Attendees
Arthur Downing, Robert Drzewicki, Stephen Francoeur, Ryan Phillips
Mobile Phones
We looked at a report from Gartner that predicted sales of mobile phones with touchscreens are expected to rise 97 percent in 2010. We also wondered if we were able to track how many visitors to the library’s website came there on mobile devices. There is some data to that effect in our library’s website statistics if you look at what browsers and operating systems were used by site visitors, but the data isn’t as complete as we’d hoped it might be. We also talked about how much we know about the extent to which Baruch students have adopted the latest cell phone technology.
Ebooks and Ebook Readers
After looking at a graphic from the New York Times comparing the “economics of producing a book” in print vs. electronic, we had a discussion of our school’s Kindle experiment and what we might do with the Kindles after the semester is over. One idea that was floated was what it might mean were we to load public domain editions of books that are required reading in undergraduate courses (especially ones that are part of the general education curriculum).
We watched a video from Flat World Knowledge about their “open textbooks” that can be freely read online as well as purchased as a file download or a print-on-demand book.
Video Collections
We looked at the way that the Z. Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University has created a “Toolkit” site where screencasts are collected. Each video offers an embed code, making it easy for instructors and librarians to deploy the videos on course websites, course blogs, etc. The embed codes are for the hosted webservice where the video file actually resides (YouTube, etc.). It doesn’t appear that the videos are locally hosted on the Toolkit site.
We also browsed the collection of screencasts that have been uploaded to our library’s YouTube account.
AWStats, the software we currently use, groups some mobile browsers with all other “unknown browsers”. Regarding a another software, Peter told me:
“we could potentially switch to Google Analytics which provides this sort of tracking. Actually, we could use both simultaneously. The only downside is that the analytics tracking is tied to a google account and held on their servers”