Del.icio.us vs. Zotero

During this school year, I have used Zotero as a research tool more than the citation tool it is usually marketed to be. Why I enjoy using Zotero more than say Del.icio.us is Zotero's ability to capture citation information from web pages such as library catalogs, electronic databases, and Amazon. With a click of my Del.icio.us tag button I can capture a URL and tag a web page but I don't have a capture of the citation information. Plus the subscription/firewall nature of the databases limits my ability to quickly link to a database article from a remote location making my bookmarks in Del.icio.us kind of useless. In Zotero I may even get an abstract of an article even if I can not access it at the time. Some people may have much more experience with social bookmarking than I do so they may find Del.icio.us easier. To me, in certain specialized situations, Zotero can't be beat.

Librarian on Location: Live Blogging 4-23-08

2:15 p.m. Finally, back on the Librarian on Location beat after weeks being preoccupied with Are You As Smart as A Freshman? (see below). I am located at my favorite spot so far - the Soda Shoppe. Good location to talk with professors and students are still in academic mode when they walk by me as opposed to being in social life mode at places like the cafeteria and the dorms.

2:21 p.m. Spoke with a professor face to face who had requested a journal in which he was a contributor. I was able to explain the accessibility of the journal without the confines of the email medium. Face time makes a difference.

2:31 p.m. More professors. One wanted to drop off his papers for me to grade. Now there is an idea. Trading jobs with professors. The librarian grades papers while the professor handles research needs. I wonder how that would work?

2:50 p.m. Whenever I am "On Location" I work on Library 2.0 things like wikis, blogs, tagging, etc. I consider this program kind of a Library 2.0 exercise so I think it relates. I am going through The 23 Things and 5 Weeks To A Social Library.

Are You As Smart As A Freshman?

I haven't been able to post much lately and have neglected some of the Librarian on Location duties so that I could organize and put on the second installment of Are You As Smart As A Freshman? Similar to the TV version - Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?, our game has upperclassmen contestants competing for prizes with the help of Freshmen. It has been great fun and positive for the library.

If you have attended any library conferences in the past year you know that Gaming is certainly a buzzword among librarians. I have had trouble understanding the significance for libraries beyond the value of offering an up-to-date entertainment and information medium. Also, I haven't seen any real relevance with offering Gaming opportunities in the academic library setting except on a special event basis. But wouldn't Student Life do a better job with this than the library? So here is where our game comes in.

When we started this we had two goals in mine. 1) To offer information literacy in a fun and creative way. 2) To portray the library as a lively, up-beat, and exciting place. I believe we have accomplished the first goal by reaching more students who would have never come to our old Library workshops. After each answer in the game, a brief Did You Know? library resource fact related to the answer is displayed on the game screen and mentioned by the host (me). We also have fliers that list the Reference Desk contact information.

The second goal is my favorite one to try to meet. Is there a more stereotyped institution in our country than the library? Television has portrayed the library as either this exciting place to learn, read, and discover for kids(watch any PBS Kids show block and count how many times "library"is mentioned) or a hum drum, stuffy, bookish bore where only nerds hang out (the most common adult portrayal). Which portrayal do you think most college students identify with? Both probably and that is the problem. In their mind, libraries are for kids or for geeks but not for a young adult chasing a career, a date, and a social life.

The value I see in our game is the reality that something exciting, slightly edgy, and enjoyable can happen within the walls of the library. Hopefully this begins to crack the iron curtain of misconceptions about the library and tells students that to set foot in the library is not stepping foot into a boutique for only the literati, teacher's pets, and anti-social book rats. In some ways I think we have succeeded.

Use of Rollyo

I have been playing around with Rollyo and love its simplicity and usability. I could see this being useful with consistent problem research questions. For our library these questions are often literary criticisms about poems or novels that are less known then the classics. Also, psychology is often a hard topic to find full text articles in. Rollyo could provide a supplemental search after the school's database has been exhausted. I have used something similar through Google but found it kind of a hassle. Rollyo's ease of use makes it a much better choice for me.

If you want to see an example of a customized Rollyo, here is one that I created for the Dallas Mavericks.