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Did you get the theme of the keynotes at Internet Librarian 2005 year? Here's the final keynote (endnote?) I recorded - Stephen Abram closing the conference with the topic of Competing with Google: Library Strategies (mp3 about 38 minutes). Stephen usually posts his powerpoints, so I'll add the link here when it shows up. Very entertaining presentation.
Posted with permission of the speaker.
Here's the audio (mp3) of the Wednesday morning keynote at Internet Librarian 2005, in which Rich Wiggins and Roy Tennant debate the merits and perils of Google.
Posted with permission of the presenters.
I met Robert at Internet Librarian last week - he's got a good page of freely available full text resources at: WOW!--Full Text AND Free?!.
Here's the audio for Liz Lawley's Tuesday AM Keynote at Internet Librarian 2005. This one one where she was going too quickly for me to take notes, so I just sat back and listened (and you can too, as here's the audio of the talk - 44 minutes mp3). I'm back on my home machine which has a lot more horsepower than the laptop, so I'm able to tweak the audio more betterer, thus you'll be hearing a much louder recording this time - all my audio uploads from now on should be better quality. I do have 2 or 3 more, mostly of the keynote variety. Hope you enjoy!
Oh, a few people did blog Liz's talk, so you can read too (or instead).
Posted with permission of the speaker.
Last night's panel discussion was, for me, worth the trip to California all by itself. Expertely moderated by Stephen Abram, the panel consisted of Mark Sandler, University of Michigan, Rich Wiggins, Michigan State University, Steve Arnold, Arnold Information Technology, Roy Tennant, User Services Architect with the California Digital Library, Adam Smith, Senior Business Product Manager with Google Print (and Google Scholar), and Barbara Quint, Editor of Searcher Magazine. Most unfortunately, Barbara was on the speakerphone and was very hard to hear.
Adam was very earnest in his claims that Google is doing this whole thing to unlock the world's knowledge - really! He claims that once this project is up and running it will make libraries more valuable because people will know what's in all the books that are locked up in our libraries. He only spoke about the project for about 5 minutes, and then participated in the panel.
I took about 4 pages of notes, trying to do a transcription for the most part - I may or may not come back and post those to go along with the audio - I'm sure you'll find lots of coverage here, as usual.
Aww screw it! I'm just going to throw up my completely unedited notes - this is what I heard and what I was able to type - this goes without saying, but this is just one guy's notes, ok? I missed a lot, and I summarized a lot, and I apologize to any of the panelists whom I misrepresent here.
If you have the above pseudo-transcript in front of you as you listen it should help fill in the gaps, and vice versa.
Here's your audio - it's about 1:25 in length - mp3. Turned out better than I had thought it would, though still has the omnipresent background hiss.
Oh, and here's the press release for the Open Content Alliance announcement about Microsoft.
UPDATE: Liz Lawley posted her long thoughts here. She's working for Microsoft right now so has an interesting perspective...
UPDATE 2: Barbara Quint's future scenarios can be read here (since they're pretty hard to make out in the audio)
Sherri and I presented today at Internet Librarian, and while the content was delivered well, the flash that we had hoped would do nothing but enhance the presentation actually let us down. We were both on iBooks, and were going to use Keynote (Mac version of PPT) for a few screenshots, and it was going to look goooood. We tested it the night before and it worked well; the iBook displayed to the projector with no problem. Overnight though Murphy played a visit and we kept getting an error on Sherri's machine that it didn't have enough VRAM to push to the LCD projector. The only variable was that we had changed the template. Sigh. So we started a few minutes late and were therefore were rushed a bit, and were both thrown by the complete surprise of having had a Mac let us down! :-(
As I said though, we got through most of the content, and folks seemed engaged. I'll see if we can get the Keynote presentation out as a PDF or something but here's a list of the tools we discussed. (don't go changing it now, y'all!)
Feel free, as always, to ask questions if you have any :-)
Remember the good old days when you could trust Google to accurately display who linked to a given page when using the link: syntax? They've long ago stopped doing that, opting instead to show you a "representative sample" of incoming links to your site. At yesterday's Cool Web Tools for Webmasters session, Darlene Fichter mentioned Yahoo! Site Explorer, which appears to me to do that same thing (show the incoming links, not a sample). Once you've entered a URL and gotten results, look for the little "inlinks" URL at the top of the results list and voila, you're looking at who links to you! Haven't done any scientific testing or anything, but it looks pretty good. Take a moment to read the help screen - it's short and will be helpful to you in understanding the results and how your results will vary depending on how you enter a URL.
IL05Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet and American Life Project delivered the opening keynote for Internet Librarian on Monday morning. You can find coverage of his comments in lots of places so I won't add to those here (I really enjoyed his talk though). What you will find here is a 46 minute mp3 of his talk. Again with a little background hiss - anyone know the best way to reduce that in Audacity?
Lee Rainie Keynote (46 minutes mp3)
Update: Lee has posted the text of his talk. (PDF)
Steve Shafer is the the Library Director at Athabasca University in Alberta, and his presentation is one of the few here at Internet Librarian that specifically mention distance education, so of course I had to attend and blog that one for y'all. Steve started with some background on Athabasca, but then eventually got in to the fun stuff, which are some of the mobile technologies they're playing with. Or more correctly, the ways they're trying to deliver materials from their Digital Reading Room (DRR) to mobile devices. The demo he showed was delivering files directly from this site to a Dell Pocket PC. I asked him if he'd send me the demos (they were windows media files, I believe) and he said he would, so once I get those I'll update this post so you can see too.
Next he showed a couple of different ways they're experimenting with delivering mp3 files of reserve readings to the same mobile devices. One of them uses something called Talkative to convert typed or scanned text into an mp3 file that can then be played and/or delivered via an RSS feed. There are of course copyright issues to work out - they're starting with files to be delivered to students with special needs, but hope to be able to offer the technology for students to convert files on their own rather than offer it as a library service...
Finally he showed a working demo of tutorials delivered to a photo iPod - I don't think they've had time to do the same thing to the new video iPod. Again he said he'd share the demos with us :-)
None of this is actually in production yet, but I find that you've gotta play with a lot of ideas before one will prove to be viable, so good for them!
Update: Steve's talk can be heard here (36 minute mp3). There's a little bit of hiss, but hey, not bad from the back of the room, which is the only place wireless was available! (no, it didn't take a wireless connection to record this, that's just where I was sitting).
Got an email last week from Tara Calishain informing me as a subscriber to the ResearcBuzz Extra newsletter that she's discontinuing this paid version of her incredibly useful ResearcBuzz weekly newsletter. Extra was one of the few subscriptions I ever bought, and it was well worth it. Won't bore you with all you missed if you were never a subscriber, but if you've never received her free weekly, you really should sign yourself up (or subscribe to her RSS feed).
Well I've landed safe and sound in Monterey, and while it's been mostly foggy since arrival, I've done a lot of walking and thought I'd share some of the sights and sounds (the conference doesn't officially start until tomorrow :-)
The California sea lions are abundant and pretty noisy out on the breakwater (15 minute walk from the hotel, so they can't actually be heard from here). Here's what one looks like, and here's what they sound like (30 second mp3). (click the image for a larger version)
Also rather more prevalent here than back home on the prairies is the Pacific Ocean. (45 second mp3).
I hope to record some of the sessions and may be able to post them here, though I understand all the sessions are to be officially recorded and a CD sold, so I may not be allowed to post my versions. I have made my multimedia files as enclosures though, so if you want to add my RSS feed to your podcast catching software any that I do post should come down automatically.
More posts soon!
Ken at RSS4Lib points to a really neat-looking tool called FeedTier that, given a URL, will attempt to create an RSS feed for that page.
Coming back from the Access conference another librarian and I were wondering how we could have our electronic reserves readings automagically appear in BlackBoard, and this tool almost does the trick. Actually it does exactly what's expected, but our reserves module is causing the links to timeout, so it's a problem to fix on our end, but you might want to run a few experiments if you have some content you'd like to shove into your course management system.
Just to give you an idea, I gave FeedTier this link that leads to a list of readings available for one course in our electronic reserves module and it gave me back this RSS feed. Go ahead and plug that in to your aggregator to see how pretty it looks. Now think about plugging that URL in to Feed2JS (or similar), pasting the code into a BlackBoard course and you're all set! If another document is added to the reserve reading list, it will automatically show up in the BlackBoard course shell.
Now I have to figure out how to bribe our programmer so the links to the actual documents don't time out....
Looks like Steve over at Edugadget is thinking along the same lines I am with the new iPod, 'cept he does more than just talk about it :-) Link: powercast - powerpoint presentations for ipods.
My GovDocs Librarian passed this on to me: GPO fast tracks FDSys project. - Almost all US Gov Docs from 1787 to present are supposed to be available online starting in July 2007.
I'm here at the Access 2005 conference in Edmonton and finally have something to share that may be of interest to the distance folks. There's a sort of preconference to Access called Hackfest, where a large wishlist is considered and a small number of projects are tackled in an all-day brainstorming / programming session. This afternoon we were presented with the results from the first batch; tomorrow afternoon we'll hear about the rest. One of the submitted projects is called Online Tutorial Tools. Basically the requestor is looking for easy-to-implement open source tutorial options (something along the lines of TILT) that could be used for large groups of libraries (public, in particular). Unfortunately I missed the beginning of the brief report so I'm not sure what to expect next, but the hackfest team that grabbed this one has a wiki page up describing how far they got on this project - it's available here. Not a ton to get excited about there yet, but it's got some nice background, and is a page that should be watched in case they continue to work on this project. There's a link there to something at Simon Fraser University called MOSST - Modular Online Software for Self-Paced Tutorials - definately worth a looksee!
Both TJ and Dean have pointers to this new article:
Susan Gardner Susanna Eng, Gaga over Google? Scholar in the Social Sciences, Library Hi-Tech News, 22, 8 (2005) pp. 42-45.
As usual, I haven't read it yet, but it's sitting on my printer :-)
Gardner and Eng draw pretty much the same conclusion as Giustini in the article from the other day: Know thy friend / enemy / neighbor.
Because I learned to screencast with Qarbon ViewletBuilder I have long felt that it was best to capture screens and then go back and dub voice and annotation. I've gotta say though, I'm really starting to come around to the idea of the quick and dirty live capture with audio to just get the thing out the door. Both Camtasia Studio and Macromedia Captivate offer this option; I've been using Camtasia more of late.
A few minutes ago I wanted to share a tip with a colleague, and it took me all of two minutes to record myself (with audio) performing this tip, then about 4 more minutes to to produce the unedited video and upload it to the campus server. Sent her an email with the link and voila! Less time than it would've taken to walk to her office and show her the tip. Could've just as easily emailed her the finished product except for our voracious campus email filters stopping almost any weird attachments...
Brian and I have been corresponding today and he's gone off on a related tangent for ways libraries can get themselves on the new video iPods. I like it! (of course now he's tipped his hand, and even if it is edgy someone will figure out it's all carefully crafted ;-) Link: The Sisyphus Stone.
OK, disclaimer here, I'm not suggesting anyone use the tools mentioned in this post to break any laws. As many of you know, Apple unveiled a new iPod yesterday that can play video. Apparently all the cool (rich) kids will have one. Unfortunately I won't, so I can't test any of this out. If all the cool kids are going to have one, don't you think we should be able to let them watch our library tutorial screencasts on them? Having not seen one, I don't know if the screen size is too small to make this feasible, but I think someone should try!
Here's a link to a tutorial (not a screencast) on How to Rip DVD Movies To Your iPod Using Free Software. This method requires a Mac, and seems to want the source file to be on a DVD, which most of our screencasts aren't. But it does offer some good information on CODECS, resolution, and screen size. I did a quick Google search and found AVS Video Converter, which claims to be able to convert AVI, Real Video, QuickTime, or WMV to MP4, which apparently is what the iPod wants to see. I have no experience with this product (which isn't free), but it would seem to be what we'd need to get our screencast output into the correct format.
Now I know that Camtasia Studio allows alternate output formats when saving a screencast (AVI, WMV, MOV, Real ), and I thought my original fav ViewletBuilder did too, but I can actually only find SWF as the output option for that product :-(, so unless someone knows of an SWF->x converter we may be out of luck making Viewlets available on the iPod. Hmm, Captivate only allows output as SWF too. 'kay, Google to the rescue again with the following possible SWF -> AVI converters: WinMPG Video Convert and ADSharit (again I have no experience with these).
OK, so to recap, we need someone with 1) a new video iPod, 2) Camtasia Studio, and 3) AVS Video Converter or similar. If someone can provide me with item #1 I'll be pleased to take the experiment from there ;-) But seriously, we need to give this a try - who's going to volunteer?
Update: There's a page on the Apple site that shows how to create video for the iPod using QuickTime 7 Pro.
Blackboard and WebCT Announce Plans to Merge. -- they claim "both Blackboard and WebCT product lines will remain intact and supported". But, "Over time, Blackboard will incorporate the best features and usability characteristics from the two product lines into a new standards-based product set."
Found via LIS News, the Google Librarian Center.
Librarians and Google share a mission: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. We support librarians like yourself who work each day to further that mission. This page is a first step toward improving and expanding that support.
Keep up to date with Google.
In the next few months, we'll be launching a newsletter that will go out four times a year — just for librarians. Subscribe now to receive Google tips, news of new features, and other information relevant to you.
Followup - after subscribing you'll be taken to a Google Groups page - right now there are 179 members in this group, and I haven't seen this before, but you can get RSS feeds of the messages posted to this group, so I guess you don't even have to give Google your email address for the newsletter - the RSS feed for the latest 100 messages is here. (right now there's only one message in the group; an introductory one).
I've just printed this out and will read later today. to whet your appetite, here's a line from the conclusion:
In summary, information professionals have no choice but to recommend Google Scholar under certain conditions and caveats.
Neat stuff brewing on my campus - not sure if we're going to be providing additional services to this new constituency, or if they just get access to all the online resources.
Link: In The News: U of C to break ground on Campus Calgary Digital Library.
The Campus Calgary Digital Library (CCDL) is a partnership with all the public post-secondary institutions in Calgary – Bow Valley College, Mount Royal College, ACAD, and SAIT Polytechnic – as well as those in neighbouring regions, such as Red Crow College on the Blood Reserve. The partnership is a first in Canada and will create an information network that will see the university’s vast electronic library holdings made available to the public electronically for use in business, education and non-profit applications. It will make it possible to create a single library card for all post-secondary students to gain access to the University’s digital holdings.
The Centered Librarian has an interesting post - Google formally declares war on Microsoft
GOOGLE HAS confirmed that it will launch free spreadsheet and word-processing software online and take on Microsoft in one of its biggest markets.
Under the deal, Google will allow web users to access Sun's OpenOffice from a toolbar.
More at the Brisbane Courier Mail, here.
Stephen at the Digital Reference blog writes about a New article on collaborative digital reference service
There's an insightful article in the latest issue of College and Research Libraries (Vol. 66, No. 5) detailing the experiences of the libraries at the University of Illinois at Chicago with their digital reference services. Titled "Quantifying Cooperation: Collaborative Digital Reference Service in the Large Academic Library," the article has lots of choice nuggets...
