Happy Tuesday! Time for Day Two of Internet Librarian blogging coverage and the morning keynote. I heard Lee Rainie, of the Pew Internet Project, speak not too long ago in San Francisco so I’m looking forward to hearing what new information he has to share this morning. Let’s get to the good stuff.

Pew Internet is in the business of primary research. No agenda. However, Rainie advocates for OED to include “Tweckle” as a word to include in the dictionary. (Definition: To abuse a speaker on Twitter during a lecture or a talk.)

Rainie went over 3 revolutions in technology and then talked about how do these revolutions affect librarians and educators. Let’s get to the revolutions:

3 Revolutions

Digital broadband
62% of Americans have broadband at home. Lots of stuff is happening, lots of information overload. 65% of internet users are social networking site users, 55% share photos, 14% are bloggers, 13% use Twitter, and 6% use location services.

Bloggers are few and far between, but are “special” according to Rainie. [Yay! And way to make the bloggers at Internet Librarian feel awesome]

Twitter is “upscale” and the users are omnivores. Not everyone is doing this–only people who love to swim in information.

Mobile Technology
84% use mobile phones. It’s huge. There are more mobiles in the United States than people. 327.6 million versus 315.5 million. 59% of adults connect to the Internet via mobiles (Pew Internet counts connection both via mobiles and laptops.)

35% own smartphones now. Mobile use includes lots of social networking. 56% of adults own laptops. 12% of adults own e-book readers, 9% of adults own tablets. It’s still an elite audience who have e-book readers and tablets. We need to remember that not everyone has these gadgets.

The divide in technology use and ownership= lots of challenges for librarians providing technology and content. Now people want “right now” service and answers. [Patience has gone the way of the landline.]

Social Networking
50% of all adults use social networking. Over 65 years old is a fast growing user group of social networking sites. Pew Internet now studying the tensions in family when parents want to friend their children. Pew Internet releasing the data in November.

Social networking is very important to people. “Social networks are more influential and are differently segmented and layered.” Now first line of information for people is their social network instead of news reporting. People using social networks for evaluation of news and information. Using social networks instead of experts for evaluation and reviews.

Social networks serve as audiences for people. We are content creators, so we are all performers. We are very conscious of the fact that there is an audience. People do this for different reasons: status, networking, etc.

5 Questions for Librarians as they ponder learning communities

Future of Knowledge?
From: Shana Ratner (1997) Emerging Issues in Learning Communities
“Learning is a process.” “Knowledge is subjective and provisional.” [Very postmodern.] Learning is social and personal. Thinking about learning as “organic.” “Learners create knowledge.” Active, problem-based learning is good. [This is what all the educators are talking about in the literature.] Learning is the individual’s responsible.

Future of Reference Expertise?
“New” models: Embedded librarianship (point-of-need help, scout for information, synthesizing and organizing information, and becoming important nodes in the network of connecting people.) [Yay, for cross-disciplinary work and knowledge!]

Knowledge concierge/valet: teacher of social media, “fact checker, transparency assessor, relevance arbiter”

Future of Public Technology?
Even experts don’t know what will be hot in the future. Forecasting what technology will catch on is difficult. Basic trends are evident now: mobile connectivity and location-based services will grow, bigger and thinner screens will emerge, and all-purpose gadgets will be more important.

Analytics are needed and must be updated to determine what will work to actual determine what is catching on and what is working.

Future of Learning Spaces?
Must be constructed for new kinds of learners. Creating knowledge in new ways. Looking at “self-starters”: learning happens outside the classroom (life-long learners). Learning is a social experience. [Collaboration is the hot “new” term for learning.] “Value of amateur experts is widen.” [This is kind of a scary thought as a librarian and a professor.] See this a lot in peer-to-peer communities that are created in health communities. [We heard about this at the Personal Digital Archiving Conference during the health session.]

Future of Community Anchor Institutions?
Have to decide how much work is aimed at helping individuals versus community. Lots of challenges ahead as people want different things out of the library. Creation space versus collections. Solitary space versus space for collaboration. Pathway to information versus an archive (oh, people, let’s talk with archivists so we actually use the term archive(s) correctly.)

Libraries have already been changing in ways to serve the new normal in the community due to all the changes in uses of technology and in learning and teaching. Pew Internet will be doing a 3 year study on how people use libraries and what they want. Yay for getting “market data” for libraries!

Takeaway
Great, funny, and informative talk. Great speaker to start Day Two of the conference.

For more information on this, you can view the slides on the Pew Internet website. You can also read my post from Rainie’s talk in May of this year. It’s interesting to see some of the changes in percentages.

This talk on Blackboard Learn is by Anita R Dryden and Christina H. Gola, of University of Houston. I’m excited about this session as my university uses Blackboard and I really want the library to embed our services into Blackboard more fully. Let’s get into the session info!

First, the context: University of Houston is very large (40,000 students) and it is a commuter campus with lots of transfer students. [Sounds a lot like my university, except for the size. We’re only at around 14,000.]

In 2009, library was “sort of” embedded in the course management system (CMS). Some subject liaisons were embedded in courses. Challenges for IT: short-staffed and underfunded. Trying to work with IT to get them on-board with getting the library embedded. Ran into trouble because librarians were working with faculty members and not instructional designers in becoming embedded. [Communication is key to successful partnerships.]

Pilot
Inspired by Emily Daly’s article in C&RL News: Embedding library resources into learning management systems and used this model to pilot embedding the library in the CMS. Identified courses for pilot, worked with instructional designers to get permissions, and manually linked to LibGuides. Then gathered stats from one semester. Got 3,872 hits in one semester on the engineering LibGuide due to having just a link in an engineering course.

Getting Buy-in
Became part of the Implementation Team for Blackboard Learn. Had training for 4 days. University tranisitioning to Blackboard Learn to centralize IT services and try to get all schools using the same CMS.

Manged to get entire Library tab at the campus level! Students see it on their homepage when they log in! [Wow! That is great!]

Overview of Blackboard Learn
“Heart of the sytem are the course pages.” Embedded links to subject guides. Also have the Library tab and librarians have control over the tab and content on that tab.

Research Guide Links
Librarians have embedded the research guides in the CMS to be at the point of need. Many of the subject guides are course specific. Began looking at automating the process for linking. Inserting a dynamic link in order to pass subject code and course number to database to link up the correct guide to the course. [Super cool.]

Library Tab
Have a very high level of control over this page. [Awesome] Still developing this tab. Library has administrator priveleges and ability for dynamic content from other library systems and focus on point-of-need research help, not replicating the library’s homepage.

Maintenance
In order to have low maintenance, they are using dynamic content wherever possible and trying to have minimal library staff working in Blackboard. Should run itself once it’s set-up.

Takeaway
Communication is super-important! You need to know the organization’s history in order to have a successful partnership and projects/programs in the future. Cultivating these partnerships are super-important for embedding the library’s services at the point-of-need. It’s worth pursuing in order to reach more students!

Summary of the session: Best Betas for Learning and Navigating by Gary Price. Gary Price is Co-Founder of INFODocket and FullTextReports. Let’s get into the good stuff.

Presentation is available at j.mp/bestbetas (which is great because there are a lot of links to online resources in this talk.

There are a lot of great betas, but remember that betas sometimes need a little work (aka might be a little buggy).

Microsoft Academic: much more robust this year. Ability to create visualizations and has advanced search feature. [I’d never heard of this product, so I definitely agree that Microsoft’s biggest challenge will be marketing and get people to use it.]

quixey: an app discovery tool. [Very cool.] Lots of filters you can use.

Primadesk: aggregates all your cloud services. [Could definitely be a time saver, but definitely raises some privacy and security issues.]

Muse: analyzes emails with visualizations. [I love this application (Collin told me about this last year). It is really fun to use.]

TinEye: reverse image search. Can see who is using the image and for what purposes. Tries to find the exact image, unlike Google’s service which looks for similar images.

Interesting use of Zotero: using it for personal digital archiving. [Makes sense. It is an easy way to save digital objects and add notes, comments, citations, etc. I just use it as a bibliographic management tool. Amazing how different people use the same tools.]

Price’s favorite database: C-SPAN Video Library. Digitized all programs from C-SPAN and available online. Can search video via keywords. [It’s nice that the digital preservation issues were given a nod, even a brief nod, as I always worry about that due to being an archivist.]

National Archives Online Public Access: revamped search screen for searching NARA’s resources. [Having done a lot of research using NARA’s search engines, I can say this is a great improvement.]

You can find out a lot of new tools and APIs through programmableweb. You can get two free, weekly emails about what’s new. [Definitely signing up for these weekly updates.]

Takeaway
One point this presentation brought home to me is the plethora of new tools and services that are coming out seemingly every day. It is nearly impossible to keep up with everything, so it’s great to have a session like this to get introduced into some of the most promising betas. I’ll definitely be checking out some of these resources more carefully for my work and teaching.

Session by SuHui Ho and Jeff Wisniewski on “Improving your website with Google Analytics’ statistics.” Let’s get into the fun stuff.

Many great features in Google Analytics.

Two reports SuHui covered:

Top Content Report
Most popular pages on website. Can filter and manipulate the results. Most useful for content life cycle management and deciding priorities for updating pages. Also helpful for deciding information architecture of site by figuring out what tasks people are completing the most on your website. Very helpful for designing homepages.

Traffic Sources Report
Can learn how people come to the webpages and where they go on your website. Goes beyond total hit count, which can be deceiving. Can use reports to determine keywords being used in search engines to find your site. You can also find out the referring sites that send people to your website.

Slide presentation availabe on Slideshare

Goals and Funnels (talk by Jeff Wisniewski)

Goals: page a vistor reaches once they have completed a desired action, such as completing a form, getting to a subject guide page.

Funnels: the optimized steps along the way to get to the goal.

You can set up goals and funnels to check how people are getting to certain pages and use the results for figuring out where people are getting lost. [Sounds great for usability testing]

99% of the time the “goal type” is a URL destination for libraries, based on Jeff’s experience.

Jeff did a nice, detailed overview of creating a goal and funnel. Instead of describing how to create it, I’m going to let you go try it for yourself. I think setting up things like this make more sense if you just go do it yourself and “tinker” with it as our keynote speaker, John Seely Brown, would say.

The reports are quite powerful and useful for redesigning your processes to complete tasks on your website.

Takeaway
Google Analytics is extremely powerful. I’m definitely going to be talking with our library’s web team when I get back to see what we are using and what we could be doing better to leverage the power of these reports and goals/funnels to improve our website.

Now time for lunch before the marathon of afternoon sessions. Allons-y!

First morning session: Super Searcher Spectacular Secrets! with Mary Ellen Bates speaking. For session slides: batesinfo.com/extras. Let’s get to the good stuff!

Tools for searching softly

Ghostery.com: IDs and blocks tracking bugs, add-on to browser to select what to block.

Use to get anonymous search results. Send in search request to one of the services below:

Scroogle: focuses on Google searching.

DuckDuckGo: focuses on Bing searching. Gives suggests on refining your query.

Can also change location in search engine to change search results. Google will auto assign location and you can’t turn it off. Broadest you can say is United States. You can’t use location outside of United States. You will need to use the Google homepage for another country to change location for results.

In Bing, you can specify any location in the Preferences Page. Get different results from specifying location versus going to another country’s Bing homepage. Very interesting.

Screensharing is great when talking with someone remotely because you and the other person will be getting different search results. Two free screensharing services: Skype (super-easy to use) and Join.me.

Bing won’t allow you to limit your search by date unless you use only one keyword. [Hopefully this gets fixed soon.]

Tools for digging deeper

Search engines have different levels of search depending on the data it collects from you, including how complex your search string is and what browser and browser version you are using. So do a complex search string to get the more in-depth search results.

Filter options change in Google depending on what index (news versus images, etc.) you are searching. Get these options on the search results page.

Google Public Data Explorer: Great way of making graphs with own datasets and public-source data. This is very good for visual learners and for making dense datasets more accessible.

Books Ngram Viewer: can see how cultural uses of words have changed with time. [This is super-cool and useful for many types of textual analyses.]

Yahoo Clues: Shows queries by age, gender. Right now, looking just at United States’ searchers.

Blekko: Cleaner search results, blocks spam and content farms. Offers customized searches via /slash-tags (filters).

LinkedIn company profiles: LinkedIn is very good at data mining. Use for finding company stats and figuring out the competitors for a company. Follow companies to determine who is coming and leaving and offer services. Also look at LinkedIn Today for what is trending.

Takeaway
Lots of tips and intersting information from this session. For my teaching, the most useful information (not new, but good to emphsize to my students): Two searchers will often get very different results from running the same search on the same search engine. Need to think about the results you are getting when you are searching and use multiple search engines. [We just did search engine comparisons in the information literacy class I teach two weeks ago and my students were amazed at the differences in results they received. It was a great learning experience and also super-fun! I’ll be adding this to the next time I teach searching strategies.] Great speaker and great session!

Happy Monday, dear readers! I’m super-excited for the start of Internet Librarian 2011 although due to wrist injuries, I probably won’t be blogging every session I attend. However, let’s get started with the keynote by John Seely Brown. Also, you can check out all the bloggers at the conference here: Bloggers at IL 2011.

A couple of cool notes: This is the 15th Internet Librarian conference. Over 1,000 people have pre-registered for this conference! Yay! (I love that that this conference is in Monterey. That probably helps for the turnout!) Lots of first-time Internet Librarian conference attendees this year.

Entrepreneurial learner: people who are constantly willing to learn new things. How do we cultivate this spirit in people, especially students, today?

We are at a cusp, a huge axis of change. In the past, had changes (like steam-power) and large time periods of stability. Digital age is an exponential curve, with little stability and a lot of change. The skills, social practices, and institutions evolve around technological infrastructures. You need time to evolve, but today we dont’ have the luxury of time and stability.

Half-life of a given skill has shrunk to about five years. (That’s both terrifying and exhilarating.)

We need to become comfortable with the flow of change and help others with the changes (“a world of flows”). Moving from codified knowledge to tacit knowledge.

Need new kind of critical thinking and reasoning. Therefore librarians are more important than ever: this is definitely a good way to get in good with a conference of librarians. 🙂

Are we prepared? Are we preparing our students for this kind of world?

We need new dispositions. “Dispositions cannot be taught. They can only be cultivated.”

[Much of this reminds me of the shift from ACRL information literacy skills to Bruce’s conception of the Seven Faces of information literacy. Moving from skills and information to holistic ways of conceptualizing learning and thinking and being information literate.]

Three Dispositions of Entrepreneurial Learners

• Disposition of curiosity
• Disposition of Questing
• Dispoistion of Connecting

You need all three aspects/dispositions in order to learn and make sense of learning in this new world. [Flavors of social constructionism in this viewpoint, which I quite like and agree with.]

For example, study groups are incredibly important for student success in college. Many are social learners and need the social interaction in order to be engaged and learn.

Content and context are changing and fluid. For example, social media changes context. We are in a participatory culture now.

We need to be comfortable with change and connecting and being able to change our minds and our understandings. [New book coming out: Too Big to Know by David Weinberg, suggested reading by Brown]

Argues for collectives for learning over social media (or a sense of belonging). Learning by the individual somehow then helps the collective. [I’m not sure I’m completely on board with that. Any type of mentoring only happens or is sustainable if both parties get something out of the exchange. Collectives might be created around interests, but they are sustained via community and sense of belonging.]

It’s all about “meaning creation.” You need content and context: both are changing rapidly and there are many different, individualized viewpoints. [Hello, postmodernism]

Need play. We have the freedom to fail. [Hello, beta testing.] Play is important for cultivating imagination. Play is an epiphany: solving a riddle. [Being less serious cultivates creativity. If you are too focused on the outcome or one way of thinking, you won’t be as creative or open to new ways of understanding and solving problems. Very much like Maker Culture. Go DIY!]

Takeaway
The social, the community, is very important in this fast-changing, digital world. It amazes me how much changes, how much stays the same. While there is so much change, digitally and technologically speaking, so much of human behavior and sociology stay the same. We are social creatures and if we leverage technology to help us connect and contribute to the conversation, obviously we will become better learners and thinkers. We are coming back full circle to the understanding that we need communities and connections to cultivating critical, complex, creative thinkers and beings. It’s about time. Communities for the win!