Can You Hear Me Now? Social Listening as a Strategy for Understanding User Needs

Maintaining regular engagement with audiences through various forms of social media is becoming more important as library users and the general public increasingly rely on social media for news, updates, and feedback. While large corporations have been monitoring social media for more than a decade, libraries have recently begun to use social listening to stay abreast of trends and assess user needs as voiced directly by their communities. This column will explain what social listening is, explore concerns over its widespread application, consider examples of social media listening software currently available, and offer an overview of its application in library settings.     

Are You Who You Say You Are?

Abstract

A growing yet unresolved problem in access services today is controlling user access to resources in a networked environment. This paper describes the history of network authentication, explores the issues involved in selecting an authentication method, discusses the benefits and drawbacks of the various methods, identifies efforts by some integrated library services vendors and academic institutions to address this problem, and makes recommendations for selecting an authentication scheme for a college library. The discussions are based in part upon the results of a survey conducted with California community college libraries, various integrated library system vendors, and online resource companies. Technical terms are defined in a glossary.     

Now What?

Abstract

Moving from graduate school into an academic reference position can be a difficult transition. A new environment, a variety of new people and the challenge of meeting expectations can quickly become overwhelming. This article reviews the pertinent literature and relates the relevant experiences of two reference librarians during their first three years in professional positions. Topics addressed include: reference service, collection development, committee work, relating to faculty and colleagues, professional development and understanding set procedures while striving to be innovative in the workplace.     

“Now We Can Talk”

This paper explores debate within Puerto Rico's journalistic community regarding the journalistic role of La Comay, a full-sized puppet host of the popular information and entertainment show SuperXclusivo, which faced a boycott in late 2012 and cancelation in early 2013. Calls to boycott and shutter the daily TV show came from the island's LGBT advocates because of comments made by La Comay that they considered homophobic. This analysis of 58 texts from four of Puerto Rico's island-wide news outlets provides an opportunity to examine how a region's dominant cultural archetype—that of the motherly and controversial comadre, after which La Comay is named—appeared in boundary work conducted by local journalists as they determined whether La Comay should have been awarded journalistic status. This paper is not meant to be yet another examination of satirical journalism as much as it is a chance to explore the appearance of a region's culture in the construction or maintenance of its journalistic community.     

And You Thought That You Couldn't Publish a Book?

Abstract

The author describes her experiences in compiling and editing a book of contributed chapters, titled The Successful Academic Librarian. The process includes writing the book proposal, finding contributors, editing their work, and working with the publisher. A timeline of the process is presented, and the challenges and rewards of the project are discussed.     

Have You Heard?

This study seeks to understand “listening” as a practice and norm of journalism in the context of an eruption of journalistic discourse about listening surrounding the 2016 US election. An examination of US journalists’ own discourse about listening pointed to an understanding of the need to listen more, better, and to a more diverse set of voices. The widespread criticism of journalism’s performance frequently pointed to failures of listening as a root cause of the more general failure to adequately cover the campaign. Thus, listening involved a set of skills, but was also sometimes construed as a moral obligation. Overall, however, the discourse showed an anemic understanding of listening, often pointing to the public’s inability to listen to journalists.     

Electronic Copyright Rights: Do You Have What You Need?

Publishing agreements have long operated with certain assumptions about what books are and what publishers do. These assumptions are increasingly at odds with the new technological forms in which books are created and marketed, from e-books and Kindle 2 read-aloud works to so-called “vooks” that incorporate on-demand streaming video and other internet-based features in conjunction with hard copy books. Publishers’ contracts need to be re-thought in light of these changed circumstances. Specifically, publishing contracts today should focus on the activities in which the publisher may engage, and not the form in which the work may be presented, a point that was made clear several years ago in the Random House v. RosettaBooks litigation. In defining these activities, contracts should track the language of the exclusive rights enumerated in §106 of the Copyright Act. Finally, to the extent that books are becoming “audiovisual works” publishers may be able to shift to a work-made-for-hire model for obtaining ownership, rather than relying on grants from individual authors.     

You Can Lead Students to Sources,but Can You Make Them Think?

ABSTRACT

In developing and teaching a new first-year psychology course that integrates information literacy skills, a librarian and a psychologist learned the importance of teaching critical thinking skills explicitly, rather than implicitly. Students learned how to use the library resources and learned concepts in psychology, but until critical thinking was taught explicitly, students did not understand the value of what they were learning. In this article, implicit versus explicit learning is defined, and psychological principles are applied to demonstrate how critical thinking can be used to teach library and information skills.     

You Tube：广播你自己

2006年5、6月间，一个由一位香港人用手机拍的视频短片《巴士阿叔》在网上传播开来之后，一时间成为中文网络世界的最大热点，这个视频的点击率扶摇直上，短短时间居然超过500万。这件事情甚至引起了美联社、纽约时报、英国卫报等著名媒体的关注，也让提供这个视频存放的网站YouTube在中国网民中迅速窜红。     

Are You Talking to Me?

Social media has become a key medium for discussion and dissemination of news stories, fuelled by the low barrier to entry and the ease of interaction. News stories may be propagated through these networks either by official news organisation accounts, by individual journalists or by members of the public, through link sharing, endorsing or commenting. This preliminary research aims to show how computational analysis of large-scale data-sets allows us to investigate the means by which news stories are spread through social media, and how the conversation around them is shaped by journalists and news organisations. Through the capture of more than 11 million tweets relating to 2303 Twitter accounts connected to journalism and news organisations, we are able to analyse the conversation within and around journalism, examining who spreads information about news articles and who interacts in the discussion around them. Capturing the tweets of news organisations and journalists and the replies and retweets of these micro-blogs allows us to build a rich picture of interaction around news media.     

We Ning-ed a Virtual Pre-Workshop: Now What?

In 2009, a group of instruction-minded librarians in Oklahoma added unconference-like elements to their usual workshop structure and agenda to make their workshop more participatory and attendee-driven. The result was a virtual pre-workshop hosted on a Ning social networking site. The virtual pre-workshop enhanced the actual physical workshop in several ways. The group's new challenge: where to host its new pre-workshop format without Ning and how to gear the new format to be more mobile friendly while not excluding non-mobile interested workshop participants.     

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苹果电脑公司免费提供InstallAnywhere Now!和MRJ SDK

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The Books Are Shelf-Ready; Are You?

Over the past 2 years, shelf-ready services, the outsourcing of cataloging and processing services, has become the hot topic in the library world. This article examines the implications of shelf-ready service, both operationally and organizationally, for both library and vendor. Using the format of a dialog between librarian and vendor, the article discusses the following questions: Why are you interested in contracting for (or providing) these services? What do you hope to gain? What are the stumbling blocks to implementing a shelf-ready program? What is the impact on workflow and staffing in your organization? How many and what kinds of jobs are affected? How do library/vendor responsibilities change when shelf-ready procedures are applied to an approval plan … to firm orders … to standing orders? How can quality control be assured? Which errors really matter? Are the same standards applied to vendor staff as to in-house staff? How are standards affected by shelf-ready? How do both library and vendor know when they’re “ready for shelf-ready” in a given situation?     

“Be All That You Can Be”

Abstract

Library school provides librarians with a good background in library science, but to be a professional reference librarian, continuous improvement must be sought. Professionalism can include developing basic employee skills, supporting library standards, participating in university and library functions; presenting papers; and publishing. Being sensitive to communication skills can impact how a librarian is perceived by library users. Image does play a role in the effectiveness of the library professional.

Professional reference librarians must market themselves by being visible on campus, in the community, and on the Internet. Being a professional librarian is an opportunity for personal growth and educating the public about a very exciting discipline.     

Have You Played the War on Terror?

The media paradigm by which we understand war is increasingly the video game. These changes are not only reflected in the real-time television war, but also an increased collusion between military and commercial uses of video games. The essay charts the border-crossing of video games between military and civilian spheres alongside attendant discourses of war. Of particular interest are the ways that war has been coded as an object of consumer play and how official productions aimed at training and recruitment have cast video games as players themselves in the War on Terror. The essay argues that this crossover has initialized a “third sphere” of militarized civic space where the citizen is supplanted by the figure of the virtual citizen-soldier.     

“Feeling Much Smaller than You Know You Are”: The Fragmented Professional Identity of Female Sports Journalists

Interviews with women working as sports journalists showed that they must negotiate several tensions, including balancing their conflicting identities as woman and as professional journalist. Nevertheless, in the end, they also saw the two as compatible. They fell along a spectrum of resistance to traditional values in sports and journalism, providing evidence of cracks in hegemonic notions of what it means to be a woman covering sports.