Is it online, digital or electronic information? mine Google data to find out

I love playing around with new Web tools. This week I had a look at the new Google Books Ngram Viewer which is a tool for comparative analysis of word usage. Google Books Ngram Viewer lets you enter words and phrases and then it does an analysis and displays a graph showing how often those words phrases have occurred. The data set being interrogated is a particular corpus of books on Google Books generated in July 2009.

We often have discussions about the terms: "online information", "electronic information" and "digital information". When you do a comparative analysis of those three phrases on Google Books Ngram Viewer from 1940 onwards, you get the graphs above, showing that "electronic information" (red line), is the most commonly used term, followed by digital information" (green line), while "online information" (blue line) has definitely plateaued.

Here are a few blog posts explaining more about the new tool: The Google Books Ngram Viewer from +Datavisualization.CH and Charting the Epic Battle of “Geek” vs. “Nerd”

Will this sort of analysis will be a boon for linguistics' scholars, or will it just remain a fun tool to explore?

ANDS, data management and libraries

Slides from my presentation this week to library staff on ANDS (the Australian National Data Service) and data management and libraries.

ANDS and Data Management

View more presentations from Julia Gross.

Slides from data management roadshow in Bath

Our university is about to commence an ANDS Seeding the Commons project on research data management.

These slides look very relevant to what we will be embarking upon.

Facing the Data Challenge: Institutions, Disciplines, Services and Risks

View more presentations from LizLyon.

23 Things program, follow up article published

The Electronic Library (TEL) has just published our follow up article on the 23 Things program at our library. It seems like it has been a long time coming. We submitted it in early 2009, but there were many other articles in the pipeline at TEL, so we had to wait.

Thanks to my co-author, Lyn Leslie, and all involved.

The full citation:
Julia Gross, Lyn Leslie, (2010) "Learning 2.0: a catalyst for library organisational change", Electronic Library, The, Vol. 28 Iss: 5, pp.657 - 668

Abstract:
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe “what happened” with round two of the implementation of Learning 2.0 with a large and diverse group of library staff at Edith Cowan University (ECU) Library during 2007/2008.

Design/methodology/approach – A previous paper reported on a study of the suitability of the 23 Things Learning 2.0 program for a small group of early adopters in the ECU Library. This follow-up paper reports challenges that library management faced when the remaining staff were given the 23 Things Learning 2.0 program. All remaining library staff members were encouraged to undertake the program, but take-up was not strong and only 25 per cent of staff completed the program. At the conclusion of round two of Learning 2.0, all staff were surveyed to find out reasons for completion or non-completion, what types of technologies they needed support with, and how they wished to learn about the emerging/Web 2.0 technologies.

Findings – From the observations and survey responses in this study it was found that while Learning 2.0 was a suitable program, some staff required extra time and a more hands-on approach to their workplace learning.

Originality/value – The paper is unique in that it follows up on previous research at the same institution, and reveals new findings.

DOI
10.1108/02640471011081942

The Electronic Library is one of the Emerald Insight journals: www.emeraldinsight.com

Sharing a Google Doc

This year with our 2010 Book Club votes I have decided to share it on the Web as a Google doc. Here it is above with the embedded code. Google also makes a separate web page version for shared docs and also gives you a link to the doc on the Web. The doc contains our votes for 2010 rating the books from 1-7.

Story telling using Make Beliefs Comix

The October digital story telling challenge was started by RestructureGirl in her blog post. For Week 4 of I have done a comic using MakeBeliefsComix.com

The key to story telling is to simply your message and get the story told in a few images. Comics are good for that in that you can pick characters, change their mood and gestures and add text as words or thought bubbles.

I can see many applications in a library setting, even in academic libraries. The story is told in my comic is aimed at postgraduate students promoting our library's open access repository and the comic is called How does you research find an audience ?

The direct link to it is:
http://www.makebeliefscomix.com/Comix/?comix_id=20368245C324795

You can't save this work on their website, but have to print a copy, do a screen capture or email the link. It's dead easy to do one.

Joan Sutherland tribute using Google Search Stories

For a wrap up of Week 2 in the October Show and Tell, digital story telling challenge go to Restructuregirl's latest blog post.

The digital story telling challenge was organised by Restructuregirl I'm having some fun with it!

It's now up to Week 3. This week I had a go at Google Search Stories Video Creator, which is available on a YouTube channel. The final video story gets uploaded to YouTube.

It's straightforward once you nut out a story sequence. Essentially you tell a story using a combination of Google searches. Start by getting the script down and then decide if you want the search to be of: text, images, maps, blogs, books etc. Then choose the music. The choice of music is pretty ordinary, but I settled on some cello music they list under "Drama". Of course the whole deal results in shameless advertising for Google, but you can have some fun with it!

I can see an educational use for this and I'm sure you could turn it into something related to learning and information skills.

So this is my little tribute to "our Joanie", world famous Australian soprano, Joan Sutherland who died this week, 12 October 2010. If this video is not the best quality when embedded in the blog, try going to YouTube direct for my Tribute to Joan Sutherland.