The Distant Librarian

Web Search Garage

Distance students search the web, don't they? Librarians search the web too.... This book will definitely be on my bookshelf once it's released. Tara Calishain of ResearchBuzz has a new book called Web Search Garage coming out around August.

In her most recent ResearchBuzz Extra newsletter she writes,

Web Search Garage is my attempt to articulate the principles that I use to solve search problems, in addition to tricks to using search engines better and pointers to resources. It was an interesting task, doing lots of searching, going through very slowly to figure out how I was doing what I did, and articulating steps in things like the Principle of Onions and the Principle of the Reinvented Wheel and the Principle of Mass similar.

Prentice-Hall's initial page about the book is available at http://www.phptr.com/calishain and the Amazon page is at http://microurl.com/43313128 . If you're an editor or reporter and you'd like a galley copy in advance of publication, please reply to this newsletter with your name, postal address, and editorial affiliation and I'll pass it on to the PR people. If you're a professor who would like an evaluation copy for a course, please send your name, postal address, college affiliation, and course ideas and I'll hook you up with the Pearson Education guy.

I'm trying to get some excerpts to put online, and I'll have more announcements on that as it gets closer to shelftime.

Way to go, Tara!

ALA | 10 Reasons Why the Internet Is No Substitute for a Library

This article, originally published in 2001, was noted in this week's CIT Infobits. A nice reminder of why we DE librarians are still here working behind the scenes to support our DE students, IMHO.

ALA | 10 Reasons Why the Internet Is No Substitute for a Library

Go Flames Go!

Mostly just looking for an excuse to try uploading a picture, but wow, these guys are good and they're going to the Stanley Cup Final!

Sending Large Attachments

The LibrarianInBlack posts a brief blurb about two digital dropbox services that you might find useful if you don't have Prospero for document delivery. Of course here in Canada we're not allowed to scan and drop articles anyway, but I've used YouSendIt for large files of other sorts. I suppose there may be some privacy issues to explore as well, but if your students insist on using hotmail accounts, this might be one way to get a large file to them...

LibrarianInBlack: Put down the attachment and walk away slowly...

Most Depressing Moment of the CIL Conference

This post about Instant Messaging reminded me that I need to experiment with offering IM as a service for my students. No idea really if they'd use it - nobody's asked me, but lots of people (Jenny) seem to think lots of other people use it! I tried setting up a Trillian account a while back but gave up. Maybe now that I have a new modern PC and OS things will work a little better? I wonder how many DE Librarians are offering IM service...

Most Depressing Moment of the CIL Conference from The Shifted Librarian

SafariX Textbooks Online

SafariX Textbooks Online is to be launched this summer - no mention on the website that these titles will be available to libraries, but this might be a resource of interest to some of your students. The big draw is that the textbooks are available for about 50% of the price of the printed volumes, but include the exact pagination, allow notes and bookmarks. Students need to be online to access the content. Mostly comp sci and some business titles. As an aside, shouldn't the music industry be discounting in exactly the same way?!?

CFP: IEEE Transactions on Education

IEEE Transactions on Education has a call for papers on an upcoming special issue:Web-Based Instruction. The initial manuscript submission deadline is August 2, 2004, and the tentative publication date is November 2005. Lots of time for peer review and revisions in there!

IEEE Transactions on Education -- The CFP is third from the bottom, or maybe this PDF will load as well with all the details...

Growing

I've had a blog with Blogger for a year now (wow, hadn't realized it was that long!) - it was a spot where I was basically collecting annotated bookmarks, and over the next few days I'll be bringing some posts over from there, hopefully with comments more specific to the scope of this blog.

OCLS Conference 2004

A couple of weeks ago I had a V-8 moment and realized I should be blogging about the fine art of Distance Librarianship. Last week (May 5-7) I was at the 11th Off Campus Library Services Conference in Carefree AZ and realized there's plenty going on to keep an endeavor like this going, so here I am with my initial posts.

I really enjoyed the conference this year - my 4th in a row (it's held every other year). Initially I thought the site (Carefree Conference Resort) was going to be too isolated, but quickly realized this was a good thing as it kept us all captive and talking to each other :-) I co-presented two papers with colleagues here in Alberta (Kay Johnson at Athabasca and Grant Kayler at the U of Alberta), and the turnout for each was disappointing, but the few folks who came to hear us talk seemed to get some good information. I guess "collaboration" isn't the big theme this year :-(

If you're a distance librarian and you've never attended this conference you really should give it a try. The next one will be held in 2006 somewhere east of the Mississippi. The PowerPoints from nearly all the presentations are now online at http://ocls.cmich.edu/oclsc/oclscfp.htm. The conference proceedings were distributed to all attendees, but will likely also be published in the near future by Haworth Press.

Carefree is just north of Scottsdale, and man was it HOT! In the upper 90's each day (or 38-ish if you prefer), but of course it's a dry heat ;-) What made that worse for me was that it was snowing when we left Calgary for the airport on Wednesday AM, and it was snowing again when we landed on Sunday afternoon. Sigh.

Faxing to students

For many years now I've been suggesting to my students that they get themselves a free eFax account that they can use to receive faxes as attachments in their email box. David Pogue of the NY Times just had a brief mention of another service called Faxaway that you might want to look in to as well. While this has not been my experience with eFax, David claims they harvest addresses for spam, and claims that Faxaway does not. Apparently Faxaway does charge about $1 per month for the service.