October 24-27, 2011

The 3rd annual Open Access Week at the University of Utah brings an exciting line-up of events to campus from a keynote address to a hands-on workshop about mashup skills from the renowned Donald Duck Meets Glenn Beck creator to a panel of experts about digital textbooks. As digital technology and content proliferate, questions of access, copyright, and fair use come to the surface. The week’s events offer an opportunity to explore these new areas of creativity, scholarship, and technology.

Free and Open to the Public.

Schedule of Events

Monday, October 24

Keynote address

LIVE STREAM

Hacking Pop Culture with Remix Video 

Jonathan McIntosh, Rebellious Pixels
11:00 am-12:00 pm, Marriott Library, Gould Auditorium

sponsored by the Department of Communication & the J. Willard Marriott Library

Jonathan McIntosh, a self-proclaimed pop culture hacker, is a video remix artist, new media teacher, fair use activist, and blogger. Best known for his video “Donald Duck Meets Glenn Beck,” Jonathan uses mass media to tell new and different stories grounded in popular culture. As he says it, “Basically I’m a pop culture hacker, but instead of computer code I hack television.” Check out Jonathan’s work at Rebellious Pixels

Tuesday, October 25

Film: rip! Remix Manifesto 

11:30 am to 1 pm, Marriott Library, Gould Auditorium

Workshop: How to Remix and Reuse

presenter: Jonathon McIntosh
1:00-3:00 pm, Marriott Library, Room 1008 (Mac Computer Lab)

register here

sponsored by the Department of Communication & the J. Willard Marriott Library

Interested in learning simple video remixing tools, tricks and techniques? This workshop will present an overview of online and offline remixing apps as well as provide hands-on experience in how to download videos from the web and convert them into easily editable formats. Jonathan will also cover the best practices of fair use when it comes to using copyrighted material in your own work.

Wednesday, October 26

Panel: Free & Open Digital Textbooks? Perspectives on a Possible Future
3:00 pm-4:00 pm, Marriott Library, Room 1150
As textbook prices continue to soar, students rely on several options to get access: rent, find an e-version, buy used, borrow from the library, etc. An additional, affordable, alternative option includes open textbooks. More than just a textbook rental, you can read an open textbook for free online, reuse it in the future, even print your own copy, and faculty can edit & adapt it for a course. This session will provide an overview of textbooks in higher education, the ways campus entities such as the bookstore and library respond to the affordability question, and introduce participants to the open textbook initiative.

Thursday, October 27

Workshop: Publishing SMART

Authors want their scholarly articles to be seen, cited and utilized. This class provides opportunities for researchers to increase their visibility by exploring various publishing and archiving choices. Tools for evaluating journal impact factors, online usage, local online availability, retaining copyrights, and submission to online archives are covered.

Marriott Library staff collected statistics and took photographs to document the library’s impact at the University of Utah and in the community.

This is what the Marriott Library looked like on April 12, 2011: http://www.flickr.com/photos/utahstatelibrary/sets/72157626541621998/

Statistics:

• Total number of hours open to patrons: 19
• Total number of people who visited the library: 8,242
• Total number of items borrowed: 2,138
• Total number of computer logins: 2,062
• Total number of research requests or staff-mediated searches: 102

Types of research requests:

• “Can you help me find Clarence King’s report from the 1870’s about the geological exploration of the fortieth parallel?”
• “I’m looking for journalism textbooks published between 1940 and1960.”
• “I need economic data on China for the past 50 years.”
• “Which databases can I search besides Scientific American for articles about memory?”
• “Can you help me print from an eBook?”

Activities/Programs at the library:

On April 12, the Marriott Library celebrated National Library Workers Day with a special appreciation party for staff. On that day, students from a University of Utah art history class visited the library’s Rare Books Classroom to see and handle facsimiles from the rare books collection. Also, students enrolled in an artists’ book class offered by the library’s Book Arts Program turned in final projects modeled after innovative publishing trends from the 1960′s. Public exhibitions at the library included Herding Cats: The Wild World of Artists’ Books on level 4 and ‘These are my people!’ The Story of Aristides de Sousa Mendes on level 1. That evening, the Friends of the Marriott Library hosted their annual spring banquet featuring Katharine Coles, Utah’s Poet Laureate, novelist, and University of Utah Department of English Professor of Literature and Creative Writing.

Testimonials from library patrons:

• “The Marriott Library offers resources I wouldn’t normally have available to me. The library acts a center for my educational needs and a place where I can gather with other students and learn.”
• “The library is a home away from home when I am on campus all day. I get so much done when I am in the library. It is an inspiring place!”
• “This is the place where I spend most of my time studying and preparing for all my classes because I can concentrate.”

The University of Utah Libraries have embraced QR (‘quick response’) codes as a means of delivering additional information to patrons via their mobile device. QR codes are two dimensional codes that can be scanned with a mobile device’s camera and a reader application to link to various resources such as a URL, application, or video. This presentation will introduce QR codes and explore how they can allow libraries to connect faculty, students and visitors to the information they want at the point of need. The libraries on campus are currently using them to link to Web sites, access digital learning objects, promote classes, and guide users to specific library locations. Participants will learn how to use and create their own QR Codes in class. Come learn about the next generation bar codes and see how they can be useful to you!

Instuctors:

* Anne Morrow, Digital Initiatives Librarian at Marriott Library
* Nancy Lombardo, Information Technology Librarian at Eccles Health Sciences Library

Date: Thursday, March 17, 2011

Time: 2 p.m. – 3 p.m.

Place: Marriott Library 1120

The workshop is free, but please register so the instructors know how many to expect. See you there!

Thursday, February 3, noon – 1:00 p.m.

Fire and Ice – Measuring Antarctica’s Frozen Sea

Cynthia Furse, PhD, U of U Associate VP for Research, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering; Joyce Lin, PhD, NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in Mathematics; and David Lubbers, Senior in Electrical and Computer Engineering

Thursday, February 24, noon – 1:00 p.m.

Looking South: Poems from Antarctica

Katharine Coles, PhD, Utah Poet Laureate, novelist, U of U Professor of English. Dr. Coles was selected to participate in the NSF Antarctica Artists and Writers Program.

Thursday, April 14, noon – 1:00 p.m.

Climate Change and the Melting Polar Ice Caps

Ken Golden, Professor of Mathematics and Adjunct Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Utah. A sea ice and climate expert, Dr. Golden led the NSF sponsored United States research team on this international expedition to study Antarctica’s frozen sea and its role in Earth’s climate.

All lectures are free and open to the public and will be held in the Gould Auditorium, first floor of the Marriott Library.

Messenger of Thought: Treasures from the Rare Middle East Collections

“The pen is the ambassador of intelligence, the messenger of thought, and the interpreter for the mind”
– Islamic writer on calligraphy

If words are the essence of books, the materials used and the technologies developed to write those words are the building blocks of a captured culture. Verbal collaborates with visual, textual with textural, enhancing meaning and inviting intimacy between writer and reader. The arts of the book – papermaking and decorating, calligraphy, illumination, and binding are highly developed in Middle Eastern culture. From ancient times, the written word and the craft of Middle Eastern bookmakers has established law, recorded history and myth, inspired faith, stimulated intellectual exploration, and created bonds between east and west.

The Rare Books Division congratulates the Middle East Center and the Middle East Library on fifty years of supporting and continuing these bonds.

The QR codes generated were designed to explore their use in a wide variety of settings, they included library map, workshops schedule, events schedule, reference desk phone number, catalog search, course reserves, classroom schedule and library website.

I had assumed that the more frequently scanned codes would be the library map, course reserves, searching the catalog, however, this has not proven to be the case.

By far and away the largest number of scans so far have been for library events and the library’s main website.

I can see how it would be completely logical to quickly scan the code for the library website, bring it up on my mobile and navigate to any of the other areas on the go rather than scanning each of their codes.

As far as library events went, I was surprised to find it was a ‘heavy hitter’

– in fact, including library events was pretty much an afterthought made sensible by the need to fill up additional space on the QR code promotion poster.

But, perhaps this should not so easily surprise, maybe this is a signal of our visitors interest in an enhanced library experience? A moment of serendipity, if you will, of going off the beaten path and not knowing the end result.

Whereas most of our QR codes involve known actions (e.g. call the reference desk, search the catalog, find a room), the message we are receiving from the number of hits suggests that an element of the unknown is attractive.

We figure that library event posters should have QR codes themselves, but, is scanning a code that takes you to ‘more about the event advertised on this poster’ really the same thing? If the goal of a visitor is to experience a detour, then maybe that’s how we should be re-thinking use of QR codes.

Thursday, January 27, 2011
12 p.m. – 1 p.m.
Gould Auditorium, J. Willard Marriott Library (see map )

The Friends of the Marriott Library are pleased to feature this lecture in their film series by film historian Molly Creel. Molly’s talk will provide a glimpse of Utah’s forgotten independent film community through the lens of local 16mm virtuoso O.L. “Brig” Tapp and a screening of his award winning 1950 film, “I Walked a Crooked Trail.”

Date: Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Time: 5 p.m. – 6 p.m.
Contact: Judy Jarrow
801-581-3421
Location: Gould Auditorium, Marriott Library – (view map)
Parking: Visitor parking is available on the west side of the Marriott Library
Cost: Free and open to the public

The three available Internships are:

• Scholarly Communications Research
• External Relations
• Research & Learning Services/Special Collections

See link for more information about these internships

The Browsing Collection display for the month of November includes a new feature, using a QR code to connect visitors, via their mobile device, to the tagged list of books included in the display. This is the first of several QR code implementations we’re currently in the process of launching at Marriott Library.

What is a QR code? A QR code is a two-dimensional, or data matrix code designed to be decoded at high speed by mobile devices and smartphones. Generally, QR codes are embedded with a URL, but they can also be used for anything from pushing out phone numbers, text and contact information to delivering RSS feeds and Google Places/Maps to a mobile device. QR codes are read using a QR code reader that has been downloaded to the mobile device. QR code readers use your mobile device or smartphone camera to decode the QR code and open the URL or display the associated information. You can find a list of readers and supported readers by mobile device and smartphone manufacturer here. QR codes are easy to create and there are many generators available free of charge. Most generators offer a statistics feature making tracking the frequency of use very easy.

Marriott launched experiments with QR codes because of the ubiquity of use of mobile devices in the library and on campus at the University of Utah. We are interested in providing our faculty, students and visitors with quick and efficient access to the information they want in the format they want it in. Currently at Marriott Library we are using QR codes to connect patrons to the catalog, browse course reserves, view classroom schedules, check library hours, get directions and call the Knowledge Commons desk.

In the future, we will be using QR codes to connect the physical with the digital by placing QR codes next to the artwork in the library’s permanent art collection. When scanned, the code will route to the collection online where there will be additional information related to the work. This is an interesting opportunity to provide our patrons with an immersive experience and is expected to be fully in place by June 2011.

QR codes were created in 1994 by the Japanese corporation Denso-Wave to serve as an inventory tool. The technology was used as an inventory tool for several years until a few years ago when the availability and use of mobile devices with internet access exploded. This development led to a new lease on life for QR codes which began to get adopted by advertisers and merchandisers as a cheap and efficient way to promote goods and services. QR codes are widespread in Asia, Australia, Europe and the UK. While still relatively new to the US, the use of QR codes in libraries is anticipated to be an efficient and effective way to address a variety of patron needs.

The potential for QR codes to play a significant role in education is beginning to take shape as well. For example, the University of Technology in Sydney (UTS), Australia, has created a poster demonstrating the application of QR codes in teaching, learning and research.

Publishers are also getting on-board by incorporating QR codes in print in order to connect the reader with additional resources, interactive forums and related video and audio, here is one such example.

We’ll be posting updates on the QR code experiment at Marriott. Do you have an idea for implementing a QR code that you’d like to share? We’d love to hear it!