Archives for posts with tag: space

A Fun Future Mix of Literacies

March 21, 2011 //

From Scott McCloud's book Understanding Comics (1994)

Recently, I came across a post from the Libraries and Transliteracy blog on a neat collaboration called You Media.

YouMedia, for those of you who don’t know, is an experiment between the Chicago Public Library, Depaul University, and the Digital Youth Network…

The YouMedia experiment is a 21st century teen learning space. It is really a digital media lab. But it is so much more. The YouMedia folks recognize that technology alone will not save us. The success of this experiment lies in the team that YouMedia has built. Not only do the kids who use the space have access to librarians and library staff, but they also have access to mentors and instructors. The mentors and instructors have expertise in the tools, in tapping into creativity, or in just listening to the kids. They all have the goal of helping these patrons find their voices. It is in these people that the success of YouMedia is built.

… YouMedia recently witnessed a major milestone. While the research findings on the success or the failure of the experiment will take years to construct, the kids recently began providing solid anecdotal evidence pointing towards success. One example of that evidence is the recent results of the Louder than a Bomb Youth Poetry Festival. The winner of the contest was a young man who represents a YouMedia team of teens, and he even gives them credit.[full post]

For those who’re not familiar with the concept, Transliteracy is essentially the idea that literacy is not limited to simply being able to read print texts. It takes, the notion goes, a complex set of interacting literacies to be able to interpret and communicate what we experience, be it by book, movie, YouTube, bus rides, whatever.

Take for example the excerpt from Understanding Comics, above. Reading a comic book involves traditional text literacy, visual literacy (knowing the way comic strips work or what an abstracted human for is), and spacial literacy (understanding movement and action), and more (i.e. you need to sort of generally understand what a Transformers toy is to get what’s happening – Transformers literacy?).

Because of its multi-faceted approach, Transliteracy is an important concept for exploring how pedagogy and communication will evolve. Projects like YouMedia take this and apply it to make a learning and creative environment that combines traditional print books with new multi-media tools. This sort of mixed-media space is well suited for libraries because they are fast becoming mixed-media spaces anyways.

Libraries have already committed to the importance of core literacies (i.e. reading and being able to use a computer). This has never been more relevant. But, if libraries are poised to take this another step. Ideas like Transliteracy will be useful for building bridges beyond simply reading a book or using a computer.

Tags comics, computer, creativity, library, literacy, reading, space, teaching, Technology, trends

Categories Library News, Literacies, Public Libraries, Services, Technology, User experience, web tools

Seditious Serendipity Supporters Suppress Scholarly Shift

March 17, 2011 //

What do you mean... online?

A little alliteration makes for a good headline. An entirely alliterated title is huge.

Anyways, there is an interesting article from American Library Magazine on the news that Syracuse U. Library has backed down in the face of faculty ‘fury’ over moving some books to off-site storage.

Interestingly, the ALM article is a critique of one the biggest myths of academic library use: the serendipity of browsing the shelves.

Here are some points that jumped out at me:

Although today’s academic library users may feel that browsing is an ancient scholarly right, the practice is in fact no older than the baby-boomer faculty who so often lead the charge to keep books on campus. Prior to the Second World War, the typical academic library was neither designed nor managed to support the browsing of collections. At best, faculty might be allowed to browse, but it was the rare academic library that allowed undergraduates into the stacks. To this day academic-library special collections—real treasure troves for scholars in the letters and humanities—remain entirely closed to browsing…

If browsing does not have a long academic history, one could argue that it is still a desirable thing because it leads to serendipitous discoveries. The problem is that such serendipity depends on whatever happens to be on the shelf at the time of browsing. Because the books in highest demand are most likely to be in use and, thus, off the shelf, browsing academic library shelves is the equivalent of hitting the sale tables on day three of a three-day sale…[full article

Having done my share of work in academic libraries pursuing my own studies, I can’t say all this isn’t true.

There is something wildly capital R romantic about idly dragging your finger along titles in the stacks. But, in practical terms, these little excursions were more about the drama of the liberal arts academic lifestyle and not nearly as effective as actually learning to use OPACs and databases well (or getting in touch with librarians who were always ready to help out).

The article ends with a decent summary of the realities of the situation.

While the presence of books may help to send the message that one has entered a place of scholarship and thoughtfulness… there is no evidence to suggest that the presence of 2 million mostly unused books sends such a message any better than the presence of 200,000 heavily used books. Or that 200,000 books does the job better than 20,000. The notion that there is a relationship between the proximity of large numbers of books and the generation of scholarly thought is a close cousin to the ancient notion that piles of old rags cause the spontaneous generation of mice.

Even if it seems that the proponents of awe-inspiring onsite library collections are winning all the battles, they will eventually lose the war due to a single, unavoidable fact: Huge onsite collections have become an unsustainable luxury.

Old school academics: change is here and more is coming. Please adapt or get out of the way for those who will.

Someone help me do this better.

Tags academic, books, collections management, customer service, librarians, library, Policy, space, trends

Categories Academic Libraries, Library News, Services, Technology, User experience

On Passages Not Found in Books

February 2, 2011 //

The good Jessamyn West at Librarian.net has compiled a list of the random, secretish places in libraries she’s been shown:

Entering the sub-basement at Colorado College.

Rubber stamps in the University of Alabama library basement (there was also a printing press)

The stairs to the room upstairs from the Bradford (VT) library

The Calef Library basement in Washington Vermont

Old card catalogs at the Library of Congress

Not quite on topic but the secret door [art piece, not functional to go someplace secret] at the San Jose State library is pretty nifty.[full post]

It’s great when the evolution of a building space is cracked open. Particularly when it’s something a little esoteric seeming, like a library.

A long time ago, I wrote an article about exploring the abandoned(ish) passageways beneath Wilfrid Laurier University. I went under the library building, just a little.

More dedicated urban explorers, though, reveal some more amazing stuff: c.f. Cool Pics of an Abandoned Russian Library

Tags Amazing, architecture, library, Lost, Public Libraries, space

Categories Library Bric-a-brac

Aboard Spaceship CISTI!

January 27, 2011 //

In past posts, I’ve alluded to the fact that I have a new job (in a LIBRARY!). It’s at CISTI, and I’m working as a Meta-Data Librarian. It’s proving pretty interesting, so far.

I know I complained about how hard it is to get a library job with the Feds in Canada, and I stand by that. I’m on a temp contract, and that means… well… it means I’m a temp. That’s pejorative. I like to think of myself as a Librarian Mercenary (hence the Ronin thing). A notion made especially dramatic by the fact that I was ushered in to help redeem a floundering database!

On a fun note: back in library school, I did a presentation on library architecture and themes of authority and power. Basically, it was about libraries as literal and metaphorical fortresses (like the library in Name of the Rose, which was modeled, in fact, on University of Toronto’s Robarts Library.).

CISTI’s building holds true with some of these traditional architectural themes, especially when seen during the day.

But! See it at night… Yep! Starship CISTI!

Tags architecture, Canada, employment, job search, library, sci-fi, space

Categories About, Employment

Reference Bomb – A Poser Borealis

January 18, 2011 //

One of my friends woke up to an odd sight: strange lights in the sky. His early morning twitter noise wanted to know if anyone else was seeing the aurora borealis near Barrie (actually over a place called Utopia).

Well, it’s not impossible.

Experience led me to think it wasn’t the northern lights, but something else. I tweeted back, and sadly I was right.

You see, one morning I too saw lights in the sky over Ottawa. To wax poetic, it was like hundreds of candles stretched up to sky and merged into a greenish-red glow spilt across the horizon.

Unaccustomed to the sight, I declared “Northern Lights” on twitter, facebook, everywhere, to anyone who would listen.

That evening’s weather report gave me a bit of a smack down. Turns out, the kind meteorologist said, it was in fact an instance of what is called light pillars.

Light pillars are caused by regular man-made light that is reflected by moisture in the air in odd ways. When a lot of pillars are close together they can look, to a hopeful eye, like the northern lights.

Eerie, true, but, ionosphere fireworks it is not. I was crestfallen when I learned the truth. Plus, I’d left a social media trail that forced me to confess my mistake.

My friend, too, soon tweeted back, his words a little heavy: he was seeing light pillars, too.

That is a mistaken sky phenomenon reference bomb, times two… bam…

Amazing News! Crowd-Sourced Astronomy!

January 13, 2011 //

Space is a strange, magical place! From NPR.org:

Hubble Telescope Sheds Light On Mysterious, Green Space Blob

Back in 2007, as part of a crowd-sourced study program called Galaxy Zoo, a Dutch school teacher discovered a very odd celestial object: It looked like a great, green blob floating in space and at the time it was inexplicable.

Today, thanks to the Hubble telescope, we have an unbelievable picture of Hanny’s Voorwerp, or Hanny’s Object, as it is now known. And we also have a better idea of what it is: Researchers said the blob is not a galaxy but a “twisting rope of gas, or tidal tail, about 300,000 light-years long that wraps around the galaxy [IC 2497].”…

First, that very young stars are forming inside the tidal tail. “The region may have been churning out stars for several million years,” said Keel. “They are so dim that they have previously been lost in the brilliant light of the surrounding gas.”

Keel told us that this is remarkable because this is not the kind of environment in which you would usually find star formation.[source article]

Two things cool about this: crowd-sourcing being used for more than marketing or spamming/winning elections AND strange green space blobs.

Please check out Galaxy Zoo. It’s zany galaxy-classifying fun. And, there’s apparently an iPhone app so you can help chart space on the bus or during meetings or wherever. Hopefully, an android app is not far behind!

Tags crowd-sourcing, space

Categories Amazing News!