delicious-ish thing 12

I quite like delicious  – I do use it: I pulled together a list of links that might be useful for users of the Medical Library - but that was a while ago, and it could reallydo with updating… I meant to link to it from the library webpage, but wasn’t quite convinced enough to do it…

 And I have an account myself, http://delicious.com/ilk21 , and find it quite useful to pull together links that I might want to share with others…. I was at a training day on sources of ongoing research trials (very interesting, I’ll have you know!), and during the session, and afterwards I loaded up the links as we were going along (hence my tag of york_session – which makes no sense to anyone, as well as the vaguely more useful links eg national&international_trials_registers) I’ve used this list to illustrate just how many different sources there are of ongoing trials (important source of relevant data that is often overlooked by people undertaking systematic reviews in advance of submitting a research proposal)

Anyway… so I quite like delicious, and the principle….

My problem comes, as with so many similar things, in the consistency of the tags I give things, and the fact that I can’t remember from one link to the next whether I’ve used _ or – to tag this topic… but I’m hashing over old ground…

But I am quite nosy, so I do like to have a squint at what people who like what I like like…eh?

Reality Check 2010: 5 Trends Shaping Libraries

Interesting slides from presentation by Helene Blowers  (slide 43 got me thinking most)

Reality Check 2010: 5 Trands Shaping Libraries

View more presentations from hblowers.

thanks to @obsto who’s attending the EAHIL conference in Lisbon (#eahil2010 ) ….. lucky! Lots of good presentations that I’ll be pouring over in the next few days.

2010 trends in academic libraries

Where are academic libraries going?

According to this review of the literature by the ACRL Research Planning and Review Committee the road ahead looks like this:

• Academic library collection growth is driven by patron demand and will include new resource types.
• Budget challenges will continue and libraries will evolve as a result.
• Changes in higher education will require that librarians possess diverse skill sets. (lucky that we’re all doing 23things then, eh?)
• Demands for accountability and assessment will increase.
• Digitization of unique library collections will increase and require a larger share of resources.
• Explosive growth of mobile devices and applications will drive new services.
• Increased collaboration will expand the role of the library within the institution and beyond.
• Libraries will continue to lead efforts to develop scholarly communication and intellectual property services.
• Technology will continue to change services and required skills.
• The definition of the library will change as physical space is repurposed and virtual space expands.

Nothing that you counldn’t have guessed yourself, but sometimes handy to see them all lumped together, in one place.

one of those “this is the future” youtube videos

quite long, but lots of interesting statistics…..

iGoogle, you Google, we all Google

iGoogle is a handy tool, lets you gather favourites, write notes to yourself, pull in widgets by the dozen etc, and can be customised visually to your hearts content  – a different theme for each tab if you fancy.

I’ve used Google Reader in the past to cherry pick particular news items from a selection of feeds in order to generate a new page of news.

How?

I got feeds in from key broadsheets, BBC news, and local papers, as well as doing a keyword search in Google news, all of which feed into Google Reader, and then shared the most interesting stories to a public page which I then fed into the libraries webpage. (I’ve not updated this for a while, but here’s what it looks like.

All  pretty fancy, but a bit of a hassle since you have to make time each week/day to pick which news stories, rather than just assuming that anything coming into Cambridge Evening News and BBC health news would be relevant (clearly not).

But I’ve never really gotten into using iGoogle for myself. I much prefer Netvibes – www.netvibes.com/ilk21 is a personal start page that I created after attending a workshop at the EAHIL conference in 2008. Great conference, and a tool that I use all the time, for my RSS feeds in particular.  As well as having a private element to it (and you can keep everything private) it’s also possible to have a public side to your pages, which can make it particularly useful. It’s easy to generate a webpage of links, text, and feeds which are relevant to a particular topic – eg http://www.netvibes.com/southteeslibraries or http://www.netvibes.com/scharr – you use widgets in the same way as iGoogle, and can add text to ensure the page makes sense for your audience.

But whichever resource I use, I find the RSS feeds a (professional-) life saving way of keeping up to date with what colleagues are up to in other libraries, and what new developments are out there.

I also run training sessions for students, researchers and NHS staff in how to use these tools to keep up to date themselves - how much email can you handle? and how much email gets lost at the bottom of your inbox? well, RSS could be the answer! Particularly now you can journal table of content  alerts, subject searches in pubmed, web of knowledge, scopus etc via RSS – it’s not just about blogs and news pages, afterall.