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I've had the TOC for Volume 23 Issue 1 of The Electronic Library sitting in my inbox for two months now; it's a special issue on Electronic Books and I was going to read at least some of the articles and let you know all about 'em, but HA! If it didn't happen in the last two months it's not going to happen anytime soon. Just thought you might like to know. About the special issue, not so much about the state of my inbox...
There's not a whole lot there just yet, but the mockups look pretty :-) ProQuest is working towards making content from their databases available as RSS feeds. They do have some feeds going, but what caught my eye were the mockups for a library page, a faculty page, and a course syllabus.
Link: ProQuest RSS Feeds
Just finished the wiki article mentioned in Carolyn's post and I highly recommend it. It's well written and easy to understand, and it does a great job of addressing many of the fears and misconceptions about the use of wikis in Higher Education.
Why librarians should care about EDUCAUSE I first discovered EDUCAUSE when I began my research on wikis. I quickly found Brian Lamb's article Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, Ready or Not
in the EDUCAUSE Review. Since then, it's like a good dream that won't go away. It...
Last month I wrote about a neat-looking virtual reference tool called Convoq ASAP, which had a really nice feature in that the one-to-one version was free. (Web Meetings for Nothing, Collaborate for Free). A couple of days ago a colleage asked me about the free version, and when I went to the Convoq website to send her the URL I found that the free version (ASAP Express) was no longer available. A quick email to Convoq confirmed this. I'm still using it, but now I'm worried it may just stop working one day :-( The Pro version is still available and has a free trial, but of course it costs actual money to purchase - annual subscription, though it looks like it's 50% off until June 1, so if you're gonna play with it, now's the time!
Library Clips posts a nice list of tools that can help you embed your RSS feed in another page (think Blackboard or WebCT or whatever...) The only one of these I've personally played with is Feed2JS, and I've been really happy with that one.
Link: Library clips :: Re-syndication: sidebar updates and more :: May :: 2005.
It's that time again - what may become my quarterly call to see if any gentle readers would like to contribute to the eServices in Libraries column for the Journal of Library & Information Services in Distance Learning.
I have several ideas for topics, but am also interested in you bringing your own ideas to the column. It's a quarterly publication, which gives us a challenge in that whatever we write about won't hit print for several months.
Information about the journal can be found here, and the last three tables of contents (PDF), which show what was covered in this column in those issues, can be found here, here, and here. Just to give you a flavor for what's already been covered...
Are you interested? If so, please drop me an email at ppival@ucalgary.ca
Thanks, hope to hear from you!
As a followup to last night's post about the introduction of the Mac version of Qarbon ViewletBuilder (incidentally there's also a Linux version, but I have no way to play with that), I was able to sucessfully import the ViewletBuilder project I created with my iBook into my Windows version of the software to add narration. (Mac_Test_viewlet_swf.html (1.9K)). (sorry about the large screensize - this was captured at 1024x768 - normally I capture at a smaller screensize to ensure it will all display nicely within 1024x768 rather than taking up the entire screen).
I did notice one or two little artifacts on the cursor movement, but it didn't happen throughout, so it may require a little more testing. Please let me reiterate - there is NO production value on this; I just wanted to see if it'd cross platforms to allow me to add audio :-)
I have also just received confirmation from a Senior VP at Qarbon that if you purchase either the Windows or Mac version, the license key will work in both versions, so assuming you also have a Windows machine handy, this does seem like a good way to capture everything you need to on the Mac, and then use Windows to add the audio component. Not a perfect solution, but certainly a serviceable one!
OK all you Mac folk, now you too can join the screencasting revolution! As far as I know, this is the first software of this type that is available for the Mac. I was a beta tester for this version and I was pleasantly surprised to find how closely it mirrored the Windows version I was already familiar with. I did find it just a little slow to compile the final product into the final Flash file, but that may be a result of my older Mac - it may well scream on a G5 for all I know. Can anyone report on this? The only glitch in this release is that it sadly does not support audio (at least as recorded on the Mac). I am told that a project that has been created on the Mac can be imported into ViewletBuilder for Windows and the audio can be added there, but I haven't confirmed this yet. While this is significant, I'll admit that I never added audio to any of my projects for the first year or so that I owned a copy of ViewletBuilder for Windows. On the other hand, I have had some feedback that students really do appreciate the audio component to these files, and of course Jon Udell uses this almost exclusively instead of annotations for his screencasts.
Qarbon does plan to release the next version, supporting audio, late this Summer.
Link: Presentation Software by Qarbon - Download our Free Presentation Software.
I too have been following the discussion on the SFX support list Peter mentions, and have been hoping he or someone of his calibre would blog about it, making it easier to summarize and include here. I didn't do a count on the opinions, but I sense that many on the aforementioned list are leaning towards wanting to mutiny and not provide Google Scholar with this extra information on moral grounds. I'm sure many will though, and I guess we'll have to learn from these early adopters if it's worth breaking the spirit of the OpenURL rule. Here at the U of C we have a hosted implementation of SFX, so we can't do anything until sometime in June when the switch is flipped for us by Ex-Libris. I had hoped that at the end of his post Peter would give us the definative answer on how to proceed, but alas...
OpenURL-enabling Google Scholar
Google Scholar has offered OpenURL links for a while on a trial basis, and now the service is open to any library. We’ve started to tinker with it but we haven’t turned it on yet. Over the last couple of days there has been a lively discussion on the support list for our link resolver, and a few points have become clearer to me as a result.
- Google still only provides OpenURL links for a minority of citations — apparently just those with reliable identifiers such as DOIs or PubMed ids
- Google wants to know what we subscribe to before they provide OpenURL links for our users, so that they can distinguish links that will get you full text and links that won’t.
Our link resolver can now generate holdings lists in the format Google wants, so this isn’t a technical challenge. But, as many people have pointed out, Google wants to provide its OpenURL service in a different way from all our licensed vendors. We don’t provide a holdings list to them, so why should we for Google?
more...
[via Quædam cuiusdam]
Just ordered for the U of C collection: The Search : The Inside Story of How Google and Its Rivals Changed Everything
Preorder The Search You can now start preordering John Battelle's book The Search at Amazon. John's the co-founding editor of Wired, author of Searchblog, and brand manager of Boing Boing.
Arnold, Julie "Evaluating the Quality of a Chat Service"
portal: Libraries and the Academy - Volume 5, Number 2, April 2005, pp. 177-193
Interesting article with some results that oppose earlier studies. The authors examined 351 virtual reference transactions over an 8-month period and found that correct answers occurred nearly 92% of the time, which is a much higher percentage than previous studies. One of the suggested reasons is that many of the earlier studies used "secret shopper" planted questions while this study looked at real patron questions.
They also found that different patron types (students, faculty, etc) definately ask different types of questions, and they suggest this has significant implications when marketing the service to each of these groups.
Lots of good data here and and interesting read.
Amit Agarwal has a nice roundup of screencasting tools, including of course the old standbys (ViewletBuilder, Camtasia and Captivate), but also including some links to some cheaper and lesser-known products.
Link: The Indian Blogger: Screencasting to help your mom.
The current issue of Computers in Libraries introduced me to an open source chat reference software called RAKIM. The article, Implementing RAKIM Open Source Chat Reference Software, describes how librarians at Midlands Technical College decided to try this package (mostly because it's free), and their impressions of its capabilities and limitations. A couple of the interesting features that caught my eye include the ability for librarians to have their own or shared bookmarks, and their own or shared scripts they can push to the patron. If a patron logs in and no librarian is available, s/he will be routed to the e-mail reference page. The software allows the librarian to push a page to the remote user, but does not allow co-browsing. The other drawback is that it does require a little technical know-how to get up and running, requiring Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. If you're already comfortable with LAMP, you might want to give this a try. There are some screenshots available as well.
Here's a direct link to the article for those of you with Academic Search Premier.
Friday the 13th is not a bad day here - it's the first day of the year I was able to walk from my car to the office without a jacket!
Gary Price has a great writup called Direct Links to Articles: Be It Resolved that Google Scholar is Now Open to More Libraries on Resource Shelf today. Really exciting stuff. In a nutshell, now any library with link resolver software can now ensure that links to their content will appear along with Google Scholar results.
Google Scholar is also extending the generation of OpenURL links beyond the initial scope of the pilot, which included OpenURLs only for items which had DOIs and PubMed IDs. Google Scholar will now offer OpenURL links also based on Journal Titles. This means more results will have links to your link resolver.
Gary mentions that on the results page, "The link will now found directly next to the title of the article or book and in some cases made even more visible by appearing in a different color than other parts of the result entry." I don't see this happening for U of C results, but we haven't yet given Google our specific holdings, which appears to be a new requirement.
I'm also noticing a fair bit of new content (dissertations and theses, and content from dSpace, for instance) that I hadn't noticed before in the results.
Something else Greg didn't point out is that Google is inviting folks to include a Google Scholar search box on their own pages. Not sure if this is working though - I entered the requested information and was returned to the same place after hitting the submit button...
Northern Illinois University Libraries is (are?) using Jybe as their virtual reference service offering. If you visit their homepage, browse to Services and More and then Ask a Librarian, which is the first option on the list. If you already have Jbye installed you can just click the link to be connected to a librarian, or if this is your first time they direct you to this page with steps to installing the chat client. I think they should provide a little additional information to the end user about what this is all about, and what makes it different than AIM and the rest (co-browsing being the biggie). I don't see mention of browser requirements either...
I just tried to join a session and was told that the session did not exist (which, having used Jybe before simply led me to believe that reference service was not available at just now, but they should work towards a more informative message). Then it dropped me to a page that told me I didn't have Jybe installed, and to click to install it. Of course I do have it installed, but I had forgotten to have the toolbar in view. Again, a more informative message would be helpful, perhaps just a reminder to have the toolbar displayed.
This service is actually hosted on the Jybe servers, and I believe this is an actual business arrangement (in other words, they've purchased the hosting solution from the folks at Jybe).
Still a little rough, but I salute the pioneers - it can only get better if we pound on it, right? :-)
Link: NIU Ask a Librarian Services.
Rebecca Hedreen has a neat description of all the options her distance students have in reaching her. Wouldn't it be great if they all were interoperable? Meredith and Stephen think so too... I think some sort of online presence indicator should be required for each and every one of these - most seem to have them already, but not all...
Embedded librarians The Iraq war brought us the concept of "embedded journalists". Now we have the concept of "embedded librarians". An embedded journalist is supposed to have better access to a story; an embedded librarian provides better access for students to him/herself and to the library's resources.
Sherri Vokey ran a survey a few weeks back to learn how many visitors to the UNLV website currently use Instant Messaging, and to find out how many would correspond with a librarian that way if such a service was offered. Sherri has posted her results, and you may find them interesting and/or useful. I plan to ask some similar questions later this summer in a survey of distance grad students (keep in mind Sherri's respondents weren't necessarily distance students) and will be sure to post any interesting findings.
Link: ::schwagbag::: IM'ers not digital reference chatters? [Part 3].
A total of 195 responses were collected over 7 days (April 15- 22). The link to the survey was featured fairly prominently under the 'News' section of the Library's main page, as well as on the existing chat reference entry page.
Gary Price offers a nice brief look at Google Print and Amazon's Search Inside the Book tools.
Stephen Dew, Chair of the Distance Learning Section of ACRL, writes to OFFCAMP:
I am glad to announce the newly elected officers for the Section.
Johanna Tunon has been elected Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect for the coming year.
Page Brannon has been elected Secretary
Anne Haynes has been elected Member-at-LargeThe newly elected officers will begin their terms at the close of ALA Annual in Chicago Congratulations to Johanna, Page, and Anne!
Last month I posted about and got some really good feedback and suggestions on an RSS to email solution. I just wanted to wrap that up here for those of you who don't get the comments. The two best solutions seem to be RSSFwd and Rmail, both of which, with a minor amount of HTML coding, allow one to embed a single box on one's blog where the user can enter an email address and forever more receive every post as an email. Also improved since our initial peek is Bot a blog, which now offers snippits of the post in the email instead of simply a link letting you know some content had changed.
With Rmail you'll get an email with the updated post within an hour. I believe RSSFwd does a batch job so there's a longer delay. I plan to implement an Rmail subscription link for this blog as soon as I get around to it :-)
I've never gotten into wikis. I just never found myself in a project where a wiki seemed the perfect solution. I've been toying with them for a couple weeks though, and then lo and behold, Meredith throws up the ALA Chicago Wiki. Now that makes sense to me! Know what? There's a Canadian Library Association Annual Conference too. Guess where it's being held this year? Calgary. June 15 - 18. I've always found that the best way for me to learn about a new technology is to jump right in. I don't usually do it publicly, but in this case that seems to be the point of wikis, so I grabbed the wiki that D'Arcy Norman put up here at the U of C and added a page for the CLA conference. You'll find it here: http://wiki.ucalgary.ca/page/CLA Oh, actually what I did was pretty much lift everything that Meredith did for a skeleton and replicate it locally, changing ALA to CLA and Chicago to Calgary.
I extend the same invite that Meredith did. If you know something about CLA or Calgary, please contribute to the wiki. You don't need an account to create or edit pages. You don't need to ask permission. Michelle has already started a great page on local restaurants, but the bars page needs some work ;-)
