LiveJournal is a social networking tool that allows users to create what are essentially shared blogs, known as "communities." Community members can make posts and comment on others' posts. In addition, LiveJournal members can see a constantly-updated digest of all the posts in any communities they belong to by reading their "friends page."
Library Grrls is a community mostly made up of librarians, people who work in libraries, and library-school students, all "grrls." The link is to one particular post, with comments, that happens to be on the subject of how to get youth interested in a manga program. Members of the community can write in with questions or comments on any topic, however, including asking for advice, sharing their thoughts on Library 2.0, connecting with other people attending their LIS program, or anything else broadly connected to the theme of the community.
I'm a member of LiveJournal and I find it to be both fun and useful. Paid membership is cheap and means that you don't see any advertising, which is another plus. Overall, I vastly prefer it to MySpace or other social networking sites for the breadth of communities, useful features, and the clean, simple design.
Friday, March 21, 2008
Competency 6.4: Specific Facet First, Dialog
For my Dialog search I chose the most specific facet first technique, since I knew that this search strategy has the potential to return the best possible results the quickest. I intended to search Dissertation Abstracts for anything about the use of Teen Second Life in libraries. Teen Second Life would definitely be the most specific facet, so I searched for it and got no hits. Then I tried Second Life, figuring that would be less specific, and also got no hits. Then I tried MySpace and got eight results.
Several of the results looked as if they would apply to using MySpace in libraries, including one about folksonomies and one involving students in Brazil.
I logged off quickly to avoid incurring more charges!
Using Dialog made me realize how difficult searching must have been when librarians had to log on to a remote database and incur charges the whole time. And it must have been especially difficult when searches were done in batch mode, since the patron who made the request wasn't even there to answer clarifying questions or modify the search.
I thought the Dialog blue sheets were helpful in explaining the coverage areas of various databases, but I was shocked at the lack of instruction on the search page itself. If I hadn't known to type "ss" for "start search," for instance, there was nothing on the page that would have let me know that I couldn't just type in my search term. I suppose that there must be training in Dialog for people who pay for the service, meaning that anyone who can log on is already expected to know the basics.
Several of the results looked as if they would apply to using MySpace in libraries, including one about folksonomies and one involving students in Brazil.
I logged off quickly to avoid incurring more charges!
Using Dialog made me realize how difficult searching must have been when librarians had to log on to a remote database and incur charges the whole time. And it must have been especially difficult when searches were done in batch mode, since the patron who made the request wasn't even there to answer clarifying questions or modify the search.
I thought the Dialog blue sheets were helpful in explaining the coverage areas of various databases, but I was shocked at the lack of instruction on the search page itself. If I hadn't known to type "ss" for "start search," for instance, there was nothing on the page that would have let me know that I couldn't just type in my search term. I suppose that there must be training in Dialog for people who pay for the service, meaning that anyone who can log on is already expected to know the basics.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Competency 6.3: Successive Fractions Search, Lexis
My notes said that you can start a successive fractions search with the broadest search term, so I started searching LexisNexis for "MySpace." I quickly got a screen that said my search had been terminated because it would have resulted in over 3000 hits. I added the term "library" and got 904 hits, many of which had to do with the music industry, for instance because of the phrase "digital music library."
I changed "library" to "public library" and got 109 hits. Then I added the word "teen" and got 26 results.
The top five results were either completely useless or only accidentally helpful - they were community calendar pages from various newspapers that happened to have the search terms in them because, for instance, there's a teen advisory board meeting at the library and some other organization down the page says you can contact them via their MySpace page.
But the tenth hit was a very interesting Boston Globe article by young-adult author Lauren Mechling about how she, as an author, feels about libraries reaching out to teens with the internet, music, and other new technologies. If librarians aren't trying to force teens to read, she asks, will anyone read her books? Her thoughts and her description of her local library portray Library 2.0 changes in a way that I think a lot of newspaper readers can understand.
Mechling, Laura. Come for the Xbox, Stay for the Books. The Boston Globe. 11 March 2007, D3.
I changed "library" to "public library" and got 109 hits. Then I added the word "teen" and got 26 results.
The top five results were either completely useless or only accidentally helpful - they were community calendar pages from various newspapers that happened to have the search terms in them because, for instance, there's a teen advisory board meeting at the library and some other organization down the page says you can contact them via their MySpace page.
But the tenth hit was a very interesting Boston Globe article by young-adult author Lauren Mechling about how she, as an author, feels about libraries reaching out to teens with the internet, music, and other new technologies. If librarians aren't trying to force teens to read, she asks, will anyone read her books? Her thoughts and her description of her local library portray Library 2.0 changes in a way that I think a lot of newspaper readers can understand.
Mechling, Laura. Come for the Xbox, Stay for the Books. The Boston Globe. 11 March 2007, D3.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Competency 6.2: Citation Pearl Growing Search, LibLit
For the citation pearl growing search, I started with the article "Web, Library, and Teen Services 2.0" by Kimberly Bolan, Meg Canada, and Rob Cullin in Young Adult Library Services v. 5 no. 2. LibraryLit gave the following subjects for this article:
Web 2.0
Young adults' library services
Internet/Public libraries
Microcomputers/Children's use
Social networks.
I did a new search using "young adults' library services" and "internet/public libraries" and retrieved 289 records, which was way too much - it included every article about every youth librarian who had ever made a web site. I noticed that one of the articles had "electronic games" in their subejcts, so I added that to see what I would find.
That search returned all of two results, both of which looked really interesting:
Mulligan, C, et al. From Playing to Creating. School Library Journal vol. 53, no. 10 (October 2007) p. 36-7
and
Makens, K. Gaming in Libraries 2.0. Young Adult Library Services vol. 5, no. 4 (Summer 2007) p. 27.
I found this search technique to be very useful because I often know there must be articles out there on my subject but can't find them across various databases that have different search terms. I never would have thought of "microcomputers/children's use," for instance, if it weren't for seeing it in the citation of my known item. I'll definitely be using this technique again!
Web 2.0
Young adults' library services
Internet/Public libraries
Microcomputers/Children's use
Social networks.
I did a new search using "young adults' library services" and "internet/public libraries" and retrieved 289 records, which was way too much - it included every article about every youth librarian who had ever made a web site. I noticed that one of the articles had "electronic games" in their subejcts, so I added that to see what I would find.
That search returned all of two results, both of which looked really interesting:
Mulligan, C, et al. From Playing to Creating. School Library Journal vol. 53, no. 10 (October 2007) p. 36-7
and
Makens, K. Gaming in Libraries 2.0. Young Adult Library Services vol. 5, no. 4 (Summer 2007) p. 27.
I found this search technique to be very useful because I often know there must be articles out there on my subject but can't find them across various databases that have different search terms. I never would have thought of "microcomputers/children's use," for instance, if it weren't for seeing it in the citation of my known item. I'll definitely be using this technique again!
Monday, March 10, 2008
Competency 6.1: Building Block Search, ERIC
I used the Expert Search feature of ERIC to perform a building block search on the topic of technology in library teen services. I chose Expert Search because it was more flexible and let me choose my own number of facets rather than limiting me to three. Fortunately, ERIC includes a little "cheat sheet" at the bottom of the Expert Search screen which lists its truncation symbol and the Boolean operators!
The screenshot looks really small in the blog, so in case you can't read the search terms I used, here they are:
kw: librar* and kw: technology and (kw: youth or kw: teen) and ft: fulltext
The word "technology" didn't appear in the abstract of the most interesting result at all (although it did appear as an identifier). If I were doing a citation pearl growing search, this would make me think I should add "internet" as a search term. Once again, the screenshot is really small, so here's the result:
Searching for Educational Content in the For-Profit Internet: Case Study and Analysis
Author: Fabos, Bettina
Publication: 2002-04-00
Description: 61 p.
Language: English
I won't retype the whole abstract, but the reason I thought this article was interesting is that the author surveyed elementary, junior-high, and high-school teachers about how they used the internet. She found that rather than allowing students to use Web 2.0 features to do things like create their own videos (or even their own web pages), teachers almost invariably used the internet as "a kind of library substitute" - students did research by looking things up on the internet in the computer lab instead of looking things up in books in the library. To me, this points out the need for librarians to take the lead in making sure teens are really information literate, by helping them create content on the internet instead of just using it for research.
This search also makes me think that I might need to refine my topic. "Use of technology in library services for teens" might be too broad - do I mean technology that librarians use to reach teens, or technology that teens use in the library, or...?
The screenshot looks really small in the blog, so in case you can't read the search terms I used, here they are:
kw: librar* and kw: technology and (kw: youth or kw: teen) and ft: fulltext
The word "technology" didn't appear in the abstract of the most interesting result at all (although it did appear as an identifier). If I were doing a citation pearl growing search, this would make me think I should add "internet" as a search term. Once again, the screenshot is really small, so here's the result:
Searching for Educational Content in the For-Profit Internet: Case Study and Analysis
Author: Fabos, Bettina
Publication: 2002-04-00
Description: 61 p.
Language: English
I won't retype the whole abstract, but the reason I thought this article was interesting is that the author surveyed elementary, junior-high, and high-school teachers about how they used the internet. She found that rather than allowing students to use Web 2.0 features to do things like create their own videos (or even their own web pages), teachers almost invariably used the internet as "a kind of library substitute" - students did research by looking things up on the internet in the computer lab instead of looking things up in books in the library. To me, this points out the need for librarians to take the lead in making sure teens are really information literate, by helping them create content on the internet instead of just using it for research.
This search also makes me think that I might need to refine my topic. "Use of technology in library services for teens" might be too broad - do I mean technology that librarians use to reach teens, or technology that teens use in the library, or...?
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Competency 5: Tagging
For this competency, I searched Library Thing for the book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee. The tag cloud associated with this book included:
*held; *wjs; 50; 103458; 52/4 r; academic; communication; communications; computer games; design; education; Educational Technologies; eecs; exploration; future; game studies; game theory; game-based learning; games; games en onderwijs; gaming; home; identity; included in the present classi; information literacy; it; learning; lib ILL; libraries; lingustics discourse; literacy; media; media literacy; new literacies; nf; nieuwe generatie; non-fiction; nonfictionm visual culture; on wishlist; pedagogy, pajobbet; research; research institution; school; serious games; society; subculture; teaching/learning; technology; theory; thinking person; to read; torture; unread; via:acrl07; via: gills2007; video games; video games literacy linguisti; video games literacy theory edu; videogames teaching literacy
The Library Thing link to this book is: here.
I notice from this tag cloud that some of the tags are subject concepts like "game theory" and "literacy." Some of the tags would probably correspond to fields in a database, if there were a Library Thing database, like "non-fiction." And some of them apply to the person who tagged them rather than to the book, like "unread" or "wish list." At least one person seemed to be trying to coordinate search terms by including all of them in one tag, like the "videogames teaching literacy" and "video games literacy theory edu" tags.
I've heard Gee speak on the subject of video games and literacy and it made me really want to read his book. While some people study how to make educational video games, Gee looks at ordinary video games that people play for fun and asks what kind of learning they promote. And he believes that ordinary, supposedly non-educational video games promote the kind of learning that we need to be able to navigate the media-rich world of the twenty-first century.
As Gee says, people from the era before video games are used to knowing the rules and objectives of the game before they start - you wouldn't walk out onto a baseball field without knowing what team you're on, what position you're playing, or what you have to do to win. But people who play video games are used to starting a new video game without knowing anything - not where they are, what they're supposed to do, or how to win. Players find all those things out by experimenting in the game world. It's very similar to the scientific method and promotes a willingness to try new things and not be daunted by the fact that they might not work the first time. This is part of the reason the military now uses video games to train soldiers!
*held; *wjs; 50; 103458; 52/4 r; academic; communication; communications; computer games; design; education; Educational Technologies; eecs; exploration; future; game studies; game theory; game-based learning; games; games en onderwijs; gaming; home; identity; included in the present classi; information literacy; it; learning; lib ILL; libraries; lingustics discourse; literacy; media; media literacy; new literacies; nf; nieuwe generatie; non-fiction; nonfictionm visual culture; on wishlist; pedagogy, pajobbet; research; research institution; school; serious games; society; subculture; teaching/learning; technology; theory; thinking person; to read; torture; unread; via:acrl07; via: gills2007; video games; video games literacy linguisti; video games literacy theory edu; videogames teaching literacy
The Library Thing link to this book is: here.
I notice from this tag cloud that some of the tags are subject concepts like "game theory" and "literacy." Some of the tags would probably correspond to fields in a database, if there were a Library Thing database, like "non-fiction." And some of them apply to the person who tagged them rather than to the book, like "unread" or "wish list." At least one person seemed to be trying to coordinate search terms by including all of them in one tag, like the "videogames teaching literacy" and "video games literacy theory edu" tags.
I've heard Gee speak on the subject of video games and literacy and it made me really want to read his book. While some people study how to make educational video games, Gee looks at ordinary video games that people play for fun and asks what kind of learning they promote. And he believes that ordinary, supposedly non-educational video games promote the kind of learning that we need to be able to navigate the media-rich world of the twenty-first century.
As Gee says, people from the era before video games are used to knowing the rules and objectives of the game before they start - you wouldn't walk out onto a baseball field without knowing what team you're on, what position you're playing, or what you have to do to win. But people who play video games are used to starting a new video game without knowing anything - not where they are, what they're supposed to do, or how to win. Players find all those things out by experimenting in the game world. It's very similar to the scientific method and promotes a willingness to try new things and not be daunted by the fact that they might not work the first time. This is part of the reason the military now uses video games to train soldiers!
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Competency 3 - Podcasts
To fulfill this competency, I used Everyzing to search for podcasts and found the podcast of a Sirsi Dynix Institute class called "Engaging Youth on Their Own Terms: Instant Messaging and Gaming in Libraries."
I found Everyzing to be very helpful and easy to use. When it retrieves the podcast, Everyzing labels the points where your search terms appear so you can start listening at those points. On the right side of the screen it provides a transcript of those points of the podcast so that you can read to see how your search terms are used.
The podcast itself was intriguing - especially the idea of providing reference services over instant messaging. According to the presentation, the casual atmosphere of IM and the ability to add the library to your IM "buddy list" means that virtual reference over IM gives youth a real feeling of connection to the library. I would love to try this myself!
I found Everyzing to be very helpful and easy to use. When it retrieves the podcast, Everyzing labels the points where your search terms appear so you can start listening at those points. On the right side of the screen it provides a transcript of those points of the podcast so that you can read to see how your search terms are used.
The podcast itself was intriguing - especially the idea of providing reference services over instant messaging. According to the presentation, the casual atmosphere of IM and the ability to add the library to your IM "buddy list" means that virtual reference over IM gives youth a real feeling of connection to the library. I would love to try this myself!
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