Love it or hate it (or, like me, be completely torn over it), the iPhone is changing the way we function in our day to day lives.  You may not have one (I don’t), but you probably know a few people who do (assuming you’re in an area serviceable by AT&T). Watching folks who’ve mastered their iPhones can be inspiring. Not sure where to go for lunch? With a shake of their phone, they’ve got great suggestions at their fingertips. Not sure if that picture you just hung on the wall is level? Using the level app, they can tell you.

And now you can add all around life-saver to the list of things the iPhone is besides, well, a phone. This from Wired.com’s Gadget Lab:

Man Buried in Haiti Rubble Uses iPhone to Treat Wounds, Survive

…

After being crushed by a pile of rubble, Woolley [a US Filmmaker in Haiti at the time of the earthquake] used his digital SLR to illuminate his surroundings and snap photos of the wreckage in search of a safe place to dwell. He took refuge in an elevator shaft, where he followed instructions from an iPhone first-aid app to fashion a bandage and tourniquet for his leg and to stop the bleeding from his head wound, according to an MSNBC story.
The app even warned Woolley not to fall asleep if he felt he was going into shock, so he set his cellphone’s alarm clock to go off every 20 minutes. Sixty-five hours later, a French rescue team saved him.

While this is just a plain cool story (aside from the overall grimness of any news out of Haiti right now),  there’s a larger message here, and one that libraries would do well to heed: As a culture, we’re getting used to having a world of information available at our fingertips. We’re decreasingly tied to our desktop or even laptop computers, and are relying more and more on the increasingly powerful computers that fit in the palm of our hands.

Earlier this morning, I sat in on a webinar sponsored by Educause called Library in Your Pocket that highlighted the mobile efforts of the North Carolina State University library. I suspect the archive of that event will be available shortly, and would recommend it to any larger library systems that have some developers on staff.

But one point that the speakers made is that even with no tech expertise, you can create a mobile presence just by utilizing some free tools like WordPress.com to create a mobile-friendly website with some basic information about your library (hours, locations, upcoming events) which can allow mobile visitors to your library get access to the stuff they may want on the fly.

What about your library? What are you doing at your library to connect to users on their mobile devices? Let us know in the comments!

A January 19 post on Jennifer Eustis’s blog, Celeripedean, shares information about the upcoming “RDA Toolkit”– the next edition of cataloging rules for much of the English-speaking world. Some details about what will be available within the Toolkit are included, as well as its price. The information is reportedly from a flyer ALA Publishing made available at ALA Midwinter last week.

An ALAConnect blog January 17 post focused on the pricing only.

Scheduled for release on June 1, 2010, RDA’s annual licensing fee for a single user is to be $325, with increasing graduated pricing for multiple users.

I didn’t attend Midwinter, haven’t seen the flyer, and missed the RDA update session. Anyone who was there care to share any additional details?

I’m really curious to know how many libraries out there plan to subscribe to RDA, keeping in mind that even if ALA Publishing will debut it in June, the Library of Congress field test will run for six months afterward. Do you have money in your budget for it? Do you see the benefits of subscribing being worth the price?

Back in September I had the pleasure of presenting at the Association of Rural and Small Libraries (ARSL) conference in Gatlinburg, TN. The session, Leading Edge Librarianship, was a 60 minute talk about some of the changes that are taking place in our patrons’ information landscape and what sorts of technologies we need to be aware of to stay relevant to our patrons’ information world.

A few months after the presentation, I was delighted to see Anne Layton Rice from the Monroe County Public Library in Key West, Florida (they’re on Facebook!), post something to the ARSL listserv about what she learned from that talk and how she had incorporated it into her work. The best part? It wasn’t the content of my talk, but the format that really hit home for her! I used a presentation tool called Prezi instead of PowerPoint (follow presentation the link above to see it in action), and for Anne, part of the message of my talk was the medium. Here’s what she posted to the ARSL list:

Last week, I used Prezi for a class on Flickr for very beginner web users. (“Beginner”, as in, they just set up their first email address last month.) I think Prezi is better than PowerPoint for most presentations, as PowerPoint is rather linear, while Prezi allows your presentation to “float” from bigger to smaller concepts and back and forth to show relationships. I found myself zooming in, out, back and around in Prezi during the Flickr class. This is more characteristic of how we present to a group, I think—esp. when we introduce new ideas.

The Flickr class was great fun.

Here’s Anne’s Flickr Prezi.

Here are a few other points Anne made about Prezi from a follow up email (to me, not the list):

• I’m bored to death by PowerPoints but needed visual cues for this class. Experimenting with Prezi made class preparation fun for me—I think it showed.
• Don’t you hate when a presenter responds to your question with “We’ll get to that slide in a minute.”? Prezi allows an immediate response within that teachable moment.

Anne also let me know that she’s working on a few other “leading edge” things, too! Her library is looking for a new ILS and they’re inquiring of each prospective vendor about their product’s support (or lack thereof!) for RSS; they’re working on getting a chat reference widget embedded onto the desktop of each of their public workstations; and, she writes, “I’m challenging my colleagues to give me one good reason why we should spend our paltry operating budget on MS Office upgrades when we can use GoogleDocs instead.”

Way to go, Anne! Way to drive progress!

Her Library’s Flickr collection has some great shots – check it out!

This is a great story, overall, but I think that what makes it so great for me is that in a time of little or no spare money for libraries, Anne was able to make it to a great conference that was relevant to her work, and then was able to make that trip valuable to her library by taking concrete action based on what she learned there. I have no doubt that the Monroe County Library service community will be better off thanks to Anne’s ambition!

What about your library? What sort of leading edge activities are you engaged in to offer your patrons more interesting and valuable services? Let us know in the comments!

Just in time for the holidays, the folks at ReadWriteWeb.com have published their techy predictions for 2010!  It truly is the most wonderful time of the year – for tech geeks like me, anyway.   Some of the predictions are, well, predictable (Facebook will continue to grow – and continue to have privacy problems, the iPhone will rule) but some are a little more interesting (Google’s Android phones will make major inroads because the iPhone App Store sucks, more people will be making e-commerce transactions with mobile devices, “netbooks” lose ground, and in between devices – not quite as tiny as a netbook, but much more streamlined than a notebook – take off).

It’s an interesting read for anyone interested in technology, but the implications for libraries is pretty clear: our patrons are rapidly moving toward an increasingly mobile experience and and they will continue to congregate in online spaces that offer social functionality.

Has your library taken any steps to be a participant in your community’s mobile computing world? Have you engaged your patrons in existing social spaces online, or added social functionality to your own web spaces?  Let us know in the comments!

(and PS – if you are interested in techy stuff, and don’t subscribe to or regularly read ReadWriteWeb, you should!!)

I’ve recently been working on a project for the State library in Nevada to evaluate their statewide resource sharing activities. Since my job keeps resource sharing on my mind all the time, I jumped right into to the work.  I stumbled a bit though, when the project manager asked me to clarify my definition for resource sharing. Alas, I quickly learned the importance of making sure we were all talking about the same thing.

Resource sharing is one of those terms that gets tossed about and has different nuances depending on the situation. Folks at a state library agency will include many activities in resource sharing that their colleagues in a public or academic library may not.

Here’s a bit of what I drafted for the Advisory committee that I’m working with in Nevada. How do you define resource sharing in your work?

Definitions of the term “resource sharing” are not as consistent as terms such as “interlibrary loan,” which is a well-defined service provided to patrons and to other libraries. “Resource sharing,” however, represents a broader scope of services than interlibrary loan. It is often defined in terms of a set of activities. For example, resource sharing at National Library of Australia “maintains and develops national union catalogues and library directory services; provides access services such as Libraries Australia Search, PictureAustralia, MusicAustralia and federated search initiatives; operates bibliographic and interlibrary loan utility services; develops new resource discovery services such as People Australia; and develops appropriate business partnerships” (http://www.nla.gov.au/initiatives/sharing.html). Alternately, resource sharing is described in broad strokes such as “a concept which has developed to include many cooperative activities between libraries and other stakeholders.” (Library and Archives Canada http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/8/3/r3-648-e.html). Shirley Baker in her introduction to The Future of Resource Sharing defines the term as “means both cooperative collection development . . . and interlibrary loan, or the movement of materials among libraries or other suppliers in response to users’ needs” (p.1).

In creating the Request for Proposal for this study, the Nevada State Library and Archives defined resource sharing as “a concept which has developed to include many cooperative activities of sharing information and materials among libraries and other stakeholders. Interlibrary loan continues to be the mainstay of resource sharing.” pg. 6

I propose the following definition for the work of this study: “The sharing, transfer or procurement of materials by libraries beyond their current collection as prompted by patron need.” This definition incorporates activity beyond interlibrary loan such as patron placed holds in a consortial catalog or the purchase-on-demand activities that are starting to take place in many ILL departments and might even include collaborative collection development activity.

I just received a message from the RDA-L list that RDA (Resource Description and Access, the next edition of the cataloging rules for the English-speaking world) is now to be published in June 2010. The message was sent by Mary Ghikas, Chair of the Committee of Principals, Alan Danskin, Chair of the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA, and Don Chatham, Chair of the Co-publishers.

Hopefully no one was holding his/her breath for the November 2009 release of it? The bright side is, that you now have something to look forward to next summer, and you won’t need to spend the holiday season with RDA.

They also announced that “pricing and purchasing information will be introduced at the time of the ALA Midwinter Meeting, 15-18 January 2010”— perhaps in time to budget for it, if any one will be able to buy staff resources next year.

I’ve not found the announcement elsewhere online yet.

So, the Oxford University Press has announced 2009’s word of the year! Contenders included “sexting” (sending sexually suggestive text messages to a paramour) and “netbook” – both tech terms. And the winner? “Unfriend.” As in “Can you believe that she unfriended me on Facebook?!!” Christine Lindberg, one of the OUP’s senior lexicographers, says that the word “has both currency and longevity,” and “has real lex-appeal,” a pun which I find irresistible.

I won’t bother making any high-minded assertions about the significance of this selection in terms of how we connect (or don’t connect) to real people in real ways (or about the use of the prefix “un” with a verb noun) , but I will say that it’s a sure sign that social networks in general and Facebook in particular have permeated our lives in some very real ways.

What does this mean for libraries? It’s just another tribute to the ubiquity of social networks, and further proof that more and more of our patrons are spending more and more time in these virtual spaces.  In the past, outreach has meant driving bookmobiles into neighborhoods without libraries or opening up small branches in popular shopping malls – essentially moving our products and services to where our public gathers.  As our public makes a move to gathering in virtual  spaces, how can we stay in their line of sight?

Do any of you have Facebook accounts – or other social network presences – for your libraries? If so, let us know about it in the comments.  How are you leveraging the power of these networks for your library?

The folks down at La Junta High in La Junta, Colorado have decided to take advantage of some prime screen real estate on their library’s public access computers by embedding a Meebo chat widget right onto the desktop. Check it out!

When a student sits down to get online, the first thing they see is that chat widget, which allows them to ask a question of the librarian. This can help them get started in their research, or can make it easier for them to ask a question when they get stuck.  It may seem odd to a lot of us to put a chat widget on a computer that sits less than 20 yards from a librarian, but a lot of younger users are so used to online communication that using a widget like this is often easier than finding the nerve to talk to An Authority Figure.

Ruth Taylor, the Library/Media Aide at the school, decided to reach beyond her comfort zone to get the chat widget project rolling when she realized that as a librarian she couldn’t afford to lag far behind her students when it came to technology. She wrote to tell me that learning the language of technology was the hardest piece in figuring out how to do what she wanted, but that the process was definitely rewarding! Even better,  it gave her a little knowledge and confidence when it came to other tech projects.  Here’s how she put it:

And another project came along regarding widgets, and I knew what that was!  So, my advice would be to jump in and at least try a few things and try not to get totally frustrated, because when the job is done and successful you can give a great big “Yes!”

Congratulations, Ruth!

There’s a quick screencast on this page showing you how you too can embed a chat widget on your library’s public access computer desktops.

Are there any other great “YES!” moment stories out there? How have you reached beyond your comfort zone to provide better service to your users?  Share your stories in the comments below!

Last week, I read the report R2 Consulting has prepared for the Library of Congress, “Study of the North American MARC Records Marketplace.” Ruth Fischer and Rick Lugg summarized results of a survey they undertook for LC of libraries and vendors preparation of MARC bibliographic records, and how those records are distributed among the library community in the US and Canada. Seventy vendors and 972 libraries completed the survey earlier this year. This was a self-selected group, for the most part; R2 made the survey available on the Web and announced it in various electronic discussion groups and other venues where catalogers are found online, though they did contact many vendors and organizations and directly request they complete it as well.

It was a huge undertaking, and I’m sure many are closely reviewing R2’s findings, the interpretations of the results, and their implications.

I don’t intend to rehash the report here, but wanted to share what I found particularly interesting (for what it’s worth) and in a few cases, surprising:

LC’s records are “significantly underpriced” because of the 1902 law which allows LC to only recoup distribution costs (and there are only 74 subscribers to LC’s MARC Distribution Service at present), not production costs;

The market “relies to a surprising degree on LC’s willingness to bear these costs and forgo this revenue,” especially when a great deal of LC’s cataloging work is on items not needed in its own collections;

Libraries routinely underestimate the cost of cataloging (for example, omitting overhead costs from their calculations);

Extrapolating from libraries’ responses to the question of how many original catalogers they employ, R2 determined that in all academic libraries in North America there are probably more than 8,000 original catalogers while in public and specialized libraries combined there are another 25,000 (and they calculated these figures conservatively);

Given the number of catalogers “on the ground” if each were to catalog one resource a day, over 6 million records would be created in the North American library community annually (seemingly, our capacity is adequate);

Cooperative cataloging has not really taken root–the PCC’s component programs BIBCO and CONSER each have fewer than 50 member libraries, and ten BIBCO members produced 2/3 of all BIBCO’s 2008 output (which was somewhat over 76,000 records, total).

With regard to capacity, R2 notes that many catalogers are engaged in authority work or have been called upon to perform non-cataloging functions in their employers’ organizations (management, digitization, etc.). The number of catalogers which will be lost to retirement isn’t clear (but these days, a lot of people are delaying retirement, or forgoing).

I don’t mean to shortchange the other insights in the report by not mentioning them here—I just thought I’d note what struck me particularly.

If you’ve read the report, what struck you, particularly?

My work Resource Sharing brought me to dip my toe in Copyright issues, which brought me to wade in a bit, which brought me to be pulled full force into the stream. While I would not consider myself particularly drawn to legal issues, I guess I do find a bit of delight in the intellectual stimulus of analyzing all the layers of legal, social, and practical issues that surface when we have to consider copyright issues in a real-world context.

This week, I’ve been teaching a workshop on ILL and Copyright with Stephanie Spires at Atlas Systems (developer of the ILLiad software). One of the questions that came up in the workshop was how to address copyright royalty payments when you offer document delivery (aka doc del, providing copying and/or scanning service of print periodical holdings for your patrons) services for your patrons. I didn’t have an answer off the top of my head and so ended writing a pretty lengthy discussion of the issue. I thought it made for a good blog post.

How are you handling your copyright for this kind of service?

Question: Handling Doc Del for patrons of library of materials owned by library

As always, I have to preface these comments with the disclaimer that, while I might be knowledgeable of copyright matters, I am by no means an expert nor a lawyer. That said, here are a couple of thoughts regarding the question of how to handle what permissions might be required when providing a document delivery service of your print holdings to patrons.

First of all the “Rule of Five” from the CONTU guidelines is specifically addressed to the Interlibrary Loan environment with the purpose to deal with the “aggregate” of copying that might arise from an institution’s ILL practice that is allowed by Section 108–the exception to make copies on behalf of patrons. Consequently, this aspect of the CONTU guidelines cannot be applied to the Document Delivery question.

Typically, I hear of 2 types of document delivery services–one for distance education students and one for “typical” patrons who are residing or working on campus. I’ll address each one separately.

Distance Education

In Chapter Four “Machine Reproduction–Photocopying,” Section “Provisions of the 1976 Copyright Act Affecting Photocopying” of the CONTU sets out the fact that copying for teaching/instructional purposes is covered under fair use in Section 107.

“Copying for teaching purposes is dealt with, not by specific statutory exemptions, but rather by a list of permissible practices held to be fair use under section 107. This is accom­plished by means of the so-called educational guidelines, the “Agreement on Guidelines for Classroom Copying in Not-for-Profit Educa­tional Institutions,” which were negotiated by educational, author, and publisher organizations and accepted by the congressional committees.214“

Pasted from <http://digital-law-online.info/CONTU/contu23.html>

The specific legislation states that Fair Use is invoked

“for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research . . . .”

Pasted from <http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#108>

It seems to me that the transfer of educational/instructional material through document delivery for distance education students has a stronger argument for fair use in that it is a requirement for that instructional modality. To reiterate what I said in the workshop, I don’t think the type of use that an on-campus user would have (going to the shelf, pulling a bound journal and making a copy of an article) should be considered different simply because a library staff worker is doing the copying on his/her behalf. Alas, that is my opinion. The problem here lies in the fact that the Fair Use claim for copies in the classroom has not been tested in court. (The current pending lawsuit against Georgia State for its reserves policies may have ripple effects on this question.)

For Local Patrons

The issue of providing a service to our local patrons might come under closer scrutiny as this type of service moves closer to “systematic distribution. ” Here is another excerpt from the Introduction to Chapter 4 of the CONTU guidelines:

All of the rights to make copies that are enu­merated in section 108 are limited by the pro­hibition in section 108(g) against “the related or concerted reproduction . . . of multiple copies . . . of the same material” and the “sys­tematic reproduction or distribution” of periodical articles or other small portions of copy­righted works. This prohibition against sys­tematic reproduction and distribution, however, is in turn limited by the proviso in section 108(g) (2), which states “[t]hat nothing in this clause prevents a library or archives from participating in interlibrary arrangements that do not have, as their purpose or effect, that the library or archives receiving such copies or phonorecords for distribution does so in such aggregate quantities as to substitute for a subscription to or purchase of such work.” The aggregate quantities that constitute a substitution for a subscription or purchase of a work are defined in the CONTU guidelines, which are de­scribed in the next section.

Pasted from <http://digital-law-online.info/CONTU/contu23.html>

The “aggregate quantities are defined in the guidelines for ILL, but not for activity such as Doc Del. (The CONTU documents do include an interesting survey of copying for internal use and the economic impact of that use but, as far as I can tell, no recommendations were included with the study. (http://digital-law-online.info/CONTU/contu25.html and http://digital-law-online.info/CONTU/contu27.html) While this service might look a lot like systematic reproduction and distribution, it would not “constitute a substitute for a subscription or purchase.” There lies the tension.

So to summarize, your institution can claim either the Sect. 108 exemption or the Fair Use one for your Doc Del activity. If you chose the Section 108 option, the “Rule of Two” would apply as would other conditions (see text of exception below.) This is the “safer” route but would also be more costly.

I believe there are good arguments to support claiming Fair Use for this activity (for either local or distance patrons); however, it is more “risky.” If you choose this route, I would recommend having a very well articulated policy that describes how the service meets all 4 factors of fair use. Additionally, I would recommend defining the point at which you believe the service becomes “systematic copying” at which time you would then make royalty payments.

Please feel free to offer your thoughts for discussion!

Additional resources

Section 108 (Copies on Behalf of Patrons)

(d) The rights of reproduction and distribution under this section apply to a copy, made from the collection of a library or archives where the user makes his or her request or from that of another library or archives, of no more than one article or other contribution to a copyrighted collection or periodical issue, or to a copy or phonorecord of a small part of any other copyrighted work, if —

(1) the copy or phonorecord becomes the property of the user, and the library or archives has had no notice that the copy or phonorecord would be used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research; and

(2) the library or archives displays prominently, at the place where orders are accepted, and includes on its order form, a warning of copyright in accordance with requirements that the Register of Copyrights shall prescribe by regulation.

Pasted from <http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#108>