CLA President Ken Roberts visits McGill

Today Ken Roberts, President of the Canadian Library Association, visited us at SIS, first with a talk at lunchtime, and later for an informal cocktail reception. He is a major advocate of the Sony Reader, and he passed one around so we could all give it a try; I’ve read many reviews of this nifty device, but it was great to finally meet one in the flesh. Here’s why Ken thinks these e-book readers could benefit the library community:

• committees could use them to share text documents and save paper
• textbooks could be sold electronically, benefitting students by eliminating the need to carry about numerous heavy volumes, and benefitting publishers by saving money typically lost on small print runs (this is part of the reason that textbooks can be so expensive – publishers are trying to make up their losses from publishing so few of each title)
• authors who are not well known become available to everyone, even if most physical bookstores would not carry them
• libraries could buy the readers in bulk and sell them to users at a discounted price – this could be a viable alternative to lending the devices

However, as is often the case when new technology changes traditional business models, the e-book phenomenon does not benefit everyone. Canadian distributors and booksellers lose out when Canadians buy their books directly from the websites of American publishers. Ken is concerned about this situation, which is why he joined a task force to tackle exactly this problem.

I asked Ken whether he preferred the Sony Reader to the Amazon Kindle (which has generated an even greater buzz in the past year and a bit). His reply was that besides the obvious problem of the Kindle not being available in Canada, it also uses proprietary filetypes and forces users to purchase their e-books from Amazon. As a librarian, he said, he prefers the non-proprietary option.

The Library Student Bill of Rights by Char Booth

This article, written by Char Booth and posted on Tame The Web, is certainly not a brand new one, but it’s new to me, so I thought I would share it. I believe that library schools have a lot of work to do towards updating their programs for the 21st century, and Char has provided some insightful suggestions. I especially agree that there should be more of a focus on teaching students how to evalute, use, and develop technology, since this is a key skill for information professionals.

From The Library Student Bill of Rights:

In order to create a more vibrant and resilient profession, the students of library and information studies programs should be entitled to the following rights:

1. The right to educate. Students should receive training in learning theory, pedagogy, instructional design, and assessment methods regardless of their areas of focus.

2. The right to evaluate. Rigorous, realistic, and applied instruction in action research methods as well as techniques in environmental scanning and user needs evaluation should be available to all.

3. The right to challenge. Debate and critical inquiry between library students should be encouraged, while information activism should be considered alongside impartiality as one of the unique contributions librarians make to the information world.

4. The right to innovate. Technology evaluation, selection, experimentation, development, and planning should be woven throughout the curriculum, rather than sequestered to the “information” side of learning.

FriendFeed

Do you have trouble keeping up with all the online content produced by your friends and the people you admire? Many people who interest me post to blogs, Flickr, Google Reader, Twitter, and more, and it can be a pain having to visit an assortment of different sites to see all of their updates. I’d been hearing about FriendFeed for a while, so last month I went ahead and created an account. FriendFeed publishes all of your friends’ updates in one convenient location and makes it easy for your friends to do the same with your content.

What I like about FriendFeed:

• It’s easier than having to run around to different sites – sort of like using an RSS feed reader instead of visiting all your favourite blogs individually
• It allows you to comment on all types of items and even gives you the option of quickly indicating which posts you like (you can also see which other users have “liked” the same item)
• If you’re interested to see what a particular person has been up to lately, you can easily see all of their updates

What I don’t like about FriendFeed:

• It can be a bit overwhelming – especially because, by default, FriendFeed includes updates from friends of friends. Even after whittling down the number of types of posts that appear, it’s still a lot, and this is especially worrying considering the following point:
• Not many of the people I follow use it. Naturally, this is always the case with new technology (would you have bought a telephone in the days when most of your contacts didn’t yet own one?), but it means that I have to continue monitoring the individual sites to catch updates from my FriendFeedless friends.

Overall, I definitely think it’s worth a try, and if you go for it, don’t forget to add me.

Making library schools smarter

When I started library school, I expected more of a focus on technology – after all, everyone knows that libraries need to be on the cutting edge to provide the best information services, right? Well, it turns out that library school is more concerned with teaching traditional skills, and to be fair, even the most tech-savvy wouldn’t get very far without a solid foundation of basic skills. But I still think we could squeeze in a bit more computer training, so I was interested to read the debut editorial from Conversants, a brand new open-access journal about participatory networks. The article, which came my way via Words for Nerds, is called making library schools smarter:

Librarians need to realize that the knowledge and implementation of user-centric technology is not optional; it is a pillar of library infrastructure. Technology education components of Library and Information Science programs need to be developed and improved to provide the crucial training to prepare librarians for success and innovation, and to provide excellent services that match patron needs.