Pointing to Open Access Journals

A post on the iNODE blog, "OA Begins at Home," struck a chord with me. We should be doing more to ensure that open access content is findable in our discovery systems (link resolvers, A-Z journal lists, even the databases we subscribe to).

Essential Chat Reference Skills and Training Techniques

I recently discovered that the San Jose State University School of Library and Information Science has a podcast series from its colloquia (here's the feed URL) that includes a nice presentation by Lili Luo from 2007 about chat reference skills and chat reference training. There are number of ways to access the recording of her presentation:

• Watch the streaming version of the video on the SJSU SLIS page
  
• Download the audio recording (MP3)
  
• Download the video recording (MP4)
  

As part of her doctoral work at UNC Chapel hill, she surveyed nearly six hundred librarians about what they felt were the essential chat reference skills. Then she held another survey that close to three hundred librarians responded to in which respondents noted which training techniques they had encountered when being shown how to do chat reference.

Of the thirty compentencies listed in the first survey, twenty-one were deemed essential. As noted on Luo's slides from her presentation, the top five were:

1. Refererring users to appropriate/services when necessary
2. Skills in selecting and searching databases and internet resources
3. Familiarity with subscribed library databases
4. Ability to think quickly and deal flexibly with unexpected situations
5. Using open probes to clarify questions

The survey on chat reference training techniques asked respondents to rate twenty-three different approaches for teaching. The top ones that Luo listed on her slides were:

1. Trainees pair up as patron and librarian to gains hands-on experience on using the software
   
2. Trainees review selected chat transcripts to learn more about the transation
   
3. Trainees ask questions to real chat reference services as users and evaluate their experiences - the secret shopper approach
   
4. Librarians pair up to practice chat reference skills on a regular basis for a certain period of time
   
5. Cheat sheet containing vital information librarians might need to access quickly and often while covering the service
   

There is tons of great stuff here that should help anyone who has to train colleagues in how to do chat reference. The only quibble I have is Luo's description of a competency that is unique to chat reference: the knowledge of library services and resources of other libraries in a chat reference consortium. She suggests that to provide effective service in a cooperative service, librarians must have a basic level of familiarity with the services and resources provided at each member library. I don't think that quite gets to the real skill that librarians who do chat in a cooperative environment have to master.

What is essential is that librarians are familiar enough with the wide range of services (and ways of offering those services) that a library elsewhere in the cooperative might offer. As a librarian at Baruch College helping students at UC San Diego in the QuestionPoint 24/7 Reference Academic Cooperative, I don't need to have memorized all the services at UC San Diego. I just need to know how to navigate the library's web site to see if such a service that the student is asking about is offered and how it is offered. In QuestionPoint, we also have online "cheat sheets" on each library in the cooperative that give you a quick overview of that library and its services and resources (as well as the relevant links to the library's many web pages). If UC San Diego happens to loan digital cameras to students, I am not expected to have memorized that fact; but I should know how to find out if the UC San Diego library does so if I am ever asked about.

As far as familiarity with resources at member libraries go, again, I don't need to have memorized what libraries have which databases. But I must know how to locate any library's list of databases. I should also know how to recommend databases that I am unfamiliar with based on subject guides, etc., that a library has put up. At no point, though, am I expected to have the ability to list from memory what resoruces each library has. With hundreds of libraries in the academic cooperative, it just isn't possible to memorize like that even if you wanted to.

Dont' let this very minor quibble, though, deter you from checking out what is a wonderful presentation.

Interesting Blog for GIS

My colleague here at the Newman Library at Baruch College, Frank Donnelly, writes a really interesting blog that focuses on issues and technologies for GIS. Launched in March 2008, Gothos features coverage of new GIS resources and detailed step-by-step instructions for various projects using GIS software.

Grab the feed here.

Bye Bye PBwiki, Hello Confluence

After having PBwiki host the wiki for our reference staff for the past four and a half years, I'm finally taking the plunge to move to whole thing (499 pages!) over to a locally installed version of Confluence. The college where I work got Confluence to use for various intranets needed around campus. Worried that some day PBwiki might just plain disappear, I decided to move the reference wiki over to something that is on our own servers and more under our control. It will take a chunk of the summer to laboriously recreate the wiki via copy and paste (wiki software from different vendors don't seem to make it easy to do import/exports). So much for that long week at the beach... 

Curate a Local Calendar for Your Community

I don't know if any libraries have taken this task on, but I think it would be really cool and make a lot of sense for a library to take on the role of helping create a community calendar. I'm not thinking about having a library meticulously build the calendar from scratch; instead, there are tools out there that can help you harvest calendar data on the web, aggregate it, and then republish the package so that people can then add as an overlay to their personal calendars (in Google Calendar and the like).

This spring, Jon Udell has written a number of blog posts about his elmcity project. Udell has found a way for people to use Delicious to gather together web sites that publish calendars. Following his instructions, those who set up a Delicious account for a specific town or city use specific tagging conventions as they add items to their Delicious accounts. Udell, in turn, passes the data that builds up in Delicious on to a system he set up using Microsoft Azure. The calendar data for each community is bundled together then and offered as a unified iCalendar feed. You can see examples of these bundled community calendars on this aggregator page Udell set up. Udell offers a number of ways to learn more about this project:

• quickstart guide
• elmcity project FAQ
• all his blog posts about it

Basically, all that a library would need to do would be to set up a dedicated Delicious account, bookmark some calendar feeds in Delicious, and then publicize the new calendar that has been built. There's no coding, no programming required; just bookmarking and tagging. It doesn't take too much imagination to see that a library, particularly a public library, could really provide an outstanding service to its community by participating in this project.

Citation Tools: Can We Trust Them Yet?

A recent blog post at Shinylib raises an interesting issue that should be on the radar screen of anyone who helps students format citations: the citation tools we recommend are not to be trusted yet. I've been using ProCite 5 for a decade now, and have fooled around with Zotero, EndNote, and RefWorks, a fair amount. I've also used the citation export features from most databases that our library subscribes to. In the end, I have always found that some errors or problems exist in the automatically formatted citations that require me to do some hands-on clean up work with.

Just as it is dangerous to promote spellcheck features in word processors as 100% reliable, so to is it problematic to encourage a blind faith in the citation-creation tools in various electronic systems. I haven't checked any of the tools yet, but I wonder if they have wrestled yet with how to update the rules for creating citations in the new MLA style.

Related Post on Digital Reference

• New Citation Rules in the 7th Edition of the MLA Handbook 4 May 2009
  

New Citation Rules in the 7th Edition of the MLA Handbook

I got my copy of the newly published seventh edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers in the mail a few days ago and have been thumbing through it to see what's new in guidelines for creating a list of works cited. There are a number of notable changes from the sixth edition by Joseph Gibaldi.

Descriptors for Publication Medium

Items cited should now describe the "medium of publication consulted" (136). So if your source was the print edition (of a book, report, article, etc.), then you place the word "Print" at the end of the citation. If the item is from a subscription database or out on the open web, then you place the word "Web" at the end. If it was some sort of a broadcast, then you can use "Radio" or "Television." If it was an audio recording, there are choices like "CD" or "LP." For movies, you have choices like "Film," "DVD," "Videocassette," "Sound filmstrip," "Laser disc," and "Slide program."

There are many others mediums to use, including a bunch you use when you are citing a digital file that you have access to independent of the source where it was originally published, such as "a PDF file stored on your computer, a document created by a peer using a word processor, a scanned image you received as an e-mail attachment, and a sound recording formatted for playing on a digital audio player" (210-211). Here are some of the medium designators suggested for these situations: "MP3 file," "PDF file," "JPEG file," "Microsoft Word file," etc.

Briefer Citations for Items in a Subscription Database

Another key change in the seventh edition is that articles found in a subscription database now have a much more compact citation. Gone are the URL for database (which was always a silly proposition) and the name of the subscribing institution (i.e., the name of the library).

Sixth edition

Carnovsky, Leon. "The Obligations and Responsibilities of the Librarian Concerning Censorship." Library Quarterly 20 (1950): 21-32. JSTOR. Baruch College, Newman Library. 4 May 2009.

Seventh edition

Carnovsky, Leon. "The Obligations and Responsibilities of the Librarian Concerning Censorship." Library Quarterly 20 (1950): 21-32. JSTOR. Web. 4 May 2009.

URLs Not Always Required in Citations

I found this change a bit perplexing. The sixth edition always advised URLs for web resources. The seventh edition now argues that adding "URLs has proved to have limited value, however, for they often change, can be specific to a subscriber or session of use, and can be so long and complex that typing them into a browser is cumbersome and prone to transcription errors" (182). It is noted that people are more reliant on search to find known items on the web than on typing in URLs. The URL should be added as "supplementary information only when the reader probably cannot locate the source without it or when your instructor requires it" (182).

If a student is clearly told by a teacher to add URLs, that's no problem. But what if the instructor just assumes that the student will use the new edition of the MLA Handbook; then the student will need to make decisions about the findability of a web resource. Making those decisions, though, will not be easy for the student, as the Handbook really does not offer guidance about how to assess the probability of someone being able to find a web resource you've cited. If I were an instructor or someone making a guide to MLA citations for the library web site, I would tell students to always include the URL. Even if the URL gets mangled somewhat, the domain name may be in good enough shape that at the very least it offers a starting point for someone wishing to track down the resource.

There is much more that I want to explore in this new edition, which also has a companion web site that I have yet to really nose around in. That site has the full text of the book as well as a couple of case examples showing students moving through the entire research and writing process. When news of this web site became known to librarians, there were interesting discussions on the list of the ACRL Literatures in English Section and on FriendFeed regarding the limited license for access to the companion web site. Basically, it looks like a library that owns a copy of the book can show the online version to students (in reference interactions, classroom settings, etc.) but can't give them the login information.

Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 6th ed. New York: MLA, 2003. Print.

Modern Language Association. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 7th ed. New York: MLA, 2009. Print.