Cultural Research

Today's Posts Found Through American Libraries Direct

American Libraries Direct is an awesome email newsletter from American Libraries and it always leads me to resources I want to check out and, often, to blog about.

Just sayin'!

Innovation Awards: U of Michigan for Enriching Scholarship, NCSU Libraries for Course Views

Various branches of the American Library Association have recently honored university library projects for innovation.

The University of Michigan’s Enriching Scholarship program has been awarded the ALA/Information Today, Inc. Library of the Future Award:

"Enriching Scholarship is a collaborative program between the University Library, campus information technology divisions, and campus-wide academic support units that offers dozens of workshops in a week long curriculum each May. These workshops enhance the effective integration of scholarly content and technology into teaching, service, and research activities on the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor, Mich."

Official Site: Enriching Scholarship

NCSU Libraries was one of three libraries recognized for use of cutting-edge technologies by the ALA Office for Information Technology Policy:

"Course Views [Library Tools] Project, North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries, Raleigh, N.C."

"The NCSU Libraries implemented a cutting-edge service in response to the difficulty of creating and maintaining enough “course pages” – recommended resources for specific courses and assignments – to meet students’ needs. The Course Views system provides pages for all 6,000 courses offered by over 150 departments at NCSU."

Official Site: Library Course Views

Related Cultural Research Coverage:
NCSU Libraries Release WolfWalk Mobile Site

Innovation Resources: Journal of Library Innovation

The Journal of Library Innovation is publishing its premiere issue in January.

I'm looking forward to seeing what they do and am quite happy that they are an open access journal.

Though I need to be careful about where I spend my energies at present, I am considering offering my support as a peer reviewer or in a related backstage role in order to put my MLS/PhD combo to work.  Given that every library innovator I've met to date has been pretty cool, maybe I'll make some interesting contacts as well!

Going forward, you'll be able to find related resources in this blog's Innovation Resources category. More theoretical material will be posted in Perspectives on Innovation. Both categories will include innovation insights directly related to libraries as well as applicable material from other areas.

Clyde, Where Are Your Library Innovation Posts?

I haven't been asked the headline question yet but I wanted to take a moment and clarify what I'm doing with this blog and how it relates to library innovation.

Two things are currently happening:

1) I'm writing my way into the topic which is how I typically work when blogging. If I was doing academic writing, my focus in public papers would be much clearer because a lot of this process would not be visible. But since I'm a blogger, you, dear reader, get a look at my process whether you want to or not!

2) Library innovation does not occur in a vacuum. I'm ultimately most interested in library innovation in higher education but that focus means that not only do I need to take into consideration the many factors affecting higher education as a whole, since a library serves a whole institutation, but also such areas as public and school libraries, because students come to college having already experienced such settings.

So I will bring up issues that may not seem to directly connect to higher ed but are actually quite influential in establishing the context for academic library usage [or non-usage, as the case might be].

That means that I'll also be discussing what I've learned on the open web over the last nine years during which much of my time has been spent as an online traveler and web publisher. I'll also be referring to my many years working in bookstores, where I learned much about customer service and about human navigation of information resources.

I would like to be able to say that whatever I blog about will therefore be connected to library innovation but that's a bit too easy. So I will do my best to at least make brief references regarding the relationship between a particular post and the topic of innovation, if that connection does not seem obvious, while occassionally allowing myself the blogger's perogative to go off-topic.

If you have any special interests related to library innovation that you would like me to dig into it, please let me know in the comments or at:
clydesmith(at)culturalresearch(dot)org

On that note, if you have any large files, commercial email, promo material or a newsletter you're hoping to sign me up for without permission, please uset:
culres(at)gmail(dot)com

It's the smart thing to do!