Adding print holdings to the SFX menu

This is most likely going to be of interest to those librarians part of the OCUL consortium, but I thought you should know that Art Rhyno has written up a description how to Add Print Holdings & ILL Links to the SFX Menu in SPOT-DOCS.

A giant now off my shoulders

I have been reading, thinking and writing lots about academic librarianship and information technology as of late but you won't see the results of this work at this here blog.

That's because I, along with my Scholars Portage partner, Stacy Allison-Cassin, have just released a white paper called Scholr 2.0 on its very own blog to take advantage of the commenting goodness from the CommentPress WordPress theme.

While the purpose of the paper is to generate discussion among the librarians in the consortium that we both belong to, the conversation is open to anyone. Please join in.

OCUL Search Engine

As you can tell from my previous post, I frequently check out the other university libraries in my province. In order to make this snooping easier, I've created an Ontario University Libraries Search Engine.

That being said, I'm not completely Ontario-centric in my worldview... although many Canadians outside of Ontario would suggest that if one is from here it is impossible to be otherwise.

CrossRef DOIs and SFX

While testing out Google Scholar links with our LibX Firefox Extension, we discovered that there was something amiss with the University of Windsor SFX links that used CrossRef's DOI service.

(OCUL librarians: some of your doi links don't work either:

• Brock
• Carleton
  
• Laurentian
• Ottawa
• Queen's
• Toronto
• Wilfrid Laurier
• York
  

that leaves these libraries who have doi linking enabled:

• Guelph
• Lakehead
  
• McMaster
• Nippising
• Ryerson
• Trent
• UOIT
• Waterloo
• Western
• Windsor)

There are instructions that detail how to set up for doi linking within SFX in the SFX 3.0 User Guide Part Two, section 1. I mention this because after we set up our doi linking, the quality of our Google Scholar SFX links seems to have improved.

Representing Public Service Librarians

I'm currently a member of the OCUL Public Services Advisory Group and will be representing the group while being a member of the OCUL E-book Working Group. More to follow.

Radical Mistrust

According to the recent Pew report called "A Portrait of 'Generation Next' : How Young People View Their Lives, Futures and Politics", more than 4 in 10 "Gen-nexters" have created a personal profile on a site such as Facebook or MySpace.

Contrast that fact with this one: out of the twenty libraries of the OCUL consortium, only one library provides profiles of all their liaison librarians on their website. McMaster, Guelph, Waterloo and Windsor have only two or three librarians who share a little information about themselves. This leaves the vast majority of Ontario academic librarians with only a email address and phone extension to endear themselves to their faculty and student constituencies.

One of way of reading this situation is to suggest that there is a serious lack of radical trust going on. That being said, it may also may be simply the result of web designers being consumed with connecting users with resources. Luckily, this is one technological problem that can be resolved with some attention.