Bibliocycle

The Oliver Wendell Holmes Library not only strives to meet the needs of our users, we also aim to anticipate those needs. Consequently, we have been staying abreast of recent developments in electronic books, and cautiously experimenting with e-reader devices and materials. Currently we have two Amazon Kindles and a Barnes and Noble Nook. One of the Kindles is a “first generation” model, and is available for loan to interested faculty and staff. The other is a Kindle DX (the large version) and is dedicated to our online subscription to The Boston Globe. It is available for use in the library by any member of the community.

E-reading devices have recently been getting a lot of publicity, and while e-books still make up a small percentage of total books sold, the “adoption curve” is increasing steeply. The devices claim to offer a reading experience comparable to that of a book, with several advantages. The first advantage is that they offer instant gratification. Many e-reading devices connect to electronic bookstores via 3G cell phone networks, without any monthly charge for that service. Therefore, obtaining content is as easy as searching for a title and pressing a button. Another advantage is portability. The devices are able to hold hundreds of titles, which certainly simplifies packing for a long trip. Finally, it is possible to instantly re-size the font, even while reading. That advantage alone has won the loyalty of middle aged readers.

The newest addition to our e-reader inventory is our Nook. From our perspective, the Nook has several advantages over the Kindle. First, it uses the ePub format, which is becoming a standard, rather than the Kindle’s proprietary format. Consequently, it may be used to offer thousands of public domain materials. Second, it “works” with Overdrive, the leading supplier of electronic books to libraries. We anticipate being able to offer a set of titles through Overdrive in the near future. Third, it permits materials to be “shared” from one Nook to another. This is a critical feature from the perspective of libraries, and is not possible with the Kindle.
But how does it stack up against a “regular” book in terms of the “reading experience?” To answer that question, I undertook to read a book on the Nook.

The Nook is a slim, lightweight device about the size of a small paperback book. It has an uncluttered face with a two-part screen. The upper screen features e-ink and serves as the reading area. The lower, smaller screen is a full-color touch screen, and serves for navigation. I deliberately did not read the manual, as I wanted to determine how easy it would be to use the reader. It was entirely intuitive. A “sleeping” Nook presents a digitized portrait of a literary luminary, and you are prompted to press a button to “wake up” the Nook. Once it is activated, the navigation screen presents four icons, and allows you to go immediately to your book in progress. If you are only reading one book, it returns you to the screen where you left off. If you are reading two or more books, you simply set bookmarks so that you can return to the right screen.

E-ink, as advertised, provides a pleasant reading experience. It would be easy to forget that you are reading on a device if the Nook had a book-like cover that permitted you to hold it like a book. Instead, it is a bit like holding a large cell phone. While that is a bit disconcerting to me, since I have considerable muscle-memory devoted to the book-holding position, it is unlikely to faze younger readers.

The navigation within a book is entirely simple. Buttons at the level of your thumbs allow you to “turn the page” with either hand. Other buttons permit backtracking, but they are positioned so as to minimize accidental use. While there is an instant delay as the screen refreshes, it is probably no more disruptive than turning a physical page. I am now 2/3 of the way through a book that was originally printed in 384 pages, and I have not had to recharge the battery. The book that I am reading electronically cost the OWHL $9.99. The print copy retails for $25.95, and the audio download is priced at $29.70. We have purchased both the e-book version and the audio book version. So far, we haven’t purchased the print version.

As our collection development policy evolves to encompass these new formats, we would very much like to hear from members of the PA community regarding your interests and preferences.

It’s no surprise that librarians are voracious readers. Just in time for spring break, we thought that we would share with you some of the books that we are currently reading or have recently read and enjoyed.

Stephanie recommends The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett. True crime meets bibliophilic lust in this shocking story about a con artist obsessed with building a world-class collection of first edition books. Get a behind the scenes look at the antiquarian book world – Bartlett spins a very readable narrative from a decade-long string of thefts in library archives, bookstores and rare book auction houses.

Celeste is reading a book that came highly recommended – The Help, by Kathryn Stockett. This first novel gradually climbed onto the best seller lists after its publication last year, and has remained there. Set in Jackson, Miss. In 1962, at the beginning of the civil rights movement, it tells the story of a time when “black women were trusted to raise white children but not to polish the household silver.”This book is also available in our collection as a downloadable audiobook.

I am enjoying The Man from Beijing by Henning Mankell, which I am reading on the OWHL’s Nook. The book begins with a massacre in the remote Swedish village of Hesjövallen and ultimately spans three continents and 140 years. The sympathetic protagonist, Judge Birgitta Roslin, is only tangentially involved in the case, but tenaciously pursues complex clues that she believes the police have overlooked. Battling health problems and a failing marriage, Roslin’s quest to find the truth becomes deeply personal.  This book is also available in our colelction as a downloadable audiobook.  I’ll be done with the book before the break, so stop by the OWHL if you are interested in borrowing the Nook.

Sara is planning to read the latest book by one of her favorite authors, Nick Hornby.  Juliet Naked received  a starred review from Publisher’s weekly, proclaiming that   Hornby has returned to his roots with “music, manic fandom and messy romance in his funny and touching latest, dancing between three perspectives on fame: a sycophantic scholar, an appreciative audience member, a fabled singer-songwriter who can’t see what all the fuss is about.”

Susan is reading a non-fiction book by an Andover Author. Loon: A Marine Story by Jack McLean. “In Loon, McLean takes readers from Andover’s privileged campus, to the infamous Marine Corps boot camp at Parris Island, to the battle at Landing Zone Loon in the rugged hills along Vietnam’s Laotian border. During that period, Jack transformed from a sheltered boy, into a Marine, and ultimately into one of a handful of survivors of a horrific three-day assault during some of the heaviest fighting of the Vietnam War.” (Review at Amazon.com)

With the passing of JD Sallinger this past year, interest has revived in his iconic work, The Catcher in the Rye.  The OWHL is happy to announce that thanks to the generous support of Chelsea House Publishing, we are able to offer unlimited free access during the month of March to a book of full length critical essays devoted to J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye from the series Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations. Edited by master scholar and Yale University Professor Harold Bloom, this comprehensive study guide presents a selection of the best current criticism and includes:
•    Critical essays reflecting a variety of schools of criticism
•    Notes on the contributing critics, a chronology of the author’s life, and a bibliography
•    Introductory essay by Harold Bloom.
We hope that this book will  tempt you to explore our extensive eBook collection.  J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye: Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations will be provided with free, unlimited access March 1-31, 2010. You can get access to the book on or off campus by following the link to NetLibrary from the A to Z resource list on the library web site.

I am a creature of habits, one of which is an addiction to the daily newspaper.  I have therefore spent already considerable time mourning  the inevitable demise of printed newspapers.  While I have long been aware that most newspapers, including my paper-of-choice, the New York Times are available online, I have indulged myself by subscribing to home delivery of the printed version.  It has always been enormously gratifying to sit on my sunny porch with a cup of coffee and the Sunday Times.  I rationalized the expense on the grounds that die-hard readers like myself have to be willing to support the news, or it will disappear.  Free is not a sustainable model for investigative journalism.

Recently, two things happened that made me reconsider my devotion to the printed paper.  The first has to do with weather in New England.  The paper is delivered at about 5:30 am, when it is still dark.  There is frequently snow on the driveway, making it really difficult to find a flat white object wrapped in a clear plastic bag.  The second occurred as a result of my need to spend some time this winter in Georgia on some family business.  I was forced to feed my newspaper addiction online.  Because I am a home delivery subscriber, I was able to read the paper using the Times Reader 2.0 for free.

I was hooked by the second day.  I am not sure exactly when the paper is available each morning, but I am an early riser, and it was always waiting for me.  I quickly learned to like the interface.  It is entirely user-friendly, and it subtly changed the way that I read the paper.  With the print version, in order to avoid the minor inconvenience of flipping through sections, I would “start” all of the articles on the front page, and then “pick up” the rest of each article as I came to it.  Using the Reader, I could easily read the entire article before moving on to the next. My aging eyes loved the fact that it is possible to instantly change the font size.  And when I wanted to send a particular article to a friend, it was a one-click process.  There are ads in the Reader, but they didn’t both me.

I have been back home a couple of weeks now, but I haven’t gone out early in the morning to try to find our paper in the dark.  I have been content to continue reading it online.  I am ready to make the economically indisputable and environmentally sound next step and give up home delivery ($14.60/week) in favor of a subscription via the Reader ($3.45/week.)   My only obstacle is convincing my somewhat technophobic husband that the future has already arrived.

Last fall, Scott McLeod of the Dangerously Irrelevant blog posted the following rhetorical question:

What constitutes a “book” these days? When books become electronic and thus become searchable, hyperlinkable, more accessible to readers with disabilities, and able to embed audio, video, and interactive maps and graphics, at what point do they stop becoming “books” and start becoming something else?

I was thinking of this during the past week, when I came across a book that was difficult to catalog.  At the OWHL we don’t have a designated Tech Services librarian who does all of the new materials cataloging.  Rather, the Instructional Services (IS) librarians each select materials for their associated academic departments, and we abtain OCLC catalog records through our consortium.  The IS team “enhances” the records of these materials when they are received, adding subject headings, contents notes, and other access points that we know will be useful to our students.

Last week I was working on the book -  Give my poor heart ease: voices of the Mississippi Blues. This printed book of interviews comes with a CD of music and a DVD of videos related to the content.  My dilemma was that our ILS constrained me to choose a single “material type” for the item.  Because it is a printed book, the logical material type is “book.”  The problem is that students doing a catalog search for books on the blues might find it, but if they really wanted a music CD of Mississippi Blues (and wisely limited their search to CDs) they would not find it.  Nor was it clear to me how anyone would ever find the video.  We run automated lists of new materials to direct people to new CDs and new DVDs, but those lists rely upon the material type indicator to allocate new materials to the appropriate list.  Under the current system, nothing can appear on multiple lists. This might change under our new open source ILS, but not soon enough to solve my current problem.

We decided to create three records for the item–one each for the print book, the CD, and the DVD.  They will be shelved so as to maximize the potential for discovery, and each item will reference the other “parts.”  The inelegant solution got me thinking about a future time in which the original “book” is not printed, but is digital.  An electronic full-text book could be seamlessly associated with its digital parts.  In the current case, for instance, you could read an essay and then immediately stream the associated video clip or listen to an MP3 of the music.  Now that would be user-centered access!

I have always been a lover of printed books, but I am not so naive as to suspect that they will be with us forever.  There are just too many ways in which electronic access can offer a better experience.  And the proliferation of excellent e-readers, smart phones, and hybrid notebook computers means that the “reading” experience doesn’t have to be compromised.

So what is a book?  For me, the essential element is the content rather than the delivery system.  As we move into this exciting new world of electronic resources, I believe that reading will be enhanced rather than diminished.  In the meantime, the OWHL will continue to work hard to assure that our readers discover all of the materials that they need to explore all of the questions they have.

For the past few years the OWHL has had a Student Advisory Committee. Students are our most important constituency, and we realized that if we wanted to continually improve our program, we needed to understand what spaces, resources, and services they needed and wanted. We had been periodically convening student focus groups, but established a standing committee in order to obtain input from the same group of students over the course of the year. I was able to arrange for the SAC to count as the students’ mandatory work duty, so recruitment was not difficult. We are able to get a balance of students by gender, graduation year, and boarding and day. We deliberately sought both library users and non-users, and we invited some students whose behavior had been particularly challenging. The input from the SAC has been invaluable.

This year, instead of having regular weekly group meetings, we are experimenting with a different format for the committee. Each student has selected a time for “work duty” and is matched with a librarian partner. Each week we develop a task for each student to do with supervision by the librarian. They have conducted usability studies of our online catalog and other electronic resources, helped us select citation software, solicited input from their friends on topics of interest to us, participated in a trial of an online information literacy assessment, and completed an extensive survey of their use of technology. The students are pleased to be working one-on-one with their partner librarians, and we have learned a lot about how our students approach real research. They have provided us with insights that we have used to make changes in our web site, our “marketing” of resources, and the arrangement of our space. The students on our SAC all have social networks. It is our hope that they will share what they have learned with their friends. We have some preliminary evidence that this is true. We recently accelerated the purchase of a new citation tool because it was the clear favorite in a head-to-head competition with our existing product. We had arranged for our SAC to test the new tool, but the outcry when the trial was over came from many students NOT on the SAC who had been directed to the trial by their friends!

In subsequent posts, I’ll describe some of the specific tasks that we gave to the students, and summarize our results.

The Procrastinator’s Guide to Getting Things Done.   By Monica Ramirez Basco

Are you a procrastinator?  Then this month’s free e-book is for you.  Expressly designed for people who want to make changes but don’t want an elaborate self-help program, this guide is packed with highly practical tips and suggestions.
The book is full of anecdotes and tips from “recovering procrastinators.” Inviting quizzes, exercises, and practical suggestions help you:
•    Understand why you procrastinate.
•    Start with small changes that lead to big improvements.
•    Outsmart your own delaying tactics.
•    Counteract self-doubt and perfectionism.
•    Build crucial skills for getting things done today.

Click on the book jacket to access the book.  Stop by the OWHL with questions.

The OWHL is proud to announce our participation in a literacy initiative of South Africa Partners. We have purchased and are displaying a collection of 25 children’s books written and illustrated by South Africans, which “exhibit literary excellence, and incorporate themes of justice, hope, and renewal.” For each book purchased in the United States, SA Partners donates a book in the purchaser’s name to a school in South Africa. The OWHL’s participation means that a set of the books will be given to the library in a rural school.  The  colorful and engaging books are written in English, and will appeal to young readers both here and in South Africa.

The goals of the Masifunde Sonke book project are to:

• Increase literacy and a joy of reading among students in rural and township public schools in South Africa
• Foster an appreciation of South African children’s books in the United States
• Facilitate contact and exchanges between South African and U.S. schools, educators, and learners
• Stimulate economic development in South Africa through purchasing books directly from South African publishers

Stop by the OWHL to see our display of the books.  Check one out to read with your own children.  And when you are choosing holiday gifts, consider a purchase of one or more of these books. 

It is the end of the term at the Academy, and students are having assessments all week. They are tired, anxious, and generally stressed. Sometimes the smallest of gestures can go a long way towards lifting their spirits. I observed such a gesture this morning. For the third year in a row, there was a little exam magic. When I arrived at the library at 7:00am, there was a bathtub in front of the door, filled with a selection of soda. Despite the fact that we don’t allow soda in the library, it made me smile.

Endurance Sports Nutrition

Are you an athlete who is looking for an edge when competing? Are you a coach who is looking for ways to guide your team in eating well? Even if you are not a competitive athlete, the consumption of high-quality food is inextricably linked to success in athletic (and academic) endeavors. Eating to optimize performance is the subject of OWHL’s current book display on Sports Nutrition. Stop by and check it out!