Mauritania

by Alfred G Gerteiny

In this new book, twelve experts share their wisdom and guidance on harnessing the best new Web 2.0 tools to address information literacy. Divided into four parts and twelve chapters, the book begins with an overview of Web 2.0 tools, such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, and how students and other library patrons use these tools. The book continues with a focus on how Web 2.0 tools impact information literacy in three different LIS students, school libraries, and public libraries. Finally, the book discusses and analyzes specific tools and how libraries may wish to integrate them into their blogs, Wikipedia, RSS feeds, podcasting, YouTube, and more.

Genres: Professional Development, Librarianship

243 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Mel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a good book on the topic of information literacy and web 2.0 use in libraries. Some of the articles focused just on the 2.0 side of things and not on information literacy per se, but it was still an interesting read. The rest of the view is my notes on each of the essays, mostly for my own use on how they work into the essay I'm writing at the moment. The first essay, the introduction by Peter Godwin was good and talked about information literacy and the changing state of web 2.0 and how they could be combined. It had a lot of quotes from other articles to look at. Brian Kelly's article Library 2.0 was mostly just a description of the different types of things people associate with web 2.0 and not really very groundbreaking or insightful. Sheila Webber's Educating Web 2.0 Lis students were a little strange. The idea behind web 2.0 in libraries is that it's what people are now using the web for. Therefore it's what we, as librarians, should be responding to and providing them with. But there is also this underlying assumption that librarians have no familiarity with web 2.0 and have to be taught about it, and then we in turn teach those, who do understand and use it, about it. It all seems very backwards. For example one of the things suggested in this is joining facebook and then looking at how facebook could be used to promote a library. Which kinda goes under the assumption that people won't have joined facebook already, and if they're not even on facebook, how are they going to understand any of the web with content? I think this goes to the bigger problem that most of the people writing about this stuff were not part of the web from the beginning. All the talk about web 2.0 involves "creating content" and talks about the "static" web pages of the past. Ok, I am old enough to remember the days when the web was just a big text adventure, and we used discussion boards, and designed our own web pages, and put out information about our favourite bands. We didn't have the software to make it as fancy as wikis or YouTube, or the corporate backing of huge sites like facebook or twitter, but the ideas were always there. Judy O'Connell looks at the use of web 2.0 in school libraries. Her ideas for use and teaching of web 2.0 in school libraries are pretty good, though I question a few of her assumptions. In her first section on searching, she seems to be implying that all young people seem to just use Google for searching nowadays and don't know how to evaluate the information they get from it. This seems to be rather a misleading assertion which gets repeated time and again. Obviously people today do not just use Google, nobody uses Google for searching Amazon, or YouTube or facebook, or any of the other "web 2.0" sites they use every day. People use different search engines. Likewise librarians need to let go of the idea that Boolean searching is the only way to search properly. Today's search engines aren't built that way, and as my information retrieval class showed, it really makes no difference at all. The key to good searching comes from knowing what words to use. Likewise most of the sites that come out of a Google search are helpful and provide the information necessary, otherwise it wouldn't have become the most successful search engine, but one of the others that were around 5 years ago would have. McLean's essay looks at the use of web 2.0 in public libraries, particularly in the US and Australia. She mentions that libraries can teach IL, but really she's just talking about teaching web 2.0 technologies, and there's next to nothing about IL in the article. Good for web 2.0, not so much for IL. Georgina Payne's article Engage or enrage looks at students doing an information blog assessment, how it was carried out and how successful it was. While this teaches students to blog is this really IL? Also how many students at a business school would be unfamiliar with blogs in the first place? At my library school they are now using a blog as an assessment tool for the introductory computer class; personally I'd find this a waste of time. I've kept a blog for almost 5 years now, and really don't want to be paying post graduate tuition fees for something I already know how to do. In the example in the book 90 percent of the students were 18-21, the age apparently where everyone is using web 2.0 technologies already! (This could be used as an example to show that teaching IL skills was necessary, but not done, just teaching web 2.0 on its own is not enough). Deitering, Using Wikipedia as the cornerstone for IL curriculum. This definitely seems to take the "dumbing down" approach to teaching information literacy. Failing to be able to teach their students to look at scholarly debates by looking at debates within journal articles, they simply show them how things are done, created and changed on Wikipedia. While this gets the idea across, unfortunately it also weakens the "scholarly" aspect, as everyone's opinion is equal, and most opinions being argued about are over "right" and "wrong" ideas, rather than developing arguments and theories based on other scholarship. Also it seems that Wikipedia just replaces encyclopaedia reference, which really should university students be using for research? This article does however; give examples of the different ways IL has been taught in the library of the university. It also shows how standards need to be lowered to be effective. Oddly while mentioning the complaints by students TAs and staff about the unreliability of Wikipedia the author does not address this issue. (Ridiculous quote about reading wiki for 1.5 hours - page 93). Fryer and Secker write about LSE using RSS feeds to bring together trainings from different departments into a central location and looks at how other libraries are using RSS feeds. (Again 2.0 but not much IL) Zimmer and Ziph look at podcasts at a US business library. It goes into quite a bit of detail about the costs and processes the library used for making their podcasts. They also did a user survey getting feedback about their audio and video podcasts; students said the podcasts were good for library instruction. Because they were put in iTunes the library could also tell how much they'd been downloaded. The project was considered a success and became part of their main teaching. Allen and Barnhart write about the Penntags system used by media students. Hoffman and Polkinghorne actually talk about the way they are using flickr in their IL classes, to show the difference between natural and controlled vocabularies, and the advantage of subject searching. This teaches students to search by subject rather than keywords. This helps them learn how to find information in OPACs and databases. The article gives details of how the sessions are performed. The task also shows the weakness of tags, and how they are biased. Good use of web 2.0 for IL. (Though teaching generic library skills rather than a specific IL theory) Ariew discusses University of South Florida's library using YouTube to post instructional library videos. Interestingly their first video was not publicised because it used copyrighted music and was in violation of copyright laws. Also interesting is they learned the lesson I mentioned earlier, that this is not a case of using tools of young people to reach young people, but they had the young people teach the old librarians about web 2.0 Parker - Going beyond Google at the Open University Beyond Google is a university course offered at the OU. They originally based on SCONUL's 7 pillars (1999) but realised these were now out of date (so will be good reference for practice of theory part of my essay and how they are adapted and changed for new web 2.0 world p. 134-5). They introduce them to the tools and then use them to highlight aspects of information literacy. This is a good example of different ways different technologies are used. Adams, Pope and Watson give examples of how their university library teaches IL skills using an open source page, ASK (Assignment survival kit). This tool is developed in tandem with their IL policy. The article includes how the project was successful and how it is being improved for the next version. Kirrimuir looks at IL through games. He mentions the interesting fact that all video games produced in France are included in the legal deposit of the BNF. IT gives examples of different universities that are teaching IL through gaming. This could be useful in the "dumbing down" argument for my essay. Godwin's conclusion is a good summation of the issues of web 2.0 and libraries, and their detractors. Lots of good quotable material.

[M]

good

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book had good points but some of the information is dated; I found myself skimming whole sections.