The Travelin' Librarian

Sue Byerley and Rita Hug, University of Colorado-Colorado Springs

• http://scholar.google.com/
• No one in the audience few they were confortable with GS
• Academics constantly trying to focus on the paid, high-qulaity databases
• GS started late 2004
• Focuses on scholarly material on the Web
• Not clear on how comprehensive GS is
• no source list
• studies have been done
• GS strong in sciences and medicine
• weaker in social sciences
• constantly improving
• lags behind prop databases on currency
• still contains significant number of links to non-scholarly material
• UCCS doing this
• “The breadth and Depth of Google Scholar” [June 2006 article]
• “Cited by” feature
• Libs can integrate their full-text resources via link resolvers
• Demo of diff between Google and GS using “hurricane katrina”
• Google: 6.5mil results
• GS: 3750 results
• Results screen
• all articles
• recent articles
• cited by
• links to local full text if available
• related articles
• abstract link variations
• Web search on related information for particular article
• BL Direct (British Library)
• Perils
• No source list
• Not as current
• Poor treatment of “popular” newspapers
• Not as strong in the humanities
• Some results are hard to decipher / hard to tell what they are
• Strange results
• search on “google scholar”
• 1st result is from 1992
• first good result is about 10 screens down
• Most of the results are links back to GS in other databases
• Can’t do much with the results
• no sorting options
• no subject headings
• no native “send results”
• When to use GS vs. prop databases
• it depends
• what databases do you have
• how much full text you have to back up GS
• Good for interdisciplinary topics
• Has elements of a federated search engine
• Check out “Scholar Preferences”
• Integrate with a third-party citation management program

John Naisbitt

• Used to live in Teluride so feels at home in Colorado
• Honorary docotorate from the University of Denver
• Anti-PowerPoint format [applause]
• “Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely”
• Wife Dorris was his German language publisher
• Better than most author/publisher relationships
• Reason for living in Vienna for the past seven years
• New book published last month
• Mind Set!
• Metaphor from The Little Prince
• Shillouette of a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant
• adults think it’s a hat
• redrawn to show the elephant
• What is really going on?
• See the future as a picture puzzle
• find one piece and see if there are other complementary pieces
• put the pieces together to see a new picture
• A visual culture is taking over the world
• slow death of the newpaper culture
• advertising: back to picture narrative
• Erricson had better technology
• Nokia had better design
• upscale design of common goods
• architecure as visual icon
• decline of the novel
• Don’t fall into the sequence trap
• sequence is not how the future or history works
• sequence is the enemy of connections
• Have a computer and a poet in every classroom
• at least metaphorically on the poet side
• Focus on the score of the game
• read the newspaper back to front
• sports in the back
• best and most reliable reporting in the sports section
• 100% accuracy
• as you move to the front, confidence in the accuracy goes down
• newspapers are the first draft of history
• constantly used as primary source materials
• read them as if they’re 100 years old
• not intersted in opinion
• interested in events & facts
• USA Today has the “box scores” of what’s going on in the country
• Media: distortion through magnification
• the world has rarely been more peaceful than today
• compared to since 1945
• wouldn’t know it by watching television
• # of armed conflicts has fallen 40% since the fall of communisim
• wars are fewer but we see much more of them
• Don’t get so far ahead of the parade that people don’t know you’re in it
• This past election day…
• leader so far out ahead that he was no longer with the group
• looking at the future: what’s just out in front, not so far out
• AT&T introduced the picturephone in 1939
• You don’t get results by solving problems but by seeking opportunities
• Opportunity seekers vs. problem solvers
• India’s IT sector as a result of Y2K
• Hillary Clinton is a great problem solver
• Healthcare
• Schwarzenegger is a great opportunity seeker
• Became governor on the recall of Gray Davis
• Problem solver: fix the post office
• Opportunity seeker: Start FedEx (Fred Smith)
• Europe needs an opportunity seeker
• Two hearts, 25 mind sets
• It’s not a borderless world
• Physical borders are geeting stronger
• Economics is becoming borderless
• People are concerend about preserving their cultural identity
• The periphery is the center
• China is dencentralizing
• China has 166 cities with 100 million or more
• Privinces are building international airports
• Might overtake the US economically “next Tuesday”
• Not going to happen that soon
• Big gap between US & China GDP
• Understanding how powerful it is not to have to be right!
• people who have to be right are run by needing to be right
• political parties have institutalize this
• shuts out learning and intellectual growth to have to always be right
• Einstein was far from sure about what he was doing

Q&A period