Automating an online display of new books in your collection
There are number of ways that you can manually update a web page on your library's site to include not only a list of newly acquired books but also the jacket art for them. Thanks to the wonders of RSS feeds, librarians are finding many ways to harness their library catalog's "new books" feed so that it can automatically update a web page listing new titles. A series of posts on the NGC4LIB list (subscription required to view the original post) in early August highlighted several ways of accomplishing this clever feat:
The Cambridge Public Library (Canada) has a New Mystery Carousel that allows you to scroll through new mystery acquisitions. Click a jacket to get to the record for that item. The creator of this, Mike Cunningham, explains how he did it here and here on his blog.
Recently, the Travelin' Librarian blog mentioned how the Shenandoah Public Library (Iowa) is using the jacket art available in LibraryThing to present on the library's home page a list of newly acquired items. From what I can tell, the librarians at the Shenandoah Public Library have created an account in LibraryThing where they only add new books from the library's collection (items that are presumably fully cataloged in their "real" catalog). If you're familiar with LibraryThing, which allows you to create an online catalog of your own personal collection, you'll know that your LibraryThing collection has a feed associated with it so that others may subscribe to it to see what items you've been adding to your collection. The Shenandoah Public Library took their LibraryThing feed of newly added items and made it display on their library's home page. It's a bit clunky, but it is also a clever, very low-tech and vey affordable way (i.e., free) to automate the process of displaying jackets for newly acquired books.
I don't know if our version of Ex Libris Aleph here at CUNY allows us to create feeds of items, but it would be great if it did. For an interesting example of what you can do with RSS feeds from your catalog in a way that doesn't involve jacket art but just title/author info, check out this page from the University of Alberta Libraries. Anyone know whether our catalog is capable of such things?
MetaFilter has an interesting post linking to someone's master's thesis on the band My Bloody Valentine (some samples from Loveless, the album discussed in the thesis, are here on Amazon). It's interesting to see something that would have been pretty much anonymous 10 years ago now discussed publicly. Academia really is becoming more transparent. People used to joke about their theses going up on a library shelf, never to be seen again, but now that's not always the case. Also, librarians might enjoy some of the outrage (in the comments) at the use of some non-traditional academic sources (like Wikipedia).
I was really excited to see Stephen's posting about faceted navigation and I surfed over to his wiki page. One of my favorite projects in library school was in my classification and subject analysis course: a presentation on the great Indian librarian, S.R. Ranganathan. I loved the clarity and simplicity of his idea of using five facets to describe and classify EVERYTHING:
Personality--what the object is primarily "about." This is considered the "main facet." Matter--the material of the object Energy--the processes or activities that take place in relation to the object Space--where the object happens or exists Time--when the object occurs (the PMEST is cribbed from http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/ranganathan_for_ias)
Anyway, I read a cool article this summer in TECHKNOW, a newsletter from the Ohio Library Council for technical services librarians (highly recommended), about how a team at OCLC has developed this "Faceted Application of Subject Terminology (FAST) schema and authority file, consisting of headings derived from LCSH that are amenable to postcoordination and authority control. " http://www.library.kent.edu/files/TechKNOW_July_2006.pdf
As highlighted today on ResourceShelf, the Librarians' Internet Index has added some special sauce to its search recipe: a big dollop of faceted navigation, courtesy of technology from Siderean.
My name is Stephen Francoeur. I'm happy to have been invited to contribute to the new LACUNY Blog and am excited by the conversations and ideas that will be generated by this new venture. For those of you who don't know me, I am an information services librarian at Baruch College. Last spring, I completed my second master's degree at Hunter College (you can read my thesis on the history of McCarthyism and American libraries on my personal wiki) and am now an assistant professor. I have also been a writing for my personal blog, Digital Reference, for the past three years and for the reference blog at Baruch for the past two years.
In addition to writing frequently for blogs, I am an avid reader of them, too. My current Bloglines account has over 300 blog feeds going into it (some of those feeds offer daily postings, others only provide new postings once in a blue moon). You can see a complete list of the blogs I subscribe to here.
During the five years I was working on my second master's degree, I was also working full-time as an instructor here in the library at Baruch and becoming a dad, too. With all the reading I had to do for my master's degree and all the running around at home with a growing boy, I found little time for reading the library periodicals I had previously kept up with (American Libraries, C&RL News, College & Research Libraries, Library Journal, Reference & User Services Quarterly). More than two years ago, I discovered Bloglines, a web-based feed reader where you can view the latest blog posts from whatever blogs you enjoy.
Every day, I go to my Bloglines account on the web to see what new posts have been delivered there. I can scan the headlines for posts and only bother to read a full post when it catches my eye. I have found that this routine of scanning and reading blog posts from my fellow librarians has kept me more up-to-date on what is going on in the library world than my earlier process of journal and magazine reading ever did. (I am happy to note though that I now have time once again to read journals.) And unlike messages posted to listservs, blog posts are easily bookmarked and can easily be re-found via general web search engines or specialized blog search tools.
In future posts to this blog, I hope to recommend a number of my favorite library-related blogs. For now, let me recommend ACRLog, a group blog sponsored by ACRL that features (among others) Steven Bell as a frequent contributor. You may already know Bell from his Keeping Up web site and his Kept-Up Academic Librarian blog.
Open Access bill in the Senate gets further support in academe
Current legislation requiring that all government agency research be open access (within six months of publication elsewhere) is under consideration in the Senate. The Federal Public Research Access Act was fiercely opposed by scholarly societies who fear revenue loss.
The academic community wants open access. In July, research universities spoke up and now, a group of liberal arts colleges have as well. Publishers are also responding to the OA movement: American Chemical Society is now offering an "author choice" program where authors can, for a fee, publish their articles with ACS in an open access mode. http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/06/access/
"Learning to Teach" in today's insidehighered.com highlighted a collaboration between the CUNY Grad Center and Queensborough CC that helps prepare doctoral students to be better teachers with an emphasis on teaching in community colleges. http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/07/practicum
For now, the Google Book Search service offers full downloads only of ``public domain" books, whose copyrights have expired. These include many of the most famous titles of all time, such as the writings of Dickens , Shakespeare , and Dante."
I will introduce this LACUNY blog at the Executive Council meeting tomorrow. I am hoping that folks at the CUNY libraries will make use of this forum so we can discuss issues of concern to academic libraries and the CUNY community. Such discussion is generally beyond the scope of CULIBS.
