The Biblio File

Campus Technology is reporting on a study by Thompson Publishing regarding faculty perceptions and use of web 2.0 technologies. Among the findings:

• The majority of faculty surveyed did not use social networking; those who did use the sites used them for both personal and work purposes.
• About 10 percent of faculty members surveyed indicated they have their own blogs.
• Nearly 50 percent of faculty who are familiar with social networking sites said they felt the sites have changed or will change the way students learn.
• Most professors (90 percent) who are familiar with social networking sites said they were aware of sites that allow students to grade or rate professors; 67 percent of those professors have checked to see whether they’ve been graded.
• Nearly 35 percent said they viewed podcasting as a valuable tool to reach students.

Of course, it should be noted that this survey was conducted by an academic publisher, and should (possibly) be treated with due dubiousness.

Amanda at Blogwithoutalibrary.net talks about the new Endeca powered catalogue at McMasters University. I haven’t played around with it much  yet, but she has a nice write-up of things she likes and doesn’t like so far.

Most of us agree that there is too much information floating around out there to reasonably manage.  But how much textual information do we really take in per day? Alex Iskold  tries to answer this question on  Read/Write web.  He tries to quantify the amount of text people consume from electronic sources each day:

So all the text information I consume daily adds up to 100 KB. Perhaps for some people this number would be two or three times more, but it is unlikely that someone is consuming 10MB of text per day.

I’ve been waiting for someone to make Twitter seem useful.  Jenny at The Shifted Librarian points to this article about how one library is sending their RSS feeds to a Twitter account, so that subscribers recieve notices on their cell phones.  It would no  doubt take an aggressive advertising campaign to get people to subscribe to a library’s Twitter feed, (and who knows how many undergraduates are using Twitter) but it’s easy to set up, without cost, and without significant time committment. As long as it wasn’t over used (I can see students getting irritated with a barrage of text messages) I can see how this would be a useful outreach tool, particularly for day-of advertising: “Remember: RefWorks workshop 2nite @ 7:00 @ the Library”

On a realted note, David Lee King points to other libraries who are using Twitter.

The LibrarianInBlack has a really nice write up about OCLC’s WorldCat Local Installation project at the University of Washington Libraries.  You should definitely try it for yourself.