The Distant Librarian

Amazon Tag Cloud

Hey, Amazon does tag clouds (aka concordance) - I hadn't seen this before!  (click for full size).  Interesting text stats too...

Persistent URLs in CSA Illumina

Ahh, lovely customer service.  I emailed the support desk at CSA Illumina to see if there was any way to create a persistent URL to an article in their product (no mention in the help files that I could find) and they responded a couple hours later with what amounted to a "nope, sorry".  In the meantime I had searched Google and found this page that describes how to find the persistent URL.  Three hours later the one I built is still working, so I'm blogging it so as not to forget where to find that puppy.  Thanks Manfred!

And just to collect these in one place, previously I had noted these excellent collections of how to create links for various products.  How to create persistent links Guides and A Guide to Linking into the Full Text Databases.

Free RSS to JavaScript Service

RSS-to-JavaScript.com appears to be a good alternative to Alan Levine's Feed2JS service.  Both of these allow you to repurpose an RSS feed in the style of your choosing simply by inserting a small snippet of javascript and some CSS code (both generated by these services) into your website.  RSS-to-JavaScript.com also has a nifty little animated scroller available.  With both services you have pretty much complete control over how many posts are displayed, how many words to display with each post, and of course color and style options.  I've used Alan's pretty extensively, but have yet to implement the RSS-to-JavaScript.com in a production environment...

I tried to insert one of their scrollers here, but while it worked in preview, it didn't display on the actual posting.  Don't know if this is because of the blog host or the service itself - ymmv, so do plenty of testing before full implementation!  ;-)

New website - Google Librarian

Eugene left a comment on one of my posts that he and a friend have  started a new website called Google Librarian.  It's nice and clean, and there are a few good tip sheets up already - looks like he wants to create a community.

A Risky Gamble with Google

Siva Vaidhyanathan, friend to librarians, has a lengthy piece in today's Chronicle of Higher Education called A Risky Gamble with Google (the link goes to his blog where the full text of the article is reproduced).  The piece is mostly a discussion about the copyright implications of the Google Book Search project (this post describes his anguish over Google changing the project name right after he submitted the piece to the Chronicle).   It's full of interesting thoughts, and his conclusion surprises me a little bit, but I can understand it.  Basically he concludes that we're making a mistake by allowing Google, a commercial entity, take on this mass digitization project.  Siva argues that it should be a library project, and while I agree at heart of course, I just don't see how it's ever going to happen in libraryland.  Who's got the money?   Siva raises a question I hadn't considered before, "What if stockholders decide that Google Library is a money loser or too much of a copyright-infringement liability?" 

Slides Synched to Sound

Someday you or I might have an audio recording made during a live talk (with ppt or Keynote) that we'd then want to post for our distance students.  Doug's soliciting solutions and if there's a good way to do it, it'll probably show up in the comments section: Slides Synched to Sound.

Annals of Cool Library Innovations

While Peter is a pretty technologically advanced guy, he's not a librarian, so it's really nice when someone like him appreciates minor innovations: Annals of Cool Library Innovations.

EBSCO Publishing provides free access to Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts

Link: EBSCO Publishing.

LISTA database Free to all Interested in Libraries and Librarianship EBSCO Publishing is proud to provide the Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (LISTA) database as a free resource to anyone interested in libraries and information management. This world-class bibliographic database provides coverage on subjects such as librarianship, classification, cataloging, bibliometrics, online information retrieval, information management and more. Delivered via the EBSCOhost platform, LISTA indexes more than 600 periodicals plus books, research reports, and proceedings. With coverage dating back to the mid-1960s, it is the oldest continuously produced database covering the field of information science.

Note: Be sure to set a bookmark for http://www.libraryresearch.com. This link takes you directly to the LISTA database. Make it a "favorite" so this free resource is available whenever you need it!

O'Reilly: What Is Screencasting

Jon Udell's got an article up that pretty much summarizes all his blog posts on screencasting: O'Reilly: What Is Screencasting.

Opinions on Google Book Search

Early last week I read a pretty interesting piece by George Dyson called Turing's Cathedral; it's a summary of a talk he gave during a visit to Google HQ last month.  Most of the article went over my head, but the quote he used to close the piece really struck a chord:

"When our machines overtook us, too complex and efficient for us to control, they did it so fast and so smoothly and so usefully, only a fool or a prophet would have dared complain." -- Simon Ings, Headlong (1999)

Now where this gets fun for me is that Dyson didn't fully attribute the quote - he just said "science fiction writer Simon Ings", but I wanted to know where it came from, so I found Simon's website and I emailed him to ask where the quote came from.

He quickly wrote back that it came from his book Headlong, which is now out of print.   That prompted me to ask him what his thoughts were as an author on the whole Google Print Book Search project.

His reply, reprinted here with his permission, was exactly what I would've expected from an author, and this is the second author who's told me pretty much the same thing (the first was an academic writer):

I asked,

Your note about the OOP status of Headlong prompts me to ask your opinion of the Google Print project, in which they're scanning copies of books both in and out of print w/o permission of publishers or authors.  It would seem that it could do you no harm to have a copy of Headlong fully-searchable through Google (they say they'll not display the full text, but only a snippet around the found text), and in fact if enough people found out about your book that way it might even go back in print, which would be beneficial to you.  But that's just my outsider's opinion; do you have one as an author?

And Simon replied,

An interesting question: are you involved in this debate? Your job title suggests this is your bread and butter -- or may become so.

A lot of writers -- and agents, incredibly -- are running so scared of services like GooglePrint, and I cannot for the life of me see why. My shelves are crammed full of books – fiction and non-fiction – which I found out about while using the Web for research. I don't use Google Print very much but I have recently used amazon.com's 'search inside' function, and this is the closest experience to actual browsing I've ever come across on-line.

And it was, quite frankly, a delight: for us in the UK at the moment, the bookshops are stocking fewer and fewer titles, so a good honest browse is becoming a rare pleasure. Yet isn't this how books get discovered and read?

For the past twenty years, the bookshops here have been relying on the same tired formula to shift units: the 'three for two' bargain. They have no innovation, no understanding of how readers find books, and no interest in any but the major sellers. (This calamitous tunnel-vision last year actually reduced the sales of  major sellers by a staggering 15%!). I don't bother with bookshops any more. Nor do many of the writers I know.

I don't know the detail, but I like the cut of GooglePrint's jib, and I know that they've been consulting with the book industry and agencies over here to get the thing working without putting people's backs up.

And its nice to see innovative companies actually thinking about books – something bookshops haven't done in my lifetime. So I think we should be positively critical and make these services better where they need to be better.

The internet is, after all,  where we go to find variety now – in music, books, and much else. Without an on-line presence, the midlist (which is to say, literature) is dead in the water.

and I replied, when asking for his permission to post our conversation,

Well I'm not officially involved in the debate in a way that will influence it, but yes, all librarians are pretty interested in what's going on.  Google claims altruistic intentions, in that they "only want to make the world's knowledge available to all" and that they're "creating the world's largest card catalogue", and if that's true, then libraries will receive a pretty big gift because people will suddenly know what's in all those books we have.  I personally don't think libraries have anything to fear from this initiative, but that's why your quote struck such a chord with me :-) .  If Google has other intentions (well of course they're out to make money somehow), it may still be an overall win for libraries.

Your author's response is exactly what I would have expected, and what mine would be if I were an author.  I too find the stance of the publishers and associations bewildering - it can only be a knee-jerk reaction to someone stepping on their turf.  It's been shown in at least one instance that making full text of books available online actually increases print sales, and Amazon found this too. 

Your notes about browsing (or not being able to) hit home for my distance students as well, who are currently unable to browse our book collection the way an on-campus student can.  Google Print could really level this playing field in distance education as well.  It'll be an interesting next few years for both our businesses.

Yeah, I guess there's the copyright question to be answered, but damn, it seems so obvious that this is good for authors, users, and libraries, and I don't see how it's harming the publishers either.  Check out Sivacracy.net for the views of someone who's paying more attention to the legal side of this issue.

And finally, I just found this page linked off the Google Book Search page - interesting how much more marketing / spin Google is forced to do with this project compared to all their other products!

Wavago for IM

Wavago has been mentioned on a few other blogs, but I finally got a chance to try it this AM.  The interface was a little confusing to me at first, but hey, it was the first time I looked at it so I suspect I'll get used to it.  I wanted to try it as an alternative to Trillian, as a way to concatenate all my IM accounts, including Gmail Talk and Skype, which Trillian doesn't do.  Worked like a charm on my first test, and one of the problems I have the GTalk is now solved - Wavago allows me to broadcast messages to multiple GTalk users, and in fact can broadcast across all the platforms.

If you're on one of my contact lists, look out, I may be contacting you just to put the product through its paces ;-)

Oh, it also supposedly does RSS feeds and catches Podcasts too.  And feeds your cat.

Diggdot.us - digg / slashdot / del.icio.us popular

For those of you trying to stay ahead of the curve: Diggdot.us.

Why diggdot.us?

Digg, slashdot,  and del.icio.us/popular - this is a  constant browsing cycle for us.  So why not combine them into a unified format without all the extra chrome?  We can eliminate dupes and add some extra niceities.    

Roy Tennant and Cathy Gordon (Google Scholar) are coming to my house

Well ok, not my house, but my campus.  The Alberta Library (TAL), our Provincial consortium, is sponsoring a two-day symposium on federated searching.  Here's a 4-page PDF flyer outlining the symposium.  You're definately invited, but I'm afraid you're not going to feel very welcome as 1) it's the beginning of February in Calgary, and 2) if you're not a member of TAL you'll have to pay $360 (earlybird) to attend!!!  Of course those are Cdn dollars, but still :-(

Plenary Speakers:

• Roy Tennant (Manager, eScholarship Web & Services Design, California Digital Library)
• Cathy Gordon (Director, Google Scholar)

Why I Blog

This question has been addressed by many people already, and I really don't have anything new to add to the topic, but since an article I wrote over a year ago has finally hit hard copy I thought I'd share it with you anyway.  I was pleased, when looking at it again a year later, that the reasoning still stands up.  A couple of the URLs mentioned in the article are gone, but hey, that's the web for you.  Also note that Haworth doesn't allow the use of contractions in their journals, so the writing is a little more formal than I would've preferred.  I'll be updating this post with the standard disclaimer that Haworth says I need to include, but here's the article:

Pival, P. (2005) Blogging for the Distance Librarian.  Journal of Library and Information Services in Distance Learning, 2(2), 55-63.

Interestingly, today brought yet another story about how bad it is for Academics to blog - this one from Slate, Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs.  I guess because I tend not to post many personal or political thoughts I don't feel worried about my blogging activity, though I too am up for tenure next year.  Maybe I'll be able to post that the committee found my blog to be a favourable factor in their decision :-)

Google Print is Renamed Google Book Search

Via SearchEngine Watch: Google Print is Renamed Google Book Search.

Inserting Flash into PPT

This morning I was helping a colleague learn Macromedia Breeze (convert PPT to Flash), and he wondered about the ability to include a brief (30 seconds) screencast within the presentation.  Breeze can handle animation, so I thought it could probably handle a movie too.  And it can.  But it's not very easy :-(

He used CaptureWiz Pro to record a screencast and save it as an AVI file (the only option).   It's very simple to insert an AVI as a movie clip into PPT, but it turns out that once converted to a Breeze presentation that movie only displays as a static screenshot.  (Incidentally I was surpised to learn that SnagIt, despite its shared family with Camtasia Studio, also only saves screencasts as AVI, so you won't be able to save the next step by using this tool).

So we surmised that since Breeze is a Macromedia product, it would probably do just fine if we could insert a Flash file into PPT.  I used Camtasia Studio to convert the AVI to SWF - piece of cake.  The fun part comes when you try to insert that SWF file into PPT.  You can't just insert it as you do a picture or audio clip (or even an AVI file).  Here are the gory details from the Macromedia website.  What a pain!

I only went so far as to prove to myself that it can be done - obviously there's still some tweaking that needs to be done as evidenced by the artifacts that show up on the finished product.  The screencast slide blows by pretty quickly because I didn't add any audio to it; again this was just a proof of concept.

I'm not sure if there are any other ways to get an actual animation into a Breeze presentation, but if anyone has any ideas, please pass them on!

College & Research Libraries online

As pointed out by David (and others), College & Research Libraries is now freely available online six months after the original publication date.  They're back to 1997 now, which is further back than I get through Wilson Education Full Text (mid 1998).  Some other nice tidbits from the press release:

"ACRL supports open access to scholarship as a principle for reform in the system of scholarly communication. In addition to this new access to College & Research Libraries, ACRL encourages author self-archiving of its published articles in both institutional and disciplinary repositories."

ACRL/DLS Haworth Press Distance Learning Librarian Conference Sponsorship Award

FYI:  This conference sponsorship award honors any individual ACRL member working in the field of, or contributing to the success of distance learning librarianship or related library service in higher education. -- $1200 to help defray the costs of travel to and participation in the ALA Annual Meeting and a citation plaque sponsored by Haworth Press.  Link: ALA | DLS Award.

ProQuest Dissertations and Theses RSS Feed

OK idea for ProQuest to offer an RSS feed for dissertations and theses in seven subject areas, but my campus runs everyone (even on-campus users) through EZProxy before accessing this database, so even on campus when I click a link in the resulting feed I can't get to the actual content.  I need a way to include my EZProxy prefix in this feed for it to be useful to me, and of course my distance students would find the same thing.  I also need to be able to get feeds for searches I have saved myself, not just in broad subject areas.  A good start though!

Location of Librarian Bloggers

Via Steven at Library Stuff, a link to librarian bloggers on the Frapr mapping service (indicate your location on a Google Map).  Man, I had forgotton how far south Chicago is! ;-)

Off-Campus Library Services Conference Workshops

There are three workshops being held in conjunction with the Off Campus Library Services Conference next year.  They'll be held concurrently with other sessions.  What I like about this listing page is that in addition to descriptions, it lists assumptions, objectives and outcomes for each workshop.  The workshop titles are: Using Web Site Usability Testing To Support Distance Learning Students, Firewalls, Ad-blockers, Web Accelerators, etc.: Helping Remote Users of Electronic Resources Overcome Barriers to Access, and Copyright in the Online Course Environment

Innovate and Motivate: Next Generation Libraries - ALA | ACRL/CNI/EDUCAUSE Joint Virtual Conference

Would seem to be plenty of room for Distance Librarians at this conference: ALA | ACRL/CNI/EDUCAUSE Joint Virtual Conference - Innovate and Motivate: Next Generation Libraries.

Submissions will be accepted through January 6, 2006

Where Learners Go - Library Journal

Good solid article from a good solid source (Joan K. Lippincott, Ph.D., is Associate Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information) This article will be a good one to pull out if you need to convince your administrators of the importance of whatever newfangled thing it is you're trying to do right now...  Link: Library Journal - Where Learners Go.

Quote for you:  "It is crucial that librarians who are committed to maintaining and expanding their role and the role of libraries in the new learning process via the Internet ensure that their web presence engages those new learners."

Busy Day for Digital Books: News from Amazon and Google

Search Engine Watch reports that Amazon will begin allowing customers to purchase individual pages from certain books: Busy Day for Digital Books: News from Amazon and Google.  Another press release had a great quote showing to whom this is going to be of interest (hint - it's our students):

"For scholars and people who are only interested in specific information, that is probably is a market in the near- to mid-term," she said. "For other people, it's going to be take a while longer. ... Downloading a chapter of a mystery novel doesn't cut it."

Allan Carrington on the scene with a group from Penn State talking about Instructional Design Librarians | connect.educause.edu

Great short podcast (about 12 minutes) from Educause 2005 in which Allan Carrington is on the scene with a group from Penn State talking about Instructional Design Librarians.  I think being an Instructional Design Librarian would be really neat.  The most interesting thing I got from this was that when developing this position, apparently it used to be just a straight IT position, but they added the librarian bit because librarians at Penn State are faculty, and they figured librarians would be more well-received by the teaching faculty.  Don't always personally find that to be true, but it's neat to hear it put that way.