Indeed, one of Elsevier’s prototypes seems more fitting for high school or undergrad classroom discussions, especially if they were to take into account Lagendijk’s points about context.

Credit: RT @atmire: RT @jimtill: #OpenAccess Elsevier going the wrong way: http://bit.ly/D16Am

I’ve had the privilege of hanging out with Mark Diggory a bit as well as other  DSpace cohorts and some of the Fedora guys.  The comaradie between the Fedora and DSpace folks is encouraging. It’s a relief to know that I’m not the only one that admires Fedora’s content model and wonders why DSpace should try to reinvent that with it’s “2.0″ vision versus adopting Fedora as a storage and web services layer and benefiting from a shared developer base.  As one of the Fedora stakeholders put it, we could really turn the heat up on Microsoft by taking advantage of the best of both platforms.

Community Source and Open Source software development is thriving in the academic space.  Collaborate or die!

I’ll be posting my notes from JA-SIG 2008 over the next couple of days.  They’ll be raw, probably incoherent and fraught with errors, but there you are.

Recently, a Medlib-er asked for examples of how medical librarians were using Microsoft Sharepoint. The majority of respondants said they had created sites or pages for their library in Sharepoint, duplicating the usual stuff found on library web sites: ILL forms, links to the public catalog, and other sites – essentially reconstructing the library’s public web site in the Intranet, or even just linking to it.

I don’t mean to disparage the efforts of my cohort. Hospital and corporate librarians tend to be lone rangers with little time, resources, and permission to push the envelope. At least they did something. I’m convinced, though, that we can do better than that.

At the academic medical campus where I work, we’ve had a (non-Sharepoint) staff and student portal for some time. The library has worked closely with developers to incorporate some library services into the portal. From my brief experience, though, University staff only pay attention to the portal every two weeks when it’s time to print their timesheets. Students visit maybe a little more frequently to check their campus accounts. Ultimately, though, there’s no reason for anyone to visit the portal in order to get work done.

Sharepoint, as collaboration space, I hope will be different. My goal is to insert library services into the flow of work and study. Not in a “hey, look at us” or “eat your spinach” kind of way, but invisibly and naturally. I’ve spent a little time envisioning how we might accomplish that. I hope to spend a lot more time over the next year.
Here are my early thoughts:
Identify the stages and flow of research, work, and study on campus that might take place in Sharepoint.
Find areas where there’s been an observable, neglected need and suggest how the library might help, eg. metadata, text analysis, categorization, training.
Build small, modular web parts, connectors, and widgets that faculty, staff, and students can include in their own spaces.
Don’t make people come to the Library’s Sharepoint site to do something.
Don’t waste time recreating the Library’s web site in Sharepoint.
Don’t just link to the web site.
Share openly.
I got some serendipitous affirmation and inspiration today while following up on a medical student’s request. Upon entering med school, our medical students receive digital versions of recommended textbooks. This student wanted to know, reasonably enough, if there was an add-on for incorporating Stedman’s Medical Dictionary (which he already owned in digital copy) into Microsoft Word or, even better, OneNote – a popular tablet pc notetaking application among our students [1].

While searching for available options, I ran across a presentation by Carl Nolan, head of the medical research services project involving Microsoft and NHS.  Here’s an excerpt from an article by Microsoft:

Microsoft has invested £40 million in the Common User Interface programme – a series of projects to help the NHS get the most out of its IT investment. One of these projects has been looking for ways to build medical research services into the software that NHS staff already use every day.

These are exactly the kinds of services I would like to see us implement at KUMC. I hope they’re sharing.

Note: What I ultimately found was that for $100 you can buy the Stedman’s Medical Spellchecker which adds a custom dictionary to MS Office apps. But that’s only spellchecking. What if I want to look up the definition of a new term? Ideally, I’d want the spellchecking dictionary feature wrapped into a single service-package with the full dictionary available in the Research Services Task Pane. Instead, both Microsoft and LWW make seem to make that impossible.

The annual Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the NMC’s Horizon Project, a research-oriented effort that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within higher education….

The core of the report describes six areas of emerging technology that will impact higher education within three adoption horizons over the next one to five years. To identify these areas, the project draws on an ongoing conversation among knowledgeable persons in the fields of business, industry, and education; on published resources, current research and practice; and on the expertise of the NMC and ELI communities….

Learn more about the Horizon Project and contribute to future editions at http://horizon.nmc.org/wiki/Main_Page.  NMC is a community of hundreds of leading universities, colleges, museums, and research centers exploring the use of media and emerging technologies in higher education.