Plucking OPAC holdings data for cell phones

I haven't been involved this quiet little project my library has been working on involving cell phones and our OPAC, but now that the chief librarian has decided to post a message about it on our library feed, I thought I'd share it here. Basically, a select group of students in this pilot project have been given accounts that allow them to check to see if any group study rooms or laptops are available. The data is plucked from our OPAC and then using technology from Rave Wireless it is sent to the users' phones. I don't know much about how this is all being done, but if anyone is interested in hearing more, leave me a comment here to let me know and I'll report back in a new posting.

Draft of Information Literacy Standards for Science and Technology

ACRL has just posted a draft of the Information Literacy Standards for Science and Technology. If you want to send your comments about this document to a representative of the task force that drafted it, you can pass them along to Virginia Baldwin, Task Force Chair, at vbaldwin [at] unlnotes [dot] unl [dot] edu.

List of copyright problems on Wikipedia

My contribution to Wikipedia's copyright problems can be found on this page listing plagiarism claims (by date submitted). My claim is at the bottom of May 14, 2005 (scroll two-thirds of the way down the page). Make what you will of the list itself.

My bit role in a Wikipedia soap opera

Peter Binkley's recent post about a project page for librarians in Wikipedia made me sit up straight this morning and realize I had better do something about the digital reference services page in Wikipedia that plagiarized sections of my web site on digital reference (for details on the plagiarism, see this earlier post of mine).

When I asked readers of my blog and fellow contributors on the Dig_Ref list what I should do, I got a range of responses:

• change the entry yourself (it is a wiki after all and we librarians especially should take responsibility for doing our share of maintaining an oft-used reference source)
  
• someone else should fix it
  
• notify Wikipedia, as there is a process already for dealing with plagiarism allegations
• demand that Wikipedia credit my site as a source for the entry and ask them for an apology
• suggest to Wikipedia that entries be run through plagiarism detection software like Turnitin.com
  
• delete the entry

Since I first wrote about this incident, I have indeed notified Wikipedia but have gotten no direct communication from them (but a "plagiarism claim" did appear a week later on the "discussion" page of the entry).

Here's where the story starts to turn into a minor soap opera. On Saturday, May 14, I got an anonymous comment on my blog in which someone claimed to have deleted the entry altogether. Even before I got this comment on my site, I had considered the option of getting rid of the entry altogether a bad idea. My biggest problem with that solution was that it assumed that all of the content was plagiarized. As I noted on my posting, only some of the material in the entry was plagiarized. There are other sections that do not include any of my content (although I have not looked to see if they contain anyone else's material).

I (or anyone else) can easily restore the "digital reference services" entry by reposting it based on the text available in the "history" tab for it. If I repost the entry in its entirety (including the portions that plagiarized my web site), does that clean up the plagiarism problem? But what if the other sections from that entry that don't use my content also contain plagiarized material? Should I delete material except for what I wrote? Should I research it to verify that it too isn't copied from somewhere else? Should I only repost my plagriarized sections and then revise it so that it doesn't merely repeat what's already on my web site?

If it weren't for a looming final exam in Russian history that I have to take next Monday, I'd go ahead now and repost the entry and then rewrite the sections that originally came from my web site. But that job will have to wait a week while I wade through all the material I have to memorize (it's not an open-book or open-notes exam). Until then, I just want to put out this plea of innocence about the deletion of the entry; I also want to commit myself to helping repost sometime next week a new improved entry on digital reference services. If anyone wants to start that task before I do, though, be my guest: it's everyone's Wikipedia.

Bill Drew on IM for chat reference

For seven years, the library at SUNY Morrisville has been using AOL IM for its chat reference service. A recent post on Dig_Ref by Bill Drew of SUNY Morrisville mentioned that a chapter he wrote for a 2003 book on chat reference is now available on his blog, Baby Boomer Librarian. I've mentioned Bill's efforts with IM before and think that with all the discussion going on now about IM it is worth giving props to someone who's been promoting it for years now.

Spreading the word

Luke Rosenberger's post on lbr about viral marketing has inspired me today to add this scripted message for our chat reference service here at Baruch:

I'm glad you found the service helpful. Since many people aren't familiar with this chat service, it would be great if you could help spread the word about it among your friends and colleagues here at Baruch.

Integrating chat technologies

Wouldn't it be cool if your patrons could use an IM client to chat with your web contact center software (such as the versions of eGain offered by Tutor.com and 24/7 Reference or Docutek's VRLplus)? We know huge percentage of our users are already using instant messaging, but imagine if they could add your library's chat reference service to their buddy list and then use their IM client to chat with you via your very expensive virtual reference software. Or perhaps some day they'd be able to use their text messaging abilities on their cell phones to communicate with your chat software.

I know that this kind of interoperability is probably years away, but it can't help to dream a little about it now (and agitate for it). As Aaron Schmidt noted recently, there's a coming convergence between instant messaging and cell phone text messages (SMS).

Another point of convergence I'd like to see: the ability for different proprietary chat products (such as eGain and VRLplus) to be able to talk to each other. That would mean that libraries using different software could still form coops and transfer chat sessions to each other. Although it was before my time on the Internet (I didn't really go online until 1994), it's my understanding that e-mail couldn't always be sent across different systems. Look where we are now with e-mail. Can you imagine what e-mail would be like today if a message composed in Outlook couldn't be sent to someone with a Hotmail account? I can only hope that all the different forms of chatting online move along the same path of convergence that e-mail did.

And in plagiarism news...

I got a nice request from Gretchen Pearson, a librarian at LeMoyne College, to mention my plagiarism troubles on the "in the news" section of her web site devoted to exploring the issue of plagiarism in general and, in particular, in higher education. Her web site is a rich source of ideas, information, and sources to explore.