EBSCOhost Mobile Tutorial
The above video demonstrating the EBSCOhost Mobile interface is a bit of a snoozer but, if you've wondered exactly how services would be mobilized, it will give you a sense of the thrilling reality!
If you're really interested in following the tutorial, I'd suggest going to the video at YouTube and enlarging the image.
ResourceShelf has more information and a brief review dating back to EBSCOhost Mobile's launch in the fall.
Following news for CR:LIB has put me in regular touch with changes in the college textbook industry. Since I've been looking for an underserved industry niche on which to focus, I've decided to launch College Textbook News as a straightforward industry blog. It's a project that will draw on my experience in industry-oriented blogging and web publishing, in the retail booktrade and in academia.
Here are the topics I've covered to date:
Espresso Book Machine Version 2.0: Demo Videos & Deals With Google & Xerox
McGraw-Hill Education Introduces ALEKS 360, An E-Textbook System
Cengage Learning & RR Donnelley Enter $375 Million Multiyear Agreement
BookRenter Announces BookRenter Platform & White Label Online Textbook Rental Stores
Twitter Search for "textbook" is Qualitative Goldmine of User Response
If you're interested in such things or have relevant promo material,
please be in touch at:
culres(at)gmail(dot)com
The NCSU Libraries recently released WolfWalk:
"a mobile library project that allows you to explore North Carolina State University campus history using selected mobile devices. WolfWalk provides information on the history of approximately 60 major sites of interest on the NCSU campus, together with multiple current and/or historic images that are sourced from the NCSU Libraries Special Collections Research Center."
This sounds like a great tie-in between special collections and information about a local setting in mobile website form. It's also an example of how traditional library departments, such as special collections, can move from simple access to the creation of meaningful resources, i.e., to digital publishing.
There's more at NCSU Libraries News.
CCV's Embedded Librarian Program
The Hartness Library of the Community College of Vermont (CCV) provides a demo video describing their "Embedded Librarian Program" in which librarians create a visible online presence within classes using Blackboard. It's a simple enough idea but having had quite a bit of experience as a student in Blackboard settings, I think it could be quite powerful.
Library Systems & Services (LSSI), a library management company currently operating the Riverside County Library System (RCLS) in California, announced in a press release that an "innovative new on-demand book printing program begins today at the Grace Mellman Library in Temecula":
"Under a $100,000 grant from the California State Library, the RCLS is studying the usefulness of on-demand printing to enhance library collections. The July 2009 grant has been used to purchase a Book Espresso 'print-on-demand' machine which prints, covers and binds trade paperback quality books from computer files."
"Library patrons will now have the option to request titles, have the book printed for free, read it and return it to the library collection, or they may choose to keep the book and pay a printing fee. If the requesting patron is at the Book Espresso location and wants to pay for the book, it can be printed immediately while they wait..."
"Available book titles will be obtained from Lightning Source, with over 500,000 titles available, and Google Books, who has partnered with over 20,000 publishers to make their content available for on-demand printing."
This innovative approach is actually very logical and timely, given the development of on-demand publishing services, though I'd love to compare how things price out between owning an Espresso Book Machine and ordering individual Lightning Source copies via Ingram.
Nevertheless, given the high cost of interlibrary loan, this is an innovation whose time has come.
What is Social Cataloging? (LIANZA09) from Tim Spalding on Vimeo.
Tim Spalding, the founder of Library Thing, discusses LibraryThing, personal and social cataloging, LibraryThing for libraries, building community and the open web. I went from perceiving him as an executive/publicist to recognizing his perspective as innovative and in touch with how libraries might better interface with the open web to serve patrons.
As Tim discussed various ways librarians could use LibraryThing, I was reminded of a visit to my local public library where a woman was told her reading wishlist had been wiped as it would be from time to time. It turned out that she'd only had it for a month or two and was supposed to expect such instability due to a warning regarding periodic data purges.
This situation, in which a libary is poorly supporting a service that could be accessed for free online via such companies as LibraryThing, is a strong example of what happens when a closed web approach encounters a problem that's readily solvable via the open web. Unfortunately, in this case, an unhappy patron who was now less inclined to use the library's own web services was the result.
paidContent:UK: Penguin's Upcoming iPad books
Penguin recently demoed a few "forthcoming books from iPad's iBook Store" in the video above and they give a much better sense of what the ebook can be beyond the shovelware dictated by devices such as Amazon's Kindle. Though the PC offers the potential for ebook development, history to date suggests that devices like the iPad will be required for new ideas to flourish.
One can see how such developments could affect textbooks and reference works. In fact, with both textbook rental and open textbooks on the rise, there may be an interesting opportunity for folks willing to connect the dots.
Though paid:Content:UK did not identify the event at which the above video was made, I'm assuming it was at the "Financial Times' Digital Media & Broadcasting Conference in London on Tuesday" where Penguin Group Chairman and C.E.O. John Makinson stated:
"The definition of the book itself, as far as we can see, is up for grabs."
At this point it's actually rather difficult to redefine the book which has such a solid place in human consciousness. But the ebook is certainly up for grabs as something that somehow bundles together networked multimedia in a form that is still uniquely identifiable despite having expanded, porous boundaries. It's the uniquely identifiable part that helps maintain the ebook's status as a digital object as opposed to a site or service and that's key to commercial concerns.
I think such developments put libraries in an odd situation since digital formats strike me as lending themselves more to subscription services than to outright ownership of ebooks. I also see a lot of the educational needs implied in the above video being served by websites as multimedia platforms. But I also see the above format having potential with consumers and therefore shaping expectations of library users. It feels like an odd "wait-and-see while continuing to move at digital speed" moment.
Related Cultural Research Coverage:
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier
Chris Anderson - Free: The Future of a Radical Price
I recently completed Chris Anderson's Free: The Future of a Radical Price in fragmented bits of reading. It's a great book for thinking one's way into the implications of free as a price and such related concepts as freemium pricing strategies.
At the same time, it's a rather frustrating book if evaluated from an academic perspective with few proper citations and open-ended, uncited use of chunks of Wikipedia and other writers' content!
It's a rare book that merits serious consideration after such excesses have been exposed but Free is just that kind of book. Of particular relevance for this blog, studying ways to monetize free content is very much on the minds of open access advocates searching for sustainable business models. Free offers a great brainstorming tool with notes from related efforts including open source software.
"Free use but paid via other means" is also a key pricing strategies for libraries supported by taxes, donations, student fees and the like. We don't pay each time we take out the books but we or other folks like us pay by other means. Open access business models often take similar routes.
The interrelationship of free web content and open access publishing also was explored in the release of free editions of Free for limited time in digital formats.
So, yes, I'm recommending Chris Anderson's Free: The Future of a Radical Price with reservations because, if taken for what it's worth, it's quite a good book!
Chris Anderson blogs or blogged at The Long Tail where you can currently find a downloadable list of "notes and sources for the book" Free.
Wired Magazine:
Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier
I originally checked out The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier due to news about an attempt at censorship but quickly came to appreciate the book itself. The combination of a graphic novel in which a "Black Dossier" is a key element of the plot and is included in the book itself in the form of various documents mixed into the pages of the illustrated tale is thought provoking.
In fact, this work got me thinking quite a bit about the relationship of such hybrid works to various electronic offerings. For example, ereaders and such devices are always more complicated than they at first appear, acquiring extra little bits and pieces of equipment. Oddly enough, The Black Dossier includes a 3D section requiring an extra bit of equipment in the form of 3D glasses!
The mix of texts mean that readers drawn in by a graphic novel may not want to read every last page just as a documentary on DVD may acquire more viewers than related documents on an accompanying DVD-ROM.
One clear difference is the fully integrated nature of The Black Dossier, a book that includes all its elements in one package. A reader might become attached to such a book in a different manner than one might become attached to an ebook one accesses on an ereader. Perhaps the ereader will get all the future love once reserved for physical books themselves.
But thinking about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier also inspired a new blog category, Books I've Read, in order to separate the discussions on particular books and the changing nature and concept of the book, until now jammed together in Books.
Greg Dimitriadis: Performing Identity/Performing Culture [Revised Edition]
In case you haven't noticed yet, I'm kind of an idea guy with way too many ideas. But I am getting better at maintaining core projects while keeping a small array of secondary projects in the long term mix.
CR: Library Innovation Blog is intended to be a core project but I haven't dug as deeply as I had hoped to by now. Still, I'm enjoying what I'm doing and it's off to a good start. A related project that's been moved to the secondary back burner for the moment is Hip Hop Research: Towards an Annotated Bibliography, a blog with a special focus on academic monographs featuring hip hop as a central theme.
Marc Lamont Hill - Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life
I launched Hip Hop Research as the first step towards an annotated bibliography to be developed as a reference work for academic libraries. I recently made contact with a library publisher via a woman who requested that folks send initial ideas prior to a book proposal. We'll see where that goes but, no matter the validity of the topic, hip hop content often seems to throw a wrench in people's perceptions, especially if their knowledge is limited to what they see in mass media.
To be honest, now that I'm reviving my search for a library position (at the worst possible time, of course!), I launched the project as much to validate my own work in hip hop media as to help validate the work of hip hop researchers in academic settings. I really do worry about what people think when they find out I've been a web publisher focused on hip hop for the last ten years, full time for the last five.
Given the response I've gotten from folks I've known who are from similar demographics as those doing the hiring in most of the situations for which I apply, I really have to wonder what potential employers think when they see the words, "hip hop."
Yvonne Bynoe - Encyclopedia of Rap and Hip-Hop Culture
It's funny, I've learned so much doing hip hop related projects that I would never take any of that back, but I do wonder how it looks to people I don't know, inundated with too many applications and looking for easy ways to pare down the list.
But, hey, as a 50 year old white man with a long history of activism and interest in African American culture, I feel like I'm so much more connected to the living reality of black people now than I ever was when I was trying to connect as a left/lib activist and artist. I have real friends now who are black and who I know through shared interests rather than African American connections who I've cultivated as part of a larger agenda, though I say that meaning no disrespect to folks finding other ways to connect.
To be perfectly frank, if getting a job meant giving up the one thing that has helped me more than any other to understand black culture in contemporary America, then I'll keep forging an independent path. But I'd love to bring what I know into an academic setting as a reference librarian since that may well be the best venue for my wide ranging interests and love of knowledge. Wish me luck!
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