The Distant Librarian

LJ Webcast Archives

I haven't had a chance to listen to/watch them myself, and am bookmarking them here as much for my use as yours, but two recent webcasts in the Returning the Researcher to the Library series are now archived at the LJ website:

• Webcast: Returning the Researcher to the Library: Building ROI through Discovery
• Webcast: Returning the Researcher to the Library: Understanding the Next Gen user

Looks like this is scheduled to be a 4-part series.

American Chemical Society (ACS) heading towards online-only

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports, "the American Chemical Society, which publishes several dozen academic journals, is moving to end print editions and produce journals only online."  You can read more at Ars Technica.

ALA Conference 2009: Ubiquity of Mobiles Greatly To Affect Libraries

Library Journal reports, "Libraries had better prepare for an explosion in the capacity of mobile devices as well as the transformative increase in user capacity and expectations. This was the message conveyed by a panel yesterday at the American Library Association's (ALA) Annual Conference on Libraries and Mobile Devices: Public Policy Considerations."

RSS to PDF

Since February I've been happily using Tabbloid to receive PDFs of blog posts I want to read on paper (that's what you're getting if you view my shared posts in Google Reader - those are things I've tagged to be delivered to me by Tabbloid).  I just ran across FiveFilters.org, which offers an open-source solution you can host yourself to convert RSS feeds to PDF.  Nice bonus is a chart comparing FiveFilters.org to four other services, with PDFs you can view to compare the same content across all five.

update: just realized that the author of FiveFilters.org had left me a comment about this site on my original post back in April :-0

Screencasting programs for Linux

Tux Radar posts today with mid-length reviews of a half-dozen screencasting programs for Linux: Group test: screencasting apps. They like DemoRecorder the best. 

How you know you're not ready for Linux?  The post concludes with a suggestion that if none of these meet your needs, you could "roll your own.  Almost all GUI apps on Linux are just a wrapper around some powerful command-line scripts. Screencasting tools are no different."  :-)

Oddly, there are no links to the reviewed products in the post.

7 Things You Should Know About Microblogging

The latest in the Educause 7 Things You Should Know About... series covers Microblogging (aka Twitter).

Microblogging is the practice of posting small pieces of digital content—which could be text, pictures, links, short videos, or other media—on the Internet. Microblogging offers a portable communication mode that feels organic and spontaneous to many and has captured the public imagination. Friends use it to keep in touch, business associates use it to coordinate meetings or share useful resources, and celebrities and politicians (or their publicists) microblog about concert dates, lectures, book releases, or tour schedules. A wide and growing range of add-on tools enables sophisticated updates and interaction with other applications, and the resulting profusion of functionality is helping to define new possibilities for this type of communication.

Summon: And then there were two

Last month Dartmouth opened its instance of Summon to the world, and now you can compare that to Summon at the University of Liverpool.  Read the press release at Library Technology Guides.

Wikipedia in the catalogue?

Image via Wikipedia

I learned from Eric Rumsey that the State Library of Kansas includes Wikipedia articles in their OPAC.  Here are some examples: http://topekalibraries.info/search/awikimedia. About 15 minutes later I saw that Aaron Schmidt posted on the DCPL Labs site that in a recent survey 88% "of people responded that they prefer the content from Wikipedia in the Catalog."  This is news to me - is this a fairly common thing these days?  Would our cataloguing department kill me if I suggested it? :-)