The Distant Librarian

Intuitive Revelations: The Ubiquitous Reference Model

How's that for an ear-catching title? Brian Mathews at Georgia Tech is working on a really interesting project.  OK, so we know some libraries have created pages in places where patrons hang out, like MySpace.  I use a Pubsub feed to look for anyone who's blogged about the University of Calgary, and on rare occasions have been able to leave a library-related comment.  Well Brian's mashed those ideas up.  Check out his post on alt ref for the details, including a screencast, but here it is in a nutshell. 

He created an account at Xanga and LiveJournal - first as a library, but later as his human incarnation.  For the purposes of his study he subscribed to the RSS feeds of 20 GT student blogs at those sites (explained in the paper).  But what he's done that seems really innovative to me is that he's using the Bloglines keyword alert feature to monitor the postings in each of those student blogs for words such as assignment, library, help, paper, project, etc.  So if any of these words shows up in a post by a GT student he checks out the post, and if it is indeed a library or research-related post, he chimes in with some suggestions for help.  How cool is that?  Yeah, it's a little like evesdropping on the students sitting around the Information Commons, but the students don't seem to mind at all, according to Brian. 

And this gets to the core of Brian's thinking that "we need to get out from behind the desk and help students when and where they need it."  Surely in your physical library you don't just wait at the reference
desk for poor souls to come to you.  Every once in a while you wander around the computers, and even occasionally offer assistance to someone who looks obviously lost, right?  What do you think of this idea?



Technorati Tags: libraries, Xanga, LiveJournal, AltRef, GT

A little more on EBSCO updates

Got an email from marketing at EBSCO on Friday; apparently I scooped their big announcement at PLA about the interface enhancements ;-)  They weren't upset, but did pass on the full press release, which I still don't see up on their news site.  There are a couple of additional enhancements I didn't notice my first time in:

IPSWICH, Mass. - March 24, 2006 - EBSCO Publishing is pleased to announce the availability of a number of new features and enhanced functionality for the EBSCOhost interface. These enhancements are designed to provide database users with a more efficient and enjoyable search experience. Some of the key features that will be added/enhanced are as follows:

RSS Enabled Alerts - These allow librarians and users to feed results from EBSCOhost Search and Journal Alerts into their news readers and aggregators, as well as their web sites.

EBSCOhost Clustering - This feature displays links of search results sorted by subject, in addition to regular Result List article links. The links provide users with instant access to just those articles concerning particular subjects.

Printing, Emailing and Saving in Standard Industry formats - Researchers interested in citing articles using specific industry formats can now choose from the following styles: AMA, APA, Chicago/Turabian: Humanities, Chicago/Turabian: Author-Date, Modern Language Association or Vancouver/ICMJE.  The citation information will be automatically formatted according to the selected style.

Visual Search - In order to deliver a graphically-rich, efficient visual searching alternative, this feature is now available in addition to EBSCO's popular Basic and Advanced Searching modes.

Database Groupings by Subject - Presented via drop-down list, this option enables the customer's databases to be sorted by popular subjects, such as technology, business, medical science, psychology or education.

Tutorials Included in EBSCOhost Online Help - Inside the online help manual, EBSCOhost users will find links to our most popular tutorials regarding the use of EBSCOhost, EBSCOadmin and other applicable interfaces. Each tutorial is presented in Macromedia Flash, complete with audio narration and matching screen text (for those without sound enabled on their computers). Tutorials run from 2 to 4 minutes in length and give users an easy-to-follow overview of how to make the most of key EBSCOhost features.

Neat to see these enhancements!

EBSCO Updates - Visual Search and RSS Feeds

Two months ago I noted that EBSCO was going to offer a visual search interface to their products courtesy of Grokker.  Either they just kind of slipped it in with a recent update, or I missed the big announcement, but Visual Search is now one of the tabs at the top of the EBSCO search screen:

Haven't really had a chance to play with it yet, but in looking at the results of a search I helped a student with earlier today, it does seem to do a nice job grouping results.

I had noticed a couple of weeks ago that EBSCO was also offering RSS feeds for Journal and Search alerts, but I couldn't get them to verify and when I contacted EBSCO they admitted that something was wrong.  Yesterday I got an email that things were all fixed, and was able to verify that today.  What I really like is that my institution's EZProxy prefix is included in the RSS feed, which of course means if I was reading from off campus I could still get in.  Nice touch!

Technorati Tags: grokker, search, ebsco, visualsearch, RSS

Learning without boundaries - Campus Calgary Digital Library

This press release was just sent to all staff at the U of Calgary (click for full size):

I was trying to figure out if the marketing people created an entirely new planet for the model to gaze through, but then I figured out the camera is inside the globe - it's just a different view from what we're used to seeing.  More metaphor?  ;-)

Here's the text of the release, for the search engines:

Learning without boundaries

Knowledge is our future.  The University of Calgary is leading the way into the Future of Learning with the greatest Digital Library Canada has ever seen.

On March 31, the U of C breaks ground on the Campus Calgary Digital Library, the first project of its kind in Canada.  The Digital Library will greatly expand the numbers of learners linked electronically to a vast world of knowledge.  Post-secondary students, teachers and researchers will have access to a growing body of online information and be able to take advantage of more collaborative work rooms, individual study spaces, video-conference and distance facilities, as well as new online collections.  E-learning at its best.

In celebration of our 40th anniversary, the University of Calgary is dedicating this new building to the Calgary community.  We thank you for your tremendous support, and we invite you to join us as we break ground and help fuel the quest for knowledge, understanding, creativity and innovation.

Knowledge is power.

The Campus Calgary Digital Library is a partnership with Mount Royal College, SAIT, Alberta College of Art and Design, Bow Valley College, Athabasca University, St. Mary's University College, Red Crow College, Nazarene University College and Old Sun College.

Sounds pretty cool, doesn't it?  BTW, you can watch for library jobs in the Calgary area at the Foothills Library Association jobline site. 

Squeet - best RSS to email yet?

OK, it's definitely too soon to proclaim Squeet the winner of the RSS to Email services, especially since I just started playing with it this AM, but on first look it's very impressive!  Here are the highlights:  You can choose the frequency with which you will receive posts (as they become available, once per day, once per week).  You can choose to receive HTML or Text email.  They offer a very nice snippet of code to allow your visitors to receive your feed via email.  And finally, you can create an account with Squeet and manage all of your subscribed feeds from one place.  Oh, and they offer a Firefox plugin that will help you subscribe to feeds via Squeet.  It's a very polished site - give it a looksee!

Librarycasting SE

Chad at Library Voice points to Librarycasting SE (the SE is for Sciences and Engineering).  This is a wonderful collection (blogged) of screencasts and podcasts put together by Pete Kirlew at Virginia Commonwealth University.  A sampling of some of the recent posts include: Tutorials for Engineering Village, PubMed Video Tutorials, Finding Online Tutorials at VCU Libraries, Searching for New Book Titles at VCU Libraries, Staying Current Using RSS Automatic Updates, NOAA Podcasts and RSS Feeds, Automated Updates of Journal Article Titles and Database Search Results for the Health Sciences.  There are separate RSS feeds for the tutorials in the disciplines of Engineering, Library Services, Life Sciences, and Physical Sciences.

Chad sums it up well at the end of his post, "This truly is awesome, Pete. This serves as a great model for other subject specialists. It’s a blog, it’s a podcast, it’s a screencast. No, it’s super-duper subject librarian outreach!!! Fantastic!"

Camtasia Studio seems to be the poison of choice here.


Technorati Tags: screencasts, podcasts

Statistics Canada to make all electronic publications available for free

I couldn't find this announcement on the StatsCan website, but this press release was sent to the Data Liberation Initiative listserv on Monday:

As of April 24, 2006, all electronic publications available on the Statistics Canada website will become free of charge. The purpose of this message is to inform you about this change in the Agency's publishing model. 

The New Publishing Model has two components:

    * the free dissemination of all electronic publications on our website
    * priced publications released on paper.

The adoption of the New Publishing Model supports the longstanding principles underlying the Agency’s dissemination program: to make information of broad public interest widely available to the Canadian public but to charge individual clients for special products and services where the benefits do not accrue to the public at large and where additional costs are incurred by the Agency in providing them.

Free Electronic Publications

The move to free electronic publications will increase consistency in our priced publication program and improve access to our published information for users, respondents and stakeholders.

Under Statistics Canada's New Publishing Model, all electronic publications (PDF and HTML) on Statistics Canada’s Internet site will be available for free as of April 24, 2006.

Electronic products that require a manual intervention by Statistics Canada staff (e.g. CD-ROM, files which have to be mailed, e-mailed or faxed to clients), database services (CANSIM, Canadian International Merchandise Trade database), and other priced datasets available on the Internet will continue to be priced.

Priced Print Publications

Under the New Publishing Model, the Agency’s ongoing print publication program will comprise a select group of publications, of a compendia or reference nature, which will enhance the visibility of Statistics Canada and profile the range of information that the Agency makes available. Statistics Canada will continue to charge for print publications in order to recover the printing, distribution and promotion costs.

The list of publications that will be part of the Agency’s print publication program will be established in discussion with author divisions over the next few months. This new print publication program will be maintained as long as it continues to meet client information needs and is able to recover the costs for these titles overall without a corporate subsidy.

Users may purchase print-on-demand service for PDF publications available on the website.

Technorati Tags: statistics

CLA Services for Distance Learning Interest Group

After a hiatus of several years, the Canadian Library Association Services for Distance Learning Interest Group is back.  Laurie Prange at Yukon College is the new convener, and she has a section of her blog dedicated to this group.  First order of business is to complete a survey on the top 10 services necessary in library suport of distance learning, but you might want to hold off for a day or two before filling out the survey - she asks for up to 10 responses, but it was only recording one of mine...

VideoEgg - tiny screencasts

Want to see what your library screencast might look like on a video iPod?  Head over to VideoEgg, which appears to be the latest in line along with YouTube and Google Video for sharing videos online.  This one looks pretty nice, and I haven't had time to do more than upload a test screencast to see how it looks.  Offers simple integration with TypePad, Bloglines, and eBay.  It can receive video from web cameras, video cameras, mobile devices, and of course files of the type you might create with your screencasting software of choice.  It was pretty simple and straightforward to create an account and upload content.  If the video can be resized, this might be a nice tool to keep in your bag.


Technorati Tags: VideoEgg, screencasting, video

Creating RSS feeds where none exist

Is there something magic about the number 20?  Why don't individual wiki pages offer RSS feeds?  These are two of the questions I've been forced to ponder this week.

Here's my story.  A month ago I blogged about the launch of the COPPUL Animated Tutorial Sharing (ANTS) Project.  We're using a wiki (MediaWiki) to track who's doing what with the tutorials.  I wanted to create a simple automated way to inform people when something had changed on that wiki page (ie someone had taken ownership of a particular tutorial) so my quest for a service that would create an RSS feed from a wiki page began.

There are over 100 items on a list on the wiki page and it turns out that's very important.

First up was Feed43, which I found several weeks ago while it was still in beta.  It was fairly complicated to get going, but eventually I provided all the right data and had a really nice feed.  It worked well until about a week ago, when Feed43 went public and their servers became overwhelmed.  They scaled all the feeds back so they would only deliver 20 items via RSS, which is fine for most, but completely ruins a feed that's trying to monitor a list of over 100.  I exchanged several emails with one of the founders and he says they're working on a paid version that would allow me to monitor that many items, but the subscription model isn't in place yet so that's of no use to me.  I was very impressed with the communication and support though.

Earlier today I found FeedYes, which is much easier to get started with, but seems to have the same frustrating limitation!  The other drawback with FeedYes is that it doesn't send full descriptions of the page content; only hyperlinks. I could live with that, but found it frustrating that the preview they showed me had the entire list, but what's delivered via the feed stops at 20 items.  I'm still waiting to hear back from the email I sent them, so maybe I'm missing something with this service.  UPDATE: I heard back from Jeroen at FeedYes within an hour, and he wrote that the limit is currently 30 items, and that they've heard from several people requesting the ability to monitor more items in their feed.  They're considering it for their next release, "which should be available in 3-4 weeks."

Turns out I'm not the only one playing with these services this week.  Robin Good and John Tropea (Library Clips) both have posts from earlier today on these services.  They both also mention FeedFire, but I couldn't get that one to work at all with the wiki page.

So does anyone out there know of a good way to monitor a structured wiki page?  I want to be able to receive updates of the specific items that have changed on this list.


Technorati Tags: RSS

Writely aquired by Google

Huh, I had seen speculation in the tech blogs that this was about to happen, but didn't think I'd actually seen it reported, but I just visited Writely and saw on their front page that they have indeed been acquired by Google.  They assure us that it'll be business as usual, but eventually better.  My initial impressions of Writely are here. 

Update:  okay, so there is one downside at least, in that "We have closed off new registrations until we move Writely to Google's systems." So if you were rushing off to try it for the very first time, I guess you'll have to wait.  Do go back though, it's pretty neat.


Technorati Tags: writely

Documentation from the TAL Federated Search Symposium

A month ago I wrote a summary of my thoughts on a Federated Search Symposium I had attended, and that post generated a lot of comments.  The sponsor of the Symposium, The Alberta Library, has just announced that all the documentation from the symposium is now available on their website, and there's some really useful stuff there for anyone who's considering a federated search product.  Of particular interest will be the vendor fact sheets found on the Vendor's Page.


Technorati Tags: metasearch, federated_searching

The Compleat Screencaster

Thanks to Geoff for pointing me at this blog entry called The Compleat Screencaster, where Yoz Grahame describes the trials and tribulations of using Camtasia Studio to build a really nice screencast demonstrating Ning.  Because his screencast is a sales pitch of sorts he really needed to get it just perfect.  I don't spend nearly as much time on mine, and it probably shows, but what I'm trying to say is that don't let this post scare you off if you've never done a screencast.  While there's lots of good advice in here, your screencasts don't have to be incredibly complex productions :-)


Technorati Tags: screencasting, Ning

Jon Udell's Screencasting Advice

Jon Udell, who coined the term screencasting, has some advice for those who are using Camtasia Studio to precisely edit narrated video.


Technorati Tags: screencasting

Access Copyright And Creative Commons Canada Launch Public Domain Registry

As brought to my attention by colleagues here, here and here, Access Copyright (our version of the US Copyright Clearance Center) and Creative Commons Canada have announced a partnership to establish a public domain registry.  They're going to use MediaWiki to "create an online, globally searchable catalogue of published works that are in the Canadian public domain."  Here's the full press release from Access Copyright (go ahead and read it - it's pretty short).


Technorati Tags: copyright, public_domain

Podcasting at the U of Calgary

Nope, not me, but D'Arcy pointed me to this press release that announces the U of Calgary is going to introduce podcasting to four courses this summer and fall, involving about 700 students.  Apparently we will the first university in the country to officially integrate podcasting into the curriculum this way.  Not sure if we're going with iTunes U, but according to this Feb 17 news story, several other Canadian schools are, so it'll be interesting to see if we really are first here ;-)  Note the cool new course designations: iENGL, iCHEM, iSOCI and iCOMS.


Technorati Tags: podcasting highered

European Digital Library announced

Any readers in Europe should be pleased about the just announced European Digital Library:

The European Commissions’ plan to promote digital access to Europe’s heritage is rapidly taking shape. At least six million books, documents and other cultural works will be made available to anyone with a Web connection through the European Digital Library over the next five years. In order to boost European digitisation efforts, the Commission will co-fund the creation of a Europe-wide network of digitisation centres. The Commission will also address, in a series of policy documents, the issue of the appropriate framework for intellectual property rights protection in the context of digital libraries.

Window of Opportunity for DE Librarians?

The New York Times reports that "Colleges will no longer be required to deliver at least half their courses on a campus instead of online to qualify for federal student aid."  Wonder how many new DE Librarian positions will be created to help with the expected increase in distance education programs across the nation?  This could signal our Golden Age :-)

Unyte has some real potential!

Over the past couple of days I've had a chance to briefly try out a couple of co-browsing tools I mentioned last Friday.  Vyew doesn't look like it'll be of use to me - no opportunity for co-browsing that I can see - it just allows me to share a whiteboard and files, but Unyte has some real potential!

Unyte is a plugin for Skype, and is Windows only.  I first tried it with Greg on Tuesday and learned that it's best used with voice instead of chat, as the chat window does obscure the display.  At that time it appeared to me that I could show Greg anything I wanted, but that he couldn't drive, but since then I've learned that I just missed a setting.

So let me back up a minute.  Co-browsing is the ability to share a web browser with a remote user, and be able to have that user both see what you're doing and to drive your web browser so you can see what they're doing.  Obviously you only want to do this with someone you trust, but the implications for distance students are great.  Most of the virtual reference packages have this capability, but from what I understand they work to varying degrees of success.  Right about this time last year I started fiddling with a service called Jybe, and it worked fairly well, though required a toolbar to be installed by both users, and they haven't updated that toolbar for Firefox 1.5, so I haven't played with it in a while.

While Unyte requires Windows to initiate a share, a session can be shared with any platform (verified this AM as I shared a session with Sherri, who's on a Mac), and according to Unyte, the other end doesn't even need Skype! (unverified by me so far).  So what we've got here is a tool that should work for any distance student, as long as you, the librarian, are running a Windows 2000 or XP machine with Skype installed.

The way it works is that I can either initiate a shared session from within Skype, or can do so from the little application tray icon that Unyte installs.  If within Skype, the user on the other end is sent a link to click, and after a moment we're both in business.  If from the application tray, you can choose to share with a Skype user or a non-Skype user, and if the latter is chosen you'll get a box with a URL you can email to someone, and again you should then be in business.  You can choose to share any individual program you're currently running, or your entire desktop (useful for remote troubleshooting in general, but so far I've stuck to sharing just a single browser window).  You can choose to share so the other end can only watch, or you can choose to share and allow them to drive as well - this option is called Allow Remote Control.

Once you're both connected, if you've allowed remote control, both users can trade off running the browser.  The big big plus with this whole system is that in all three trials I've run, the remote users was able to access and drive U of C databases w/o any hassle, which means I've now got an easy way to co-browse my databases with any of my distance students!

Incidentally, this is what the screen looks like if you are running Skype but with only the chat (not voice) enabled:

 

So it works best if you can be talking about what's going on rather than texting about it.  If you're sharing with a user who doesn't have Skype, that probably means having a phone connection would work best.

I'll keep playing with this, and hopefully will get a chance soon to use it in a real world trial.  Definitely worth a looksee though!