Karen Markey is a fac­ulty mem­ber in the School of Infor­ma­tion at the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan. Ear­lier this year, she received a small grant from the Del­mas Foun­da­tion to build a pro­to­type online board game that teaches stu­dents information-literacy skills. Her game pro­to­type is now fully oper­a­tional and is being tested and eval­u­ated by a class of 75 under­grad­u­ates at the Uni­ver­sity of Michigan.

They’ve just fin­ished con­duct­ing inter­views with stu­dent game play­ers, but they haven’t had suf­fi­cient time to mull over inter­view data and ana­lyze game play logs. They already rec­og­nize that the incen­tive for play­ing the game is a crit­i­cal issue and future games must be inti­mately con­nected to a class assign­ment or project.

Because Karen wants to do some­thing that would scale beyond Michi­gan, she is look­ing for research part­ners at pub­lic or aca­d­e­mic libraries who are inter­ested in build­ing on her foun­da­tion, expand­ing what they have already done, and test­ing her approach with their library patrons. Her intent is to find libraries who want to col­lab­o­rate on an IMLS National Lead­er­ship grant to host a unique instance of the game that is cus­tomized to achiev­ing their infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy objectives.

The game is based on the “search strat­egy” model that Tom Kirk and his Earl­ham Col­lege col­leagues devised to teach under­grad­u­ates how to do library research. Karen chose the “Black Death” for the pro­to­type game’s topic, and they are learn­ing from their eval­u­a­tion other top­ics that college-age stu­dents prefer.

Here are some links to learn more about their approach:

1. Infor­ma­tion on their Sto­rygame Project gen­er­ally: http://www.si.umich.edu/~ylime/storygame.html
2. Playing-the-game video at YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u76tW-né-yY
3. Man­ual for play­ing the game: http://ics.umflint.edu:3904/manual/manual.html

If you’re inter­ested in part­ner­ing with Karen, you can con­tact her at ylime [ at ] umich.edu. I can’t wait to hear more about this project and watch it develop.

“Copy and paste” is becom­ing a more fre­quently used tool to build web­sites as online ser­vices con­tinue to offer their ser­vices and con­tent for use any­where, not just on their own pages. As I show in pre­sen­ta­tions, these days you can build a very decent com­mu­nity site using either RSS or “copy and paste” (see a proof of con­cept I built around the La Grange Park Pub­lic Library almost two years ago).

It’s a dif­fer­ent way of think­ing for libraries, that we can actu­ally inte­grate exter­nal con­tent and ser­vices into our sites, not just link to them, but the world around us is chang­ing and every­one else is mash­ing up. It’s not just the grow­ing unstick­i­ness and promis­cu­ity of bits and bytes but also the dis­in­ter­me­di­a­tion of con­tent and the fact that peo­ple want to — and now can — get a par­tic­u­lar piece of some­thing, not just the whole. Again, a dif­fer­ent con­cept for online library services.

So, in this type of envi­ron­ment, what ser­vices make good mash part­ners for libraries? Who do we want to play spin the bot­tle with?

The first time I saw Mee­boMe, it seemed like an obvi­ous can­di­date. Inte­gra­tion in library web­sites as a cheap (read: free), light­weight ref­er­ence chat client was a no-brainer. I’ve high­lighted libraries that pro­vide links to live help in their cat­a­logs, espe­cially ones that are based on what our patrons use, instant mes­sag­ing. Using Mee­boMe for this type of ser­vices offers two advantages:

1. The user doesn’t need to have IM soft­ware installed.
2. Mee­boMe offers the equiv­a­lent of web voice­mail, allow­ing the patron to “leave a mes­sage” if the library is closed.

So I’ve been won­der­ing if a library would add this ser­vice to its cat­a­log, but because there is some­times a lag in either page load­ing or chat win­dow load­ing with the Meebo wid­gets, I wasn’t sure how fea­si­ble this is. Plus, I still have some pri­vacy con­cerns because the chat goes through Meebo’s servers, a com­pany that may or may not pro­tect pri­vacy to the level libraries do. Still, I found the idea intrigu­ing, as appar­ently did oth­ers, since at least four libraries have started doing this recently.

Tech­ni­cally, I think the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­gary was the first to do this, prob­a­bly because Paul Pival works there. And they didn’t inte­grate Mee­boMe halfway or on a test page. No, they inte­grated it every­where — on search results, item records, and my favorite, the “no results found” page. That last one is par­tic­u­larly bril­liant, as it pro­vides a life­line at the point of need at a dead end for patrons. So I imme­di­ately added this mashup to my core set of slides.

Around the same time, McMas­ter Uni­ver­sity did the same thing, prov­ing that great minds do indeed think alike. Then a month later, David King announced that the Topeka Shawnee County Pub­lic Library had also inte­grated a Mee­boMe wid­get into its cat­a­log on the “no results found” page. Thanks, David — I love that I now have a pub­lic library exam­ple to show. How is a small city library match­ing ser­vices with a big uni­ver­sity one? Sim­ply by using copy & paste.

Since pretty much any­one can copy and paste, now Bay­lor is doing it, too. Can you do it, as well? You bet. Just go to Mee­boMe, cre­ate a wid­get, copy the code they give you, and paste it where you want the chat box to appear on the page. So far the results seem to be pos­i­tive, but I’m hop­ing these folks will gos­sip about their mash­ing in a few months to let us know how it’s going.

In the mean­time, I’m wait­ing for a library to be the first to imple­ment Twit­ter for cat­a­log or web­site sta­tus updates, to dis­play the lat­est arti­cles from a data­base (such as EBSCO­Host) on their web­site using RSS, or to do a Google Maps mashup of local his­tory sites that is dis­played on the library’s site. Please let me know if you’ve spot­ted any of these in the wild.