By Erik Mitchell

Inside ZSR

Institutional repositories, Second life , tagging, & social networks

My apologies for posting a stream of consciousness list of topics but for the moment I have a good wifi signal 🙂 The second day of ASIS&T included a number of interesting presentations taht talked in broad strokes about many of the issues of current interest to lis realms. There was an interesting discussion on... more

ASIS&T 2008 – Ohio bound

I found myself back in Ohio on Sunday, attending the American Society for Information Science & Technology 2008 conference. Columbus shares some interesting features with Cincinnatti including pro sports arenas, a winding river, impressive 20th century american architecture, and wide one-way streets. Following the opening session, I went to a panel discussion on e-research and... more

Lita 2008 – Open Access, Open Source, & Grid Storage

Today saw some interesting presentations. In the morning I went to a panel on institutional repositories which included a presentation by Tabatha Becker on the University of Colorado’s work in publishing an Undergraduate Research Journal using an open source platform. As we talk about libraries re-examining their roles it is interesting to see someone taking... more

LITA 2008 – Day 1

Lita 2008 started off with a interesting set of presentations on Friday. The opening keynote by Tim Spalding on LibraryThing contained an interesting lookat the data that LibraryThing is beginning to aggregate on books. Tim suggested that the use of a FRBResque model to link book editions along with user-supplied topical tags yields good prototypical... more

Blender(ed) Librarians view webcast

Today a whole group of zsr staff watched a Blended Librarianship conference. There was an interesting discussion about how libraries are changing. There was general agreement that the most interesting part of the discusion was a review of perspectives on the future of libraries. The session did include some citations to some recent reports: No... more

Reading Group discovers that students are smarter when they are online

There was a lively discussion in the journal reading group this morning related to the article Why Professor Johny Can’t Read. The conversation varied far and wide and included an admission by Erik that he had not read the article prior to the meeting, and more insightful discussion on the place of vertical/horizaontal information consumption... more

OLE Project webcast

This afternoon, a group of Carptenter, PCL, and ZSR library staff gathered together to watch the first OLE Project webcast. The webcast discussed their scope, goals, and accomplishments to date. The project is still in its early stages but intends to design a new ILS based on SOA principles. Interestingly, they are already looking towards... more

IRB training

Yesterday I attended an IRB 101 workshop offered by Primr in Durham, NC. The goal of the workshop was to orient folks new to the IRB process to the issues and concerns of research approval and adminstration. While there were many interesting things in the workshop, perhaps the most interesting part for me was the... more

NCAECT 2008

On thursday I went to Concord, NC to attend the North Carolina Association for Educational Communication & Technology conference. In the morning, I attended a session by the folks who do teachertube.com. The talk was interesting if only to hear a presentation about web 2.0 from the “school 2.0” perspective. The speaker (Jason Smith) talked... more

Erik@ASIS&T

Saturday was day 2 of the ASIS&T pre-conferences for me. Friday morning contained an interesting overview of DSpace and Saturday was a workshop on Classification Research. Presentations in the morning discussed tagging, building of communities through user-based categorization, and systems that support knowledge creation/SenseMaking. The discussions that grew out of the presentations focused on the... more