Your Tour Guide on the Information Superhighway

What is the place of the academic library?

librarianellen — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:48:39 +0000

I found this link in my Twitter stream this morning, and I thought I would share it with you. I am very curious as to your reactions to this article especially in light of all you’ve been learning about education this semester.

This is a faculty member writing about what he feels an academic library should be (and not be).

The classroom is where students connect, collaborate, learn, and synthesize, under the guidance of faculty who are, at the end of the day, responsible for teaching. Students can continue the process over a cup of coffee in the local college coffee shop, in the common room of their dorms, or when they run into each other in the computer lab or library. The library exists as a means: to support the members of the classroom, the students and faculty.
…
The library is a means to an end: enabling students and faculty to access archives.

Thoughts? I have mine, of course, but I’d love to hear what yours are.

Comic Books & Graphic Novels in the Library

librarianellen — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:13:36 +0000

I’m not a huge comic book fan, but there is one that I own that is really meaningful to me. It’s called Safe Area Goražde by Joe Sacco. I lived in Bosnia for 3 years, and this graphic novel, while not pleasant to read, does a fantastic job explaining the war in Eastern Bosnia. Joe Sacco has written several other graphic novels about war zones – one called Palestine, another called Footnotes from Gaza, and several more about Bosnia. He’s a journalist as well as a comic artist.

When I set out this morning to assess our library’s collection in regards to comics, I was delightfully surprised! Our amazing Zeta collection of children and young adult books has a wide variety of comics and graphic novels. If you do a keyword search in BearCat for “Comic books, strips, etc.” you will come up with a wonderful list of comics and graphic novels located in the Baylor Libraries. Here are a few that I’ve chosen to highlight. Some in this list are reference works and scholarly studies on comics.

Aoki, Keith. Bound by Law?: Tales from the Public Domain. New expanded ed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

Burgan, Michael. Frankenstein. Minneapolis: Stone Arch Books, 2008.

Garrett, Greg. Holy Superheroes!: Exploring the Sacred in Comics, Graphic Novels, and Film. Rev. and expanded ed. Louisville, Ky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008.

Lent, John A. Comic Books and Comic Strips in the United States Through 2005: An International Bibliography. Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2006.

Nakazawa, Keiji. Barefoot Gen: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima. San Francisco, Calif: Last Gasp of San Francisco, 2004.

Pawuk, Michael. Graphic Novels: A Genre Guide to Comic Books, Manga, Andmore. Westport, Conn: Libraries Unlimited, 2007.

Pendleton, Jeff. The Story of Dublin Dr Pepper: Dr Pepper, Texas. Limited ed. [Dublin, Tex: Dublin Dr Pepper, 2007.

Sacco, Joe. Palestine: #1. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books, 1993.

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 2003.

Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986.

Thoreau, Henry David. Thoreau at Walden. 1st ed. New York: Hyperion, 2008.

Weiner, Robert G. Marvel Graphic Novels and Related Publications: An Annotated Guide to Comics, Prose Novels, Children’s Books,articles, Criticism and Reference Works, 1965-2005. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland, 2008.

From Doug Engelbart to Right Now

librarianellen — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:45:29 +0000

One of my favorite blogs about (for the lack of a better word) web stuff is the ReadWriteWeb. Last week they ran a series of posts documenting what the top web trends of 2009 are. I thought it might be an interesting enterprise to list those trends here to see if anyone can make connections between what Doug Engelbart was writing and thinking and demoing back in 1968 with the cutting edge web trends of 2009.

ReadWriteWeb’s top web trends of 2009:

Structured Data

The basic principle of the Web of Data is “unstructured information will give way to structured information – paving the road to more intelligent computing.”
The Real-Time Web

the Real-Time Web is a new form of communication, it creates a new body of content, it’s immediate, it’s public and has an explicit social graph associated with it, and it carries an implicit model of federation.
Personalization

Ultimately personalization is about web sites and services giving you what you want, when you want it.
Mobile Web and Augmented Reality

Augmented reality is “the addition of a layer to the world on your mobile device”
Internet of Things

The Internet of Things is “when real world objects (such as fridges, lights and toasters) get connected to the Internet.”

So, anyone want to jump in and list where they might see connections with what’s going on now in the world of the web and what Doug Engelbart’s original vision was? You can either respond here in the comments, or on your own blog.

A little experiment in New Media Studies research

librarianellen — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 19:52:25 +0000

As a librarian, I help students with research projects all the time. For this class, to start out, I decided I wanted to do a little experiment related to research on new media studies. The story by Borges and the article by Vannevar Bush inspired me, as they were from two completely different disciplines. So I chose three different library databases in three different subjects and did a search for “new media” to see what would come up (to find out about library databases and what types of information you can find by searching through them, see these two pages).

The three databases I chose were the MLA International Bibliography (MLA is the Modern Language Association and this database contains the following subjects: literature, language, linguistics and folklore), the ACM Digital Library (ACM is the “Associaion for Computing Machinery and this database contains all the articles from their journals, newsletters and conference presentations) and Sociology Abstracts (contains international literature in sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences).

I wanted to see what searching for “new media” in these different disciplinary databases would turn up. What types of research, projects, ideas are out there that are being described as “new media.” Here is what I found.

MLA International Bibliography

(It is interesting to note that the MLA doesn’t have “new media” as a subject heading. The term “new media” is instead found in titles, abstracts and journal names. The subject headings that are found instead are, for example: “electronic publishing,” “internet,” “computer technology,” “social network,” “relationship to hypertext,” “role of digital technology,” “role of image-text relations,” and “technology and media.”)

Almjeld, Jennifer Marie. “The Girls of MySpace: New Media as Gendered Literacy Practice and Identity Construction.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences 69.6 (2008): 2252-2253.

Galey, Alan. “Signal to Noise: Designing a Digital Edition of The Taming of a Shrew (1594).” College Literature 36.1 (2009): 40-66.

Hughes, Janette Michelle. “Poets, Poetry and New Media: Attending to the Teaching and Learning of Poetry.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences 68.9 (2006): 3769.

Jansz, Jeroen. “The Paratextual Pleasures of Reading about Playing Video Games.” New Media & Society 10.5 (2008): 793-801.

Parish, Nina. “From Book to Page to Screen: Poetry and New Media.” Yale French Studies 114 (2008): 51-66.

Tabbi, Joseph. “Locating the Literary in New Media.” Contemporary Literature 49.2 (2008): 311-331.

Turner, Henry S. “Life Science: Rude Mechanicals, Human Mortals, Posthuman Shakespeare.” South Central Review: The Journal of the South Central Modern Language Association 26.1-2 (2009): 197-217.

Zimmer, Michael. “Renvois of the Past, Present and Future: Hyperlinks and the Structuring of Knowledge from the Encyclopédie to Web 2.0.” New Media & Society 11.1-2 (2009): 95-114.

ACM Digital Library

Biswas, Amitava et al. “Assessment of mobile experience engine, the development toolkit for context aware mobile applications.” Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGCHI international conference on Advances in computer entertainment technology. Hollywood, California: ACM, 2006. 8. 28 Aug 2009 <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1178823.1178834&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=50428443&CFTOKEN=25877625>.

Holmes, Tiffany Grace. “Eco-visualization: combining art and technology to reduce energy consumption.” Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI conference on Creativity \& cognition. Washington, DC, USA: ACM, 2007. 153-162. 28 Aug 2009 <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1254960.1254982&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=50428443&CFTOKEN=25877625>.

Kerhervé, Brigitte, Anis Ouali, and Paul Landon. “Design and production of new media artworks.” Proceedings of the ACM workshop on Multimedia for human communication: from capture to convey. Hilton, Singapore: ACM, 2005. 11-16. 28 Aug 2009 <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1099376.1099381&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=50428443&CFTOKEN=25877625>.

Leggett, John J., and I. I. I. Frank M. Shipman. “Directions for hypertext research: exploring the design space for interactive scholarly communication.” Proceedings of the fifteenth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia. Santa Cruz, CA, USA: ACM, 2004. 2-11. 28 Aug 2009 <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1012807.1012812&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=50428443&CFTOKEN=25877625>.

Manovich, Lev. “Inventing new media: what we can learn from new media art and media history.” Proceedings of the eleventh ACM international conference on Multimedia. Berkeley, CA, USA: ACM, 2003. 363-363. 28 Aug 2009 <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=957013.957015&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=50428443&CFTOKEN=25877625>.

Merhi, Yucef. “Super atari poetry.” Proceeding of the 16th ACM international conference on Multimedia. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada: ACM, 2008. 1137-1138. 28 Aug 2009 <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1459359.1459602&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=50428443&CFTOKEN=25877625>.

Polaine, Andrew. “The flow principle in interactivity.” Proceedings of the second Australasian conference on Interactive entertainment. Sydney, Australia: Creativity \& Cognition Studios Press, 2005. 151-158. 28 Aug 2009 <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1109180.1109204&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=50428443&CFTOKEN=25877625>.

Sumner, Tamara, and Josie Taylor. “New media, new practices: experiences in open learning course design.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. Los Angeles, California, United States: ACM Press/Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1998. 432-439. 28 Aug 2009 <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=274644.274703&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=50428443&CFTOKEN=25877625>.

Winget, Megan A. “Archiving the videogame industry: collecting primary materials of new media artifacts.” Proceedings of the 9th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries. Austin, TX, USA: ACM, 2009. 459-460. 28 Aug 2009 <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1555400.1555512&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=50428443&CFTOKEN=25877625>.

Sociology Abstracts

Atanasoski, Neda. “Roma rights on the World Wide Web: The role of internet technologies in shaping minority and human rights discourses in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 12.2 (2009): 205-218.

Brooker, Will. “All Our Variant Futures: The Many Narratives of Blade Runner: The Final Cut.” Popular Communication 7.2 (2009): 79-91.

Cheng, Chung Tai. “New Media and Event: A Case Study on the Power of the Internet.” Knowledge 22.2 (2009): 145-153.

Duque, Ricardo B, and Marcus Antonius H Ynalvez. “Internet practice and sociability in South Louisiana.” New Media & Society 11.4 (2009): 487-507.

Giddings, Seth. “Events and Collusions: A Glossary for the Microethnography of Video Game Play.” Games and Culture 4.2 (2009): 144-157.

Gorski, Paul C. “Insisting on Digital Equity: Refraining the Dominant Discourse on Multicultural Education and Technology.” Urban Education 44.3 (2009): 348-364.

Groshek, Jacob. “The Democratic Effects of the Internet, 1994–2003: A Cross-National Inquiry of 152 Countries.” The International Communication Gazette 71.3 (2009): 115-136.

Katz, James E, and Chih-Hui Lai. “News Blogging in Cross-Cultural Contexts: A Report on the Struggle for Voice.” Knowledge 22.2 (2009): 95-107.

Kucklich, Julian. “A Techno-Semiotic Approach to Cheating in Computer Games: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Machine.” Games and Culture 4.2 (2009): 158-169.

Wright, David W, and Twyla J Hill. “Prescription for Trouble: Medicare Part D and Patterns of Computer and Internet Access Among the Elderly.” Journal of Aging & Social Policy 21.2 (2009): 172-186.

Super Atari poetry, digital versions of Shakespeare, combining art and technology to help the environment, studying internet culture in the South, in Eastern Europe, among the elderly, to study democracy, human rights, medical care… New Media studies is cross-disciplinary, interactive, and ever evolving.

This just scratched the surface of what I found in the databases. Does anything strike you as interesting in these lists?

Introducing your virtual reference librarian

librarianellen — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 19:51:08 +0000

Hello Baylor_NMS_F09 students!

I’m Ellen Hampton Filgo, and I’m the E-Learning Librarian here at the Baylor Libraries. I’m going to be joining your class this semester virtually (via Twitter and this blog) to be your guide to all things information-related. If you have any library resource questions, if you have a need for any librarian-ninja search skills, or even have any tech puzzlements, let me know. It’s my job to help students search for and find what they need.

You can find me in a number of places: