2013
18
Dec
/
20 Comments
Giving Games the Old College Try
In Brief: Based on evidence that games might help students get more engaged in my online class, I decided to overcome my skepticism and road-test two information literacy games. First I tried BiblioBouts, which uses the online citation management tool Zotero to integrate gaming into a research paper assignment that is already part of the course... Read More
2013
4
Dec
Charles A. Cutter and Edward Tufte: Coming to a Library Near You, via BIBFRAME
In Brief The library catalog as it exists today is a century-old tool that presents an array of challenges for its users. The manner in which users search for information has not changed since the inception of the paper catalog and its different indices. The electronic records that comprise library catalogs are in a format... Read More
In Brief: Joseph Schumpeter defines creative destruction as a “process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.” As libraries struggle with how to position themselves to thrive in the digital age, how can we balance the traditional elements of librarianship like... Read More
2013
6
Nov
New literacies, learning, and libraries: How can frameworks from other fields help us think about the issues?
In Brief: In the library world, we may look to other fields to help us make sense of new digital literacies. Their frameworks may offer us new perspectives, challenge our assumptions, or give us greater clarity on the issues. Transliteracy is one non-library-centric framework that has been promoted for this purpose. It has also been... Read More
In Brief by Hugh Rundle The early founders of free public libraries intended them to achieve particular outcomes: a place for working people to access the wisdom of the classics, to socialise and to become more informed and educated citizens and avoid spending their time idling, lonely or drunk. There is, however, little incentive for... Read More
2013
9
Oct
The Library as Incubator Project wants YOU to look at Programming as Collection Development
In Brief: The Library as Incubator Project is a web-based project that seeks to promote and facilitate creative collaboration between libraries and artists of all types, and to advocate for libraries as incubators of the arts. Through founding and maintaining the project, we began to see that not all knowledge worth collecting for a library... Read More
Download this article as an EPUB for reading on mobile devices. In Brief This article explores the professional award structure (formal and informal) of librarianship. The goal in doing so is to discover what the field values in terms of bestowing honors at the individual level, and in which ways the awards system is... Read More
In brief by Phil Minchin For various reasons, libraries have largely ignored the volume of new content whose creation has been enabled by the internet. We have failed to recognise that the same systems that created all those creative opportunities also offer opportunities for us. Among those potential boons are tools that could help us deal... Read More
In Brief: The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) has emerged in the past few years as the poster child of the online higher education revolution. Lauded and derided, MOOCs (depending on who you ask) represent the democratization of education on a global scale, an overblown trend, or the beginning of the end of the traditional... Read More
In Brief: The HarperCollins boycott, which was intended to demonstrate to the publisher that “self-destructing ebooks” was a bad idea, has not been successful. This article describes the intent behind the BoycottHarperCollins.com website, and also what the experience of boycotting HarperCollins was like for a public library in New Jersey. The goal of the article... Read More