In recent weeks Knowledge Ontario (KO) was told it will receive no provincial funding this year for its digital services and products – their request for ongoing funding from the Ministry of Culture was not supported.

This decision deals a serious blow to cross-sector library collaboration in this province and creates challenges for libraries, librarians, library users and all taxpayers. Implications are:

•  no  KO licensed e-resources to K-12 schools, college, university and government libraries (current licenses expire Dec. 2010)
•  no funds  for the other four KO programs (Ask (askON), Connect, Learn and Our Ontario)
•  an additional 22 public libraries, 2 university and 2 college libraries are unable to participate in and offer the askON/ONdemande service in September as planned
•  an end to the askON internship program that provides virtual reference training and experience to dozens to iSchool students
•  KO will need to secure “bridging” assistance to ensure that it has sufficient operating funds to continue from January to June 2011

There are some actions you can take if this news concerns you:

Write to the Minister of Education (responsible for school libraries), the Minister of Culture (responsible for public libraries), and/or the Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities (reponsible for college/university libraries), or the Premier himself.

A link to a draft letter is available on Kim Stymest’s blog at http://kimstymest.com/2010/06/18/lets-get-agitated-part-2/

•  Blog, twitter (#KOmatters) and work your networks. Let people know and encourage them to act.

•  Join the Knowledge Ontario Matters Facebook group and watch for more calls to action

•  Find out what your local library is doing about it. Have they passed a Board resolution supporting KO?  Have they written their minister yet?

•  Subscribe to KO News to make sure that you have all the current information. See www.knowledgeontario.ca/jointheflow.aspx

Library collaboration, of the kind introduced by Knowledge Ontario, makes not only good financial sense but offers all of Ontario’s libraries and librarians an opportunity to share, develop and use leading edge tools and services to better serve our profession, our clients and ourselves.

Campus Overload – Got a research paper to write? Friend a librarian.

Spring break is over. April is here. Those end-of-the-semester deadlines are not quite as distant as you think. And chances are your to-do list includes at least one research paper.

Ah, college research papers — it takes most students all four years to figure out how to complete them quickly and accurately (especially through hang-overs or Red Bull jitters).

Your secret weapon? The college reference librarian.

No, seriously. And here are some reasons why:

They can help get you started, even if you don’t understand your topic.

As soon as you get a research paper assignment, stop by your library’s reference desk and ask for help, says Barbara Fister, academic librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minn. “The reference desk is an underutilized site for one-on-one individualized help,” she said. “And if you’re not on campus, chances are there’s a chat reference.”

Understanding the assignment is half the battle, says Beth Mark, instruction coordinator at the Murray Library at Messiah College in Grantham, Penn. “We often work with students to either narrow the research topic or broaden it,” she says. “A topic that is too narrow won’t produce the results needed for the student and a topic that is too broad oftentimes overwhelms the student with thousands of results.”

They are Google experts.

Let’s get this straight: Most reference librarians do not hate Google. They just get frustrated when students think a #1 hit means a reliable source.

And if used correctly, search engines like Google can be beneficial, said Priscilla Atkins, library head of reference and instruction at Hope College in Holland, Mich. Plus, Google offers more advanced search options, like Google Scholar and Google Books. Reference librarians can show students how to do that.

“Googling is not a cause for dismay,” she says. “I don’t know anyone who doesn’t use Google; but in 2010, it’s still the case that reference books and scholarly articles provide the most authoritative information on most topics.”

But when Googling, students need to take a hard look at the source of their information.

“Think about your sources being your expert witnesses: if you were in court and your expert witness showed up in jeans and flip-flops… do you think the jury would be impressed?” Fister said. “Pick your expert witnesses with an eye on not just what they say, but what impression they’ll make on your audience.”

But don’t think that being tech savvy alone makes you a good researcher, cautions Donna Miller, a librarian at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Penn.
“A cook can be wonderfully adept with the gadgets found in today’s kitchens, but nevertheless whip up dreadfully tasting meals,” says Miller. “It’s very easy to conduct awful information searches, yet be quite proficient with technology.”

They have access to information you didn’t even know existed.

Most college libraries give students access to online tutorials, online research guides, electronic databases and electronic journal subscriptions. Susan McClintock, head of reference at Meredith College in Raleigh, N.C., said a librarian can help you figure out which ones to use.

“We want them to understand that research is like being a detective. Just looking is not enough,” she says. “To solve the case you need to look in the best places for the clues. Then you need to analyze the results to make sure you have solved the case.”

Even non-techies can offer cutting-edge services right away

New social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter enable librarians to converse, communicate, and collaborate with patrons as never before, because they are increasingly a part of people’s everyday lives. A brochure that describes your library with a few pictures is great, but a video tour that people can watch on your website or blog is immeasurably better. Enabling patrons to save their catalog searches is important, but offering the ability to notify patrons via email and text messaging when new acquisitions arrive presents a fresh way to connect with users.

Librarians who are still becoming comfortable with the Web are often reticent to begin using new technologies in their day-to-day work because the learning curve often takes more time than they have at hand. When I begin teaching people about Web 2.0, mobile, and emerging technologies, I try to answer three questions:

• What is it?
• Why is it important?
• How can it help me better serve my users tomorrow?

Here are 10 ideas you can use to start creating, collaborating, connecting, and communicating through cutting-edge tools and techniques. All of them are culled from the 10 books in the Tech Set series, to be published by Neal-Schuman in March.

10 Technology Ideas Your Library Can Implement Next Week | American Libraries Magazine.

By SERGEY BRIN
Published: October 8, 2009

Mountain View, Calif.

“THE fundamental reasons why the electric car has not attained the popularity it deserves are (1) The failure of the manufacturers to properly educate the general public regarding the wonderful utility of the electric; (2) The failure of [power companies] to make it easy to own and operate the electric by an adequate distribution of charging and boosting stations. The early electrics of limited speed, range and utility produced popular impressions which still exist.”

This quotation would hardly surprise anyone who follows electric vehicles. But it may be surprising to hear that in the year when it was written thousands of electric cars were produced and that year was nearly a century ago. This appeared in a 1916 issue of the journal Electrical World, which I found in Google Books, our searchable repository of millions of books. It may seem strange to look back a hundred years on a topic that is so contemporary, yet I often find that the past has valuable lessons for the future. In this case, I was lucky — electric vehicles were studied and written about extensively early in the 20th century, and there are many books on the subject from which to choose. Because books published before 1923 are in the public domain, I am able to view them easily.

But the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole. With rare exceptions, one can buy them only for the small number of years they are in print. After that, they are found only in a vanishing number of libraries and used book stores. As the years pass, contracts get lost and forgotten, authors and publishers disappear, the rights holders become impossible to track down.

Inevitably, the few remaining copies of the books are left to deteriorate slowly or are lost to fires, floods and other disasters. While I was at Stanford in 1998, floods damaged or destroyed tens of thousands of books. Unfortunately, such events are not uncommon — a similar flood happened at Stanford just 20 years prior. You could read about it in The Stanford-Lockheed Meyer Library Flood Report, published in 1980, but this book itself is no longer available.

Because books are such an important part of the world’s collective knowledge and cultural heritage, Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, first proposed that we digitize all books a decade ago, when we were a fledgling startup. At the time, it was viewed as so ambitious and challenging a project that we were unable to attract anyone to work on it. But five years later, in 2004, Google Books (then called Google Print) was born, allowing users to search hundreds of thousands of books. Today, they number over 10 million and counting.

The next year we were sued by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers over the project. While we have had disagreements, we have a common goal — to unlock the wisdom held in the enormous number of out-of-print books, while fairly compensating the rights holders. As a result, we were able to work together to devise a settlement that accomplishes our shared vision. While this settlement is a win-win for authors, publishers and Google, the real winners are the readers who will now have access to a greatly expanded world of books.

There has been some debate about the settlement, and many groups have offered their opinions, both for and against. I would like to take this opportunity to dispel some myths about the agreement and to share why I am proud of this undertaking. This agreement aims to make millions of out-of-print but in-copyright books available either for a fee or for free with ad support, with the majority of the revenue flowing back to the rights holders, be they authors or publishers.
Some have claimed that this agreement is a form of compulsory license because, as in most class action settlements, it applies to all members of the class who do not opt out by a certain date. The reality is that rights holders can at any time set pricing and access rights for their works or withdraw them from Google Books altogether. For those books whose rights holders have not yet come forward, reasonable default pricing and access policies are assumed. This allows access to the many orphan works whose owners have not yet been found and accumulates revenue for the rights holders, giving them an incentive to step forward.

Others have questioned the impact of the agreement on competition, or asserted that it would limit consumer choice with respect to out-of-print books. In reality, nothing in this agreement precludes any other company or organization from pursuing their own similar effort. The agreement limits consumer choice in out-of-print books about as much as it limits consumer choice in unicorns. Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice — fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.

I wish there were a hundred services with which I could easily look at such a book; it would have saved me a lot of time, and it would have spared Google a tremendous amount of effort. But despite a number of important digitization efforts to date (Google has even helped fund others, including some by the Library of Congress), none have been at a comparable scale, simply because no one else has chosen to invest the requisite resources. At least one such service will have to exist if there are ever to be one hundred.

If Google Books is successful, others will follow. And they will have an easier path: this agreement creates a books rights registry that will encourage rights holders to come forward and will provide a convenient way for other projects to obtain permissions. While new projects will not immediately have the same rights to orphan works, the agreement will be a beacon of compromise in case of a similar lawsuit, and it will serve as a precedent for orphan works legislation, which Google has always supported and will continue to support.

Last, there have been objections to specific aspects of the Google Books product and the future service as planned under the settlement, including questions about the quality of bibliographic information, our choice of classification system and the details of our privacy policy. These are all valid questions, and being a company that obsesses over the quality of our products, we are working hard to address them — improving bibliographic information and categorization, and further detailing our privacy policy. And if we don’t get our product right, then others will. But one thing that is sure to halt any such progress is to have no settlement at all.

In the Insurance Year Book 1880-1881, which I found on Google Books, Cornelius Walford chronicles the destruction of dozens of libraries and millions of books, in the hope that such a record will “impress the necessity of something being done” to preserve them. The famous library at Alexandria burned three times, in 48 B.C., A.D. 273 and A.D. 640, as did the Library of Congress, where a fire in 1851 destroyed two-thirds of the collection.

I hope such destruction never happens again, but history would suggest otherwise. More important, even if our cultural heritage stays intact in the world’s foremost libraries, it is effectively lost if no one can access it easily. Many companies, libraries and organizations will play a role in saving and making available the works of the 20th century. Together, authors, publishers and Google are taking just one step toward this goal, but it’s an important step. Let’s not miss this opportunity.

Sergey Brin is the co-founder and technology president of Google.

The Google Book Search Settlement has been much in the news recently, with the Internet Archive, Philip K. Dick’s heirs, consumer groups and Microsoft registering their objections to the search giant’s agreement with authors and publishers. And now Justice Department anti-trust lawyers are meeting with Google about the settlement, raising the possibility of a full-blown anti-trust court showdown between the government and the world’s biggest search and advertising company. It’s a complicated story combining copyright law, anti-trust issues and the odd problem of orphan books. It’s also the story of one company’s attempt to create the largest and most comprehensive library in the history of the world. Here’s Wired.com’s guide through the thicket of the Google Book Search Settlement.

The Fight over the Google of All Libraries: A Wired.com FAQ.

Search reality check

From BEA Systems and its soon-to-be owner Oracle, from mighty IBM to a myriad of social network and online office start-ups, vendors have been telling us how the “Google generation” and Web 2.0 will change the way we work. Many have been flogging applications and middleware products, strategies and marketing puff to back this up.

It seems, though, the industry has overestimated the Google generation’s net-savvy credentials. Two reports should set the alarm bell ringing among vendors and end-users championing Web 2.0, and force them to re-evaluate the demand for such software.

According to a British Library study many of the assumptions made about the Google generation – defined as those born since 1993 – fail to stack up to the evidence.

Among these, that the Google generation are search experts – something labelled “a dangerous myth”. “A careful look at the literature over the past 25 years finds no improvement (or deterioration) in young people’s information skills” the report said. Also there is no hard evidence to prove the Google generation needs information immediately and that it has no tolerance for delay in getting such data.

Social networking also comes up short. Around seven per cent of students agreed they were “very” or “extremely likely” to use social networking for a variety of tasks such as online discussions or sharing ideas. But the rest, the study concluded, “are not interested”.

The perception seems to be that social networking is OK for “personal” activities – but not for those that are work-related. The numbers are drawn from an Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) survey of 6,545 teenagers on sharing, privacy and trust on the internet.

Overall, the British Library study delivers a score card on assumptions based on data from different polls such as OCLC to find out how the researchers of the future, currently in school or pre-school, are likely to access and interact with “digital resources” in five to 10-years’ time.

While designed for libraries, the report should make good reading for anyone interested in the way people work with information and collaborate with each other.

The British Library study appeared as a separate KPMG-sponsored report raised further doubts on the adoption of Web 2.0 in business, this time from the employer’s perspective.

Prepared by the Economist Intelligence Unit and based on interviews with 472 executives worldwide, the report notes while the majority see the benefits, concerns over data security and governance could slow the progress of Web 2.0 development in enterprises.

It pays, as ever, to put Web 2.0 into a little historical context. The idea of using technology to improve collaboration goes back a long way. In his seminal 1962 paper, Douglas Engelbart proposed computers should be used not only to improve individual productivity but also team productivity.

“We feel that the effect of these augmentation developments upon group methods and group capability is actually going to be more pronounced than the effect upon individual’s methods and capabilities, and we are very eager to increase our research effort in that direction,” Engelbart wrote.

Since then we have seen collaborative working systems, workflow processing and groupware achieve some successes – but also some failures. Web 2.0 is only the latest manifestation of collaborative technology, and is also likely suffer from the same mixture of over-stated vision, successes and failures as evidenced by these two reports.®

http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2008/01/22/web_two_dot_zero_myths/

Microsoft, shame on you. Haven’t you been paying attention at all?

If you’re only half-Geek like me and you’ve ever attempted a WordPress install, you’ll know that it is a simple thing as advertised, but only after you’ve done the install once or twice. You need to put aside any squeamishness you may have about creating a database on your host, and editing config files, to get through the install and begin the fun part of building your blog.

I’ve admired Joomla as an effective CMS for quite some time, but have not had the guts to try an install and implementation myself — but with BitNami, I may work up the courage.

Web Worker Daily reports:

“Bitnami is a relatively new effort to do something about this. They’ve created a series of “application stacks” that enable wizard-driven installation of popular open-source software across Windows, Linux, and Mac. Each stack is fully self-contained, including all the necessary servers and management tools, as well as the application in question, and each installs to a separate directory so that it can be isolated from the rest of your computer. “

I love it that Open Source continues to become more and more democratic, empowering the non-techies to take advantage of cool web publishing tools and engage in freedom of expression. Truly, it’s a librarian’s utopia.