American Library Association: Technology Trends

At the annual American Library Association Conference, a panel of expert technology librarians held forth on most interesting library-tech trends. I will be reporting on these all week.

Super Fast Book Scanning: 200 pages in one minute or less
University of Tokyo professor Masatoshi Ishikawa (covered a few months ago on IEEE Spectrum's Automaton blog), which could, in just a few years, allow a handheld device, such as a phone, to scan an entire 200-page book in one minute or less. I'm not really sure how we deal with this but it's not avoidable.

Click on Automaton blog in the previous paragraph for more information and to see the scanner in action on YouTube.

Credo Reference has Topic Pages

We're excited to announce the launch of Credo Topic Pages, now available on http://www.credoreference.com!

Topic Pages can now also assist you in finding your library. By allowing search engines to index Topic Pages, Credo aims to direct even more users to their local libraries - and to your library resources. After finding topic pages in a search engine, users can find their local library on our login page that lists nearby subscribers.

How to find Topic Pages
To find Topic Pages, simply start searching Credo. If a Topic Page exists for your query, it will appear at the very top of your search results.

Technology in Higher Education

The National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT), a small nonprofit considered to be the intellectual center of the technology-based course transformation movement, has labored mightily and with much success to help more colleges bring their undergraduate courses into the modern age. But it has labored precisely because colleges have yet to decide, en masse, that adopting a proven method to produce better student learning outcomes for less money is the kind of thing they should naturally do on their own.

At Fairfield University here in Connecticut, seven different professors all taught a general biology course with a total enrollment of 260 students. Fairfield consolidated the biology course into a single section co-taught by two professors and used technology, such as clickers and laptops, to supplement the learning experience and to make sure the larger setting was not too impersonal. The changes reduced course costs by 31 percent. At the same time, student retention of concepts covered in the course also improved, as measured by questions given to students in the required second-year course for biology majors specifically designed to test concepts covered in both the redesigned and traditional class.
Here is the full report.

What Do Colleges Want Students to Read?

"In the last decade, the number of colleges that assign summer reading to incoming freshmen has soared. The National Association of Scholars has tracked and analyzed 290 such programs—the most comprehensive study of “common reading” programs to date. The study reveals national patterns in book selection. Major findings include a widespread assignment of books that promote liberal political views; a preponderance of contemporary writing; and a surprisingly low level of intellectual difficulty."
Read the report.
Source: National Association of Scholars Web Page

Dr. Chocolate

Meet Andy McShea, a scientist using his training to make better—and healthier—chocolate. He’s known as Doc Choc, because he came to Theo Chocolate in 2007, after 7 years at the Seattle biotechnology company CombiMatrix and 3 years as a postdoctoral fellow at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. He’s now using his science background to make better—and healthier—chocolate.

Read more.
Source: Dr. Chocolate - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences

Visualizing U.S. Health Data

It was a busy day yesterday for tools from Bing (Microsoft's search engine) and Google to assist in visualizing health information.

Bing's application will allow you to overlay health data onto Bing Maps so you can better understand and visualize the health of a community.

Access the Bing Health Maps

Categories of Data Include:
+ Birth Measures (Low Birth Weight, Premature Births, etc.
+ Death Measures (Homicide, Lung Cancer, etc.)
+ Health Risk Factors (Smoker, Diabetes, etc.)
(Data sources: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
Institute of Medicine
The map is part of the Community Health Data Initiative)

Shortly after the Bing announcement hit the web, Google made their announcement.
HHS has published useful data about communities, hospitals and nursing homes and made it available for download. So Google combined some of this information using Google Fusion Tables, a database service in the cloud that makes it easy to explore, visualize and share structured data.

Access the Google Health Map (Hospital Data)

At the moment (of course this will likely change), the Bing Health Map has a lot more data to “play with.”
Source: Report of Greg Sterling from Search Engine Land (SEL)

Google Lists Top Most Visited Web Sites

June 2nd, 2010--In a resource prepared for its advertisers, Google has listed the top 1000 most-visited web sites based on unique visitors. Google.com is not on the list.

The Top 10

1. Facebook
2. Yahoo
3. Live.com
4. Wikipedia.org
5. MSN.com
6. Microsoft
7. Blogspot (owned by Google)
8. Baidu.com
9. QQ.com
10. Mozilla.com

Here are a few other rankings:

18. Twitter
22. Amazon.com
31. Flickr.com
44. IMDB
56. Linkedin.com
83. NY Times
102. Scribd
166. Reference.com
179. Reuters.com

Library Workshop June 3

Students, Faculty, Staff--you are invited!

We are repeating the workshop on accessing library resources from home presented by Dan Bonacum of the IT department.

Library Workshop
Accessing Library resources off-campus: Conquering the Virtual Private Network
Room 142 (next to the library)
Thursday, June 3
begins at 10 a.m.

Break free from Oil Addiction

This Memorial Day weekend the Sierra Club and the American Security Project released a joint report showing how America’s addiction to oil threatens our national security, our economy and our environment. Read "Ending Our Dependence on Oil" that highlights the connections between national security and energy and lays out solutions for mitigating the threats posed by continued oil dependence.
Source: Sierra Club Currents June 1