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As noted by Dean at the UBC Google Scholar Blog, librarians at UCLA (is this Esther Grassian again?) have been busy creating a page to help students understand what Google Scholar is and isn't. One of the highlights is the Camtasia Studio screencast comparing results and search options in Schoogle and PsycINFO. Nicely done, and something I should do too...
Link: Google Scholar, Search Engines, Databases, and the Research Process.
Richard, of Science Library Pad, pointed me towards PROWE, Personal Repositories Online: WIKI Environment. This initiative was just launched by JISC in the UK, and while there's nothing to see there yet, the project description sounds like something distance librarians would want to participate in. I won't reproduce the whole description here, but here's the first sentence, "The PROWE project (Personal Repositories Online: WIKI Environment) will provide an innovative informal environment to support collaboration and learning amongst part-time, remote tutors on distance education programmes, and will build on and be evaluated alongside the asset repositories and digital library collections which are already available."
Intriguing, no?
A new blog with the following tagline: A forum for librarians implementing E-reserves in academic libraries across Canada: Canadian Electronic Reserves.
TechSmith, the folks who produce Camtasia Studio and SnagIt have a new blog: TechSmith Visual Lounge. No real content there yet, but I would expect them to announce product news there, and they accept comments, so this could be a good way to provide them feedback on their products. Well, this is what they have to say:
Find out about TechSmith behind-the-scenes, see screencasts and videos from other customers, meet up with your fellow TechSmith users and staff, and get more tips and tricks!
I'm away on vacation now with only a Mac at my disposal so haven't had a chance to try this, but Google has just announced an Instant Messaging solution called Google Talk - it requires a download. From the site:
They say talk is cheap. Google thinks it should be free. Google Talk enables you to call or send instant messages to your friends for free–anytime, anywhere in the world. Google Talk offers you:
* Choice: Get in touch how and when you want to–over email, IM or a call
* Quality: Talk through your computer but hear your friends as if they were in the same room
* Convenience: Your Gmail contacts are pre-loaded into Google Talk so inviting or talking to your friends is just a click away
Google Talk is in beta and requires a Gmail username and password.
Just about a month ago there was a nice little exchange on the OFFCAMP list about creating mini-tutorials for distance students. I was really impressed with some of the stuff people were doing, and wanted to collect the links in one post, so here they are in no particular order:
Incidentally just in case you weren't aware of it, the OFFCAMP archives are searchable back to May 2002 at http://listserv.utk.edu/cgi-bin/wa?S1=offcamp
Are you a librarian who blogs? Meredith is trying to answer some questions Walt didn't ask - why not take a moment to fill out her survey?
E-Learning company Brandon Hall has a page of software shootouts, and the most recent is on simulation software. Our old friends Captivate and ViewletBuilder are on the list, but Camtasia Studio wasn't involved. Also on the list are a whole whack of new ones (well new to me). There are links at the bottom to all the presentations that were created as a result of the contest, but I couldn't get most of them to work in Firefox :-(
Julie Garrison writes to the OFFCAMP list:
For the upcoming 12th Off-Campus Library Services Conferences in Savannah GA in April, we are hoping to put together a panel discussion on "Copyright issues in Distance Education and Current Library Practices". We are looking for potential panel members who are doing anything they feel is particularly unique in regards to electronic reserves, electronic course packs, the TEACH Act, or some other aspect of copyright. If you feel you could contribute to this type of panel discussion, please send me an email message explaining a little about what area you would like to discuss and what your institution is doing. We would like this panel to provide concrete examples of specific institutional policies, explanations of how these policies are instituted and upheld, how the policies benefit/hinder distance education students, how the library has been involved, as well has strategies for what other libraries and institutions can do.
Was just poking around on the OCLS Conference site and notice that they have posted the titles (draft) of the presentations that will be given at this conference next year (April 26-28). Also see that they seem to have lined up Marshall Keyes (whom I do not know) as the keynote speaker, though the featured speaker info page is still blank. I don't know about you, and I know it's a little early to be thinking this way, but I'm really looking forward to being somewhere where it will be spring when the calendar says it's supposed to be spring ;-)
Link: Off-Campus Library Services Conference | Presentation Titles.
I recently took over the maintenance of the Foothills Library Association Jobline. I said I wouldn't do it unless I could convert it from a static HTML page to an RSSified page, and the Executive said "great", so I did. I felt it was important to do this for a couple of reasons; 1) it used to only be updated once per week, and now it's updated daily through Blogger - days count in the job hunt! And 2) I thought that asking job-hunters to remember to come visit our page once per week wasn't a good use of their time, so I wanted to provide a way to have content delivered to them automatically. Obviously RSS takes care of that, but I also had a hunch that most folks weren't heavy users of RSS aggregators, so I wanted to make sure there was an RSS-Email option. A recent study seems to validate this decision:
"However, the majority of respondents to the survey said they were less familiar with RSS feeds. Among the other respondents, 23 per cent understood RSS but did not use it, while 66 per cent either did not understand the technology or had never heard of it."
One in 10 visitors to blog sites uses RSS - vnunet.com
In a couple of earlier posts I explored (mostly with help from you!) various options for delivering RSS feeds via email. You might want to make sure your readers have an option like this as well!
Mostly because I was able to integrate the little "hear me speak" image over there on the right (goes pretty well with the colors of the site, don't you think?) I thought I'd mention that Sherri and I are presenting together at Internet Librarian in Monterey this October. We're on day 2; here's the abstract of what we said we'd be discussing:
Session D203 — Web Tools for 21st-Century Learners
1:30 p.m. – 2:15 p.m.
Paul Pival, Distance Education Librarian, University of Calgary
Sherri Vokey, Remote Services Librarian, University of Nevada
As the number of courses offered at a distance continues to rise, so does the number of students studying in a blended environment, where at least some of their time is spent accessing course work from off campus. Many tips and tricks are shared by two distance education librarians who make use of free Web tools to offer quality support to their distance students. Learn how to magically insert up-to-date information into multiple courses in virtually any course management system; how to put a cross-platform chat tool such as Chatango or Skype in front of the students where they log in, instead of on the library homepage; how to help professors bookmark subject-specific pages from across the Web and present them on a course Web site or course management system using applications such as del.icio.us, Furl, or CiteULike. Pival and Vokey also outline strategies for creating current awareness services and e-learning opportunities for distance learners.
If you're a regular reader of either of our blogs you'll have read us discussing much of this stuff already, but not in an integrated way. Plus, as the next two months bring new developments there will be additional tools that we'll be able to sneak in. Oh yeah, and there are some other people speaking too ;-) See you there?
So the unofficial 2005 CLA wiki was not nearly as successful as Meredith's unofficial 2005 ALA wiki. Maybe it's because we have far fewer attendees. Maybe it's because my readers aren't CLA attendees. Who knows. Not fussed about it, but I do wonder what you all think should be done with the skeleton. There's not a ton of information there, and of course there are no more legitimate contributions expected. The spammers hit it once or twice per week...
So we could lock the pages and keep them as an example for other local or library conferences (though again Meredith's is a much better example). Or we could delete them. Either way D'Arcy and I don't have to take the effort to revert the spammed pages.
Anyone have thoughts? (even you spammers - do you have some reason you'd really like to keep hitting those pages? Perhaps we could work out a deal of $ome $ort... ;-)
Google will temporarily stop scanning copyright-protected books from libraries into its database, the company said late Thursday.
Link: c|net: Google pauses library project
Aw man, and I was just going to apply for this job as Product Manager, Google Print (Libraries) - Mountain View - guess that's on hold! OK, I wasn't really, but only because I couldn't bear to leave the lovely weather we have in this part of the world for that of Mountain View - blech!
The U of Calgary has the full-meal-deal with ProQuest Digital Dissertations, or I guess it's now called "ProQuest Dissertations and Theses - Full Text". That means we're supposed to have full access in PDF to pretty much everying in the database from 1997 to present. Yes, it is nice :-)
The other day though, my colleague Marvel (great name, eh?) found a recent citation that didn't include the PDF, so she placed an order for it through ILL. They came back and told her it was in fact online, but they found it through the old interface to the product, which they had bookmarked.
Ok, so if it's online in the old interface (you may recall that "online" meant you had to enter an email address and they'd email you a link to download it), why isn't it there in the new?!? Turns out it is, but there are two hoops that we needed to jump through.
Enough typing - watch this for the full story.
As an aside, I originally tried to use Camtasia Studio to do this screencast, but I could not for the life of me get the audio to work. I'll write more about that experience later :-(
Amazon.ca Launches "Search Inside" Amazon.ca today announced the launch of its Search Inside! feature which allows consumers to find and discover books by searching the full text inside them, not just matches to author or title keywords.
Just caught up to Sherri, who posted a couple of weeks ago about Jyve, a real-time presence indicator for Skype. Over on the upper right you can now learn my Skype status, and click the button to connect. This will also be made available for my distance students on the Library Connection homepage, and in their BlackBoard course shell. Cool!
I can't quite place it, but this story sounds vaguely familiar... Hmmm, what was it...
A Tale Of Two Travel Agencies For years we've been hearing stories about how the ease of online travel booking meant that there was no more need for travel agents. It was one of those classic case studies about how the internet would cut out the middleman. So, it looked like it might just be more of the same in this story from the Wisconsin State Journal talking about a 70-year-old travel agency that was closing after losing too much business to the internet. However, the article then gets much more interesting, as it contrasts the experience of the closing travel agency, to another local travel agency that has made adjustments to the internet age, allowing it to continue to thrive. The president of that travel agency explains how she reorganized the company into three different divisions focusing on specific areas where clients are much more likely to need the human touch in setting up travel plans. Then, of course, there's talking up the additional services that a human travel agent can provide. It might not hurt to point out some of the downsides to booking everything online yourself (such as the amount of time it takes to really find a good price). Of course, further contradicting the "cuts out the middleman" story, was the news earlier this year that both Expedia and Travelocity were looking to set up brick and mortar travel agencies themselves. Either way, the original article above shows why the conventional wisdom doesn't always apply -- and how smart businesses can figure out ways to adjust to a changing marketplace.
Great link found on Stephen Abram's site - a new graphic novel with a librarian as a hero :-)
A librarian seems to be an unlikely hero and protagonist for a comic series. Thoughts?
This is just what they want you to think. There's a lot librarians don't want you to know. Everything that's been going on behind the scenes at your local library is being blown wide open with the publication of Rex Libris.
Link: comicreaders.com - Rex Libris - Interview with creator James Turner.
Update: Here's a press release that provides some more details on where/how you can get this puppy.
Since my return from vacation a week ago I still haven't gotten through all the backlog in my aggregator. I've checked in on most of the feeds, and while I can't quite let myself just mark them all as read, I'm really pleased (and a little surprised) to find that I'm not suffering symptoms of withdrawal. This past weekend was a long one here in Alberta, and I didn't check the aggregator one time, and didn't miss it either. Which of course partly explains why there continues to be a paucity of posts here :-) The other reason is that I'm suffering from the OMG it's almost the end of summer already and there are dozens of major projects that need to be finished RIGHT NOW!
I was able to listen to the new Daily SearchCast podcast during my drive/walk in this AM though, and I like it! A perfect use of the podcast medium. It's only 15 minutes long, and allows me to catch up on niche information during a time that might otherwise be spent listening to the weather or traffic reports.
