Top Ten Tips

This blog Professors' Guide at US News and World Report is aimed at college students, but there is much that is useful for high school students, too. The most recent entry is The Top 10 Tips to Get the Most Out of the Library. There are lots of tips we hope you are sharing with your students--WorldCat (and MnLink in Minnesota), the databases, virtual reference, interlibrary loan, and more. Tip #10? Ask for help...get to know your librarian. Just what we've been saying.

Save Money@your library

Here is one of my favorite Web 2.0 tools. It is convenient and saves me money! I often have materials out from more than one library and with this tool, someone else reminds me of what is due when and where. Handy.

LibraryElf is an Internet-based tool for keeping track of what's due, overdue and ready for pickup at your library. Users can keep track of one or more library accounts in one place and receive reminders. Reminders are sent when the user wants it -- before items are due (up to seven days advance notice, weekly notice, or everyday reminders). For families or anyone who'd like reminders before an item is due (user-selectable number of days notice). This is a third-party application (not developed/supported by the library or its circulation system vendor). If LibraryElf is for you, sign up for an account.

Some people are concerned about privacy with this service. In theory, you could put in someone else’s library barcode and their PIN (since in most libraries it is set as the last four digits of your phone number) and then see what they are reading. Just why I would want to do that, I am not sure. And, I can change my PIN to a different number if I want to. So, I use ELF and I love it. I did about these issues, but I decided that I was willing to accept the potential risk of privacy loss for the convenience of the service. As soon as my libraries start offering RSS and or other easy reminders on my account, I'll gladly use that rather than my Elf account. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening any time soon.

All Twin Cities area library systems are compatible with Elf.

Google Book

You may know that Google was being sued by authors and publishers over the book scanning project. Well, they have reached a settlement. Not sure if this is good news, bad news, or no news in the sense that not much will change for the user. Except for the need for libraries and universities to purchase a license? According to Google Official Blog,

This agreement is truly groundbreaking in three ways. First, it will give readers digital access to millions of in-copyright books; second, it will create a new market for authors and publishers to sell their works; and third, it will further the efforts of our library partners to preserve and maintain their collections while making books more accessible to students, readers and academic researchers.

Here is each party's take on the settlement.

• Google Book Search’s page on the settlement
• Association of American Publishers’ page on the settlement
• Author’s Guild page on the settlement
• Joint FAQ about the settlement
• Official Google Blog entry about the settlement
• University of Michigan President Paul Courant’s analysis. (University of Michigan was one of the early Google Book partners.)

The library section, down near the bottom of the first link, says:

This agreement wouldn’t have been possible without all the libraries who have preserved these books and now partnered with us to make so many of them discoverable online. We’re delighted that this agreement creates new opportunities for libraries and universities to offer their patrons and students access to millions of books beyond their own collections. In addition to the institutional subscriptions and the free public access terminals, the agreement also creates opportunities for researchers to study the millions of volumes in the Book Search index. Academics will be able to apply through an institution to run computational queries through the index without actually reading individual books.

"...computational queries without actually reading individual books" has a brave new world sound about it, doesn't it

*Update* Harvard University Library weighs in and isn't happy. From Library Journal: Harvard University Library Director Robert Darnton said that

As we understand it, the settlement contains too many potential limitations on access to and use of the books by members of the higher education community and by patrons of public libraries.

Concern of many seems to be that Google is going from "a universal digital library" to a "universal digital bookstore" with Google Book (Paul Courant, UMich President). Libraries have collected these materials and made them available to researchers and others and with the idea of licenses or other payments for materials, some librarians are not happy. The Library Journal article above has a roundup of reactions.