MLA announced the results for the 2012/2013 election.
Congratulations!
President elect: Dixie Jones
Board of Directors: Julia Esparza and Chris Shaffer
Nominating Committee: Max Anderson, Ana Cleveland, Keith Cogdill, Jo Dorsch, Sherrilynne Fuller, Heidi Heilemann, Melissa Just, Neville Prendergast, and Lisa Traditi.
Last year I posted about Texas Medical Center Library’s Bookmas Tree and their “How To” guide to create your very own bookmas tree. This year I found a whole slew of bookmas trees in all sizes and styles.
Here are two examples, browse the 12 styles of bookmas trees at The Mary Sue.
Have a wonderful weekend and a Merry Christmas.
Yesterday Organizational Monkey’s post “Libraries should get specific in our promotions” directed my attention to a recent article in The Journal of Academic Librarianship 2011. 37(5): 386-401, “Usability testing for e-resource discovery: How students find and choose e-resources using library web sites.”
It is a pretty interesting article about how BGSU students use the library’s website to find information and any problems they might encounter. Not so surprising, students primarily used links in the left navigation bar. Also not so surprising, they were confused by the layout of the links on the bar. What surprised me was that the students in this study did not really read what was in the middle of the web page.
“The researchers also noticed what appeared to be a huge middle-of-the-page blindness. When looking at the library’s home page, study participants typically started at the top left corner of the page, looked down the left navigation bar, and then sometimes scoured the rest of the page just to complete the exercise. Links from the middle of the page were rarely highlighted, and only three were chosen more than once.”
Huh, it has been a while since I have brushed up on my web page usability studies, is this type of behavior typical of today’s students or is it unique to BGSU and perhaps their web page?
They also found that students stick with the resources that they are familiar with regardless of the search. Basically they will force a round peg in a square hole because they aren’t familiar with other possibly more relevant databases.
“If students have used something successfully in the past, they will return to that resource for other research questions … As with the statewide catalog, OhioLINK, students can, and do, recognize branded databases and return to them.
Therefore, libraries should get specific in our promotions, capitalizing on the brand recognition students already have and marketing brands that students will remember.”
We need to be more specific about our databases and why somebody would search them because apparently that information is not getting to them.
It is an interesting article and worth reading. For example did you know that your users might be confused over the phrases “mobile access” and “on campus access,” some BGSU students were. While you may not be thinking about your website redesign over the holidays, print out or tag this article for when you do begin the process of revamping your library web page.
As 2011 comes to a close, it makes sense to start highlighting 2012 events. One major event in 2012 is the Annual Meeting in Seattle. The NPC has been hard at work trying to make it a great meeting. In the upcomming months there will be more and more updates about the meeting and you if you want to be in loop of what is going on then you will want to check out the Official MLA ’12 Blog and use #mlanet12 as the meeting’s hashtag on Twitter.
So go to http://npc.mlanet.org/mla12/ and bookmark it or add it to your RSS feed reader because there will be some posts in the near future on our speakers, the Opening Reception (aka Opening Day), and the call for bloggers and much more. Once we have selected our bloggers, things will really take off with posts about the meeting.
Do you have a question about logistics, programming, or anything else about the meeting? Want to pick some of the NPC people’s brains? Or do you just want to chat in general about the meeting? Try posting on Twitter. Use the hashtag #mlanet12 and type away, we will see it an respond. Not only are the two NPC co-chairs on Twitter but so are many other NPC and LAC members. Are you new to Twitter? That is ok. We plan on having another online MLA Twitter tutorial available for people. It is still a little early and it isn’t quite ready to go live, but if you want to join in on the #mlanet12 discussion and just want a little refresher check out A Beginner’s Guide to Twitter.
Keep in touch!
It is the gift giving time of year and some people are looking at smartphones as gifts. Since the three major carriers have the iPhone, people now have to decide whether they want an iPhone or Android. David Gewirtz at ZDNet provides a fairly good pros/cons list on the iPhone and Android to help you with your decision.
I only have a few things to add to his list.
Support:If your hospital or institution supports a certain type of phone, that can weigh heavy in your decision making. However, a lot of medical institutions are still clinging to Blackberrys and many don’t allow personal devices (i.e. your own smartphone) to access or sync to their network. If this is the case then you might want to look at what a lot of your peers have and possibly consider getting what they have. Ok, I know that sounds like a popularity contest of buying what your friends or coworkers have, but there is safety in numbers. The people in your group will be talking about the best apps they use for certain things. If you are a doctor or nurse then it will most likely be the best apps your colleagues use to help treat patients. If you are librarian, it might be what most of your patrons are using so you can provide better customer service. As David mentioned there are a lot of apps on both platforms but not all apps are on all platforms. Knowing what apps they use can be helpful and having the same platform means that app is available for your device AND it will perform the same (not all apps perform the same on Android and iPhone). If you don’t have institutional support, your mobile peers might also be your second line of tech support. When your phone is misbehaving and an Internet search does not reveal the cure, you are more likely to ask around your group for help before you spend money at the Genius Bar or Geek Squad.
Customization: I know David mentioned that the Android beats the iPhone hands down on customization, and he is totally right. But what you have to ask yourself is whether you really can/should customize. An iPhone is an iPhone is an iPhone, there is no difference between them except for different generations. Heck if you sync through iTunes they all are running the same OS version. Androids are the Wild West of customization. Not all are created equally, not all phones are running the latest OS and not all are going to be upgraded to the latest OS. You can download things to further customize your phone such as different fonts, icons, widgets, web browsers (I’m loving Dolphin right now), change/customize the boot animation (usually the carrier’s logo that shows when you reboot your phone), customize the lock screen, etc. With great customization comes great responsibility, you can really accidentally do something that makes your Android a real pain in the butt and is hard to undo. Right now I am trying to figure out what on earth I did that screwed up my Android so that my camera doesn’t work. My camera won’t take pictures, every time I tap the camera icon I get the message “The application Camera (process com.android.camera) has stopped unexpectedly. Please try again.” I can sort “fix” it by rebooting the phone. But that only works if once the phone is rebooted I go straight into camera (waiting an hour later I get the same error message) and I can only take 1-3 pictures before the camera app freezes and fails. Now I did very little customization, but was it something I did that screwed it up? Is it the OS? Do I need to buy a bigger memory card? All I want is for my camera to work.
Not everyone should customize. I personally would trade all of the damn customization in my Android for my camera to work again. There was something very nice about having the limited customization of an iPhone. I didn’t have to think, my phone just worked. That is very enticing to a lot of people, many of which who don’t realize it. But some people LOVE exploiting all of the possible ways to customize their phone…if that is the case then they need an Android. But if you are an average person who just wants their phone to work and thinks of phone customization as the color of its case or different ring tones then just skip the whole customization argument and look at other arguments for iPhone vs. Android.
Address Book: I would make this a mini point. The Android uses Google Address book for your contacts list. If you don’t use Google Address book or don’t want your Google Address book added to the contacts then get an iPhone. iPhones also do a MUCH better job importing and syncing your contacts than Androids. Just do a simple search on the Internet for Android and contacts and you get a whole bunch of pages about people having problems. However, if there are other reasons why you like/want an Android the address/contact mess isn’t a deal killer, it is just a real pain in the butt that you will have to work at to fix. It took me forever to straighten it out but once I got it fixed, it has since stayed fixed.
Hopefully the ZDNet article and my thoughts can help you decide if you are on the fence. Both the Android and the iPhone are good devices that are making huge inroads in the medical profession. Although work doesn’t pay for my device and it isn’t supported, I think I am better at helping the doctors and nurses in my institution with their (personal) smartphones and suggesting helpful tips, ideas, and apps.
A new PubMed Tutorial is available. This tutorial was updated in December 2011, and reflects PubMed changes through December 12, 2011. To see a list of recent PubMed changes, go to PubMed’s New/Noteworthy.
Those of you who create your own PubMed tutorials unique to your institution’s settings may want to view this new one to see if you need to change or update anything.
Multiple friends posted this article, “Studay Raises Doubts About Effectiveness of Facebook as Outreach Tool for Academic Libraries” ironically on their Facebook accounts.
The study, in the current issue of D-Lib Magazine, by Michalis Gerolimos, examined 3,513 posts on the Facebook pages of 20 U.S. academic libraries. He found that the vast majority of the Facebook posts (91%) did not generate any comments from fans and those posts that did, the comments were primarily from library personnel not faculty or students.
If you look at the Facebook page fan information outside of libraries you will see that the numbers might not be what librarians hope for. According to Sysomos only 23% of Facebook pages has more than 1,000 fans and the average page has 9.5 pieces of fan generated content (photos and video). These numbers are regular Facebook pages which include celebrities, companies, public figures, and (yes) libraries and educational sites. So the vast majority of Facebook pages out there have less than 1,000 fans. That figure seems to fall in line with Gerolimos’ findings. Only two of the twenty libraries he looked at had more than 1,000 fans.
Yet most library Facebook pages have very few fan generate content. Surprisingly most of the content on the walls (including “likes” and comments) were from library staff. It appears that most libraries are well off the mark for user fan generated content and the content library staff post is either not engaging or irrelevant, such as Fondren Library’s page that posted a close up of a librarian walking to work.
This illustrates my point that I made on my friend’s Facebook page on this article, ” Too many librarians believe just slapping a FB page up will automatically lead to engagement. Successful businesses have entire marketing departments who are trained from birth to engage the customer. We have no such departments.” Obviously, if we think a picture of a librarian walking is engaging the fans. Even if we are good at engaging people, or we all of a sudden find some social media marketing wunderkind willing to work on engagement, there is a good chance that people still might not be interested.
While people may chat with each other at the library, its Facebook page is not an online water cooler where users trade ideas, discussions, or simply ask questions. “Gerolimos found that users were not interested in sharing personal data via the library Facebook pages.”
In his article Gerolimos cites two papers stating users are more interested in personal communication and interaction rather than educational endeavors.
“Pempek et al. (2009) identified the same mentality regarding its use in academia. They found that communicating with friends was the most popular reason to use Facebook and finding help with schoolwork was among the least. In addition, a survey conducted by Valenzuela et al. (2009) recorded that 51.5% of its users do not read or post on groups as part of their daily activities, and 64.3% rarely visit the profiles of groups they have joined. Selwyn (2009) found that only 4% of a total of 68,169 students’ personal wall postings he analyzed were related to education.”
Only 4% of students wrote posts related to education. Well that doesn’t bode well for the library Facebook pages. What is even more distressing for all who have Facebook pages is “78% of people who “like” brands on Facebook like fewer than 10 brands.” (SEO Inc.) So, competition is a bit rough to be among the 10 liked pages, but it is even more difficult when you learn that some social media pundits believe that more than 80% of fans do NOT return to the fan pages once they have clicked “like.” YIKES! Most people are getting their news and interacting from their own newsfeeds.
This brings up a whole other can of worms. Facebook does interesting things with their news feeds. With news feeds, timing is everything. People in general don’t like to scroll, so you need to know when your users are most likely to login to their Facebook accounts to see your news feed. Additionally, Facebook treats scheduled posts differently than ones that are unscheduled. Facebook wants things to be timely, it considers scheduled posts from sites like HootSuite to be less timely therefore less relevant and your post then gets squooshed together with other items in the news feed.
The good news is that you don’t have post something every freaking day on Facebook to get good engagement. According to Sysmos, the average wall post (by administrators) is every 15.7 days, and for pages with more than a million fans one wall post is created every 16.1 days.
“Unlike on Twitter, where popularity is correlated with how many times you Tweet, Facebook fan pages tend to be updated only once every 16 days. And that’s really the big difference between Facebook fans and Twitter followers. On Twitter, you follow someone because you want to hear what they have to say. On Facebook, you fan them just to show your support of affinity.” (TechCrunch)
Librarians have been traditionally talking about the fact they have a Facebook page and how many fans they have, as if by mere fact that somebody slapped up a page they are automatically engaging their users. But really is Facebook really where we should be if we are looking to engage our users? Given the small number of fans, the poor response rate, and our inability to post something interesting or relevant to our users, perhaps there other things we need to consider focusing on. We need to be in the business of engaging our users, not building a site where people just fan us to show their support.
The Medical Library Association’s National Program Committee has been calling and contacting companies to see if they would like to be a sponsor for the 2012 meeting in Seattle. These meetings are valuable to librarians and many who attend either make crucial decisions or help make decisions regarding resources for their libraries. Our members realize it is important to stay in personal contact with exhibitors, and they value the time they spend in the exhibit area at our meeting. In the words of one attendee: “MLA is the one time I can meet face to face with vendors I currently purchase goods and services from, as well as meet face to face with vendors with whom I am interested in purchasing goods and services from.” MLA members also value and appreciate the support exhibitors bring to the meeting.
In today’s world, organizations face increasing changes to our game and ever growing accountability. MLA hopes you will grow your opportunities by supporting our meeting and maximizing your company’s exposure with our members. Your support enhances our meeting’s quality and depth You will find numerous opportunities for contributing to the success of our meeting on the accompanying pledge form, http://www.mlanet.org/am/am2012/pdf/mla12_sponsor_form.pdf
If you have been a sponsor of the Medical Library Association’s annual meeting in the past or you are company that wants to reach out to medical librarians and participate in the meeting, you should consider sponsoring the meeting in 2012.
Now is the time to act if you want your company’s name or logo in the program.
Next week, the Medical Library Association’s Preliminary Program for the 2012 annual meeting goes to the printers. For any sponsorship pledge over $12,000 received by Friday, December 9, 2011, it is still possible to add your corporate logo to the cover of the MLA ’12 preliminary program. The preliminary program goes out to approximately 5,000 potential attendees. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the MLA NPC co-chairs before Friday to get in the program.
Other opportunities are available to be a sponsor.
We understand that the timing might not work out and you might not know how much you can sponsor before Friday. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other opportunities. Check out MLA’s sponsorship form for a list of other items you can sponsor such as WiFi for the meeting (would be greatly appreciated by attendees), meals, meetings, and other events.
What do you get in return for your support?
Additional rewards you can receive are based on your sponsorship level:
We look forward to seeing you at MLA ’12 and thank you in advance for your remarkable support and hopefully, helping us hit a grand slam home run at the annual meeting!
Remember if you want to sponsor a specific program or activity it is first come first serve so you you will want to ensure your first choice by faxing the pledge form to MLA headquarters at (312) 419-8950. Don’t forget if you want to get into the Preliminary Program we need your pledge form before Friday!
You snooze you will lose because today is the absolute last day that you can vote on the 2012-2013 MLA President Elect, MLA Board Members and MLA Nominating Committee.
You must vote by tonight, December 6, 11:59 central time. Make your voice and vote count! View the official candidate information. The President Elect candidate Q&A and Board Member candidate Q&A are available on the Connections blog. Go to https://www.directvote.net/MLA/ and use the login information provided via email. For technical support (available Monday–Friday 8:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m. central time) call 952.974.2339 or email. If you have other questions, please contact Carla J. Funk, CAE, at MLA headquarters.
If you haven’t voted, please vote. Take some time to look through the candidates and select the person that you feel will move MLA in the direction you think it should go. Even though the Nominating Committee candidates don’t have a Q&A that you can view, look at the people and do a little digging to find out a little bit about them. I think the Nominating Committee is one of the most important elected positions because they are the people who look through the entire MLA membership to find the candidates for President and the Board that you will vote on next year. They are helping to shape MLA in the candidates they choose for next year.
The National Library of Medicine has launched its YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/nlmnih. The channel will allows unregistered users to watch videos and registered users to post videos of lectures, training, special events NLM exhibitions, public service announcements, and more.
If your hospital doesn’t block YouTube you can subscribe to be notified whenever new content is posted.
Ok I have a stupid question for somebody who knows more than I do in IT. Many insitutions block YouTube but allow streaming of educational, medical, or work related videos on educational or medical sites (basically not YouTube sites). Is it possible to block YouTube in general but to allow access to specfic channels, like the NLM channel, on YouTube?
As a hospital librarian who is asked to look for videos of surgical procedures, techniques, exercises, etc. I have to say A LOT of good stuff is posted on YouTube by college medical centers. But because it is on YouTube I can’t see it. I can only do the search and then tell the person how I did the search to retrieve the results so that they can view the videos at home (or on a 3G device that has wifi disabled). I realize there is a lot of junk on YouTube…but there is a lot of good stuff like the NLM and NIH channel. So is there any way to block general YouTube but allow a channel? Just curious.