The Distant Librarian

Greg Schwartz is doing something new...

You remember Greg Schwartz, one of the original, if not the first, Library-world podcasters?  He's been pretty quiet lately, taking a break for family and life in general, but he's just popped back up to announce a new venture - Uncontrolled Vocabulary.  UV is a live web-based talk show.  Greg explains it all here, including his decision to use TalkShoe to host the show.  First show is scheduled for Thursday June 28 at 10pm EDT - I'll be just coming back from vacation and may or may not be there, but please put it on your calendar and try to participate, or even just listen.  Archives will be made available.  Good luck with this Greg!  Off to create my TalkShoe account...


Technorati Tags: Libraries, Unconrolled_Vocabulary, Podcasting, TalkShoe

POD Friday!

Couple of really interesting developments in the print-on-demand world today:

1. Amazon has partnered with four (soon to be more?) libraries to digitize public domain books and then sell them in paper to consumers.
   See coverage from:
   
   • The Centered Librarian
   • ACRLog
   • Chronicle of Higher Education
   • Original Press Release
     
   
   
2. The New York Public Library appears to be the first in the nation to have a print-on-demand machine in house.  Ooh, U of Alberta up the road is getting one this fall.
   See coverage from:
   
   • Engadget
   • O'Reilly Radar

Hmm, combine these two technologies (and a heavily-modified copyright law) and you've got a new way to deliver monographs to your distance students!


Technorati Tags: Amazon, Libraries, POD, Print-on-demand, Kirtas, BookSurge

WorldCat Lists - where are the RSS feeds?

WorldCat now allows you to create lists - favorite, new, children's - these are some of the "book" lists that have already been created.  You can search on pretty much any word to see what lists contain that word (or is it only lists that have that word in the title or description?- not much documentation that I could see) or use the * to see all lists that have been created.  But where are the RSS feeds?  If I create a list of new books on a certain topic I want to be able to re-purpose that list to any other website, not force my students to come to WorldCat!  By the same token, if a reader I trust is creating a list, I want to be able to follow his/her additions.

Technorati Tags: OCLC, WorldCat, Lists, Books

Google Book Search vs Live Search Books

Stephen Leary at The Reflective Librarian has an interesting post in which he compares the shifting number of results he gets over time with Google Book Search.  Live Search Books (MSN) provides stable results, but neither service actually allows you to see the results after a certain point.  I tried to leave him this comment, but it wasn't accepted by his setup:

But Stephen, we all know that only the first page of results is all that matters!  ;-)  Really interesting post - t'would be interesting to see a long-term graph of how the results vary for a handful of phrases.  Wonder if it varies by location of the searcher as well? Here are my results for GBS: "next attack"= 911 (the first three hits are all the same book and citation!) "homeland security"= 5120, and Sapajous= 568

Technorati Tags: Google, Microsoft, books, results

New Blog for the LITA Distance Learning Interest Group

The LITA Distance Learning Interest Group has a new blog at http://dlig.wordpress.com/ It's brand new and quite empty at the moment, but plug in that RSS feed and wait for content to arrive :-)

Buy O'Reilly Books by the Chapter

Yesterday Tim O'Reilly posted about a new option for O'Reilly books - buy them by the chapter for $3.99 each!  Keeping in mind that many of O'Reilly's offerings are techie references, this might just work well for them.  Personally, $3.99 is a little steep for me to consider it, but personally, I don't buy songs at $.99/ea either, so I'm probably not the best demographic to worry about :-)  One of the commenters to the original post asked about DRM, and the response was very refreshing:

>>What kind of DRM is used with these chapters?

As with all our PDFs, there is no DRM except the trust we place in you to treat the document as you would a print book.

>>Is printing allowed, obviously for use only by the owner of the PDF?

Absolutely.

>>Is it password protected? Am I going to have any trouble with any PDF readers?

No password required. Our PDFs word best with Adobe reader, but others work too.

Technorati Tags: oreilly, books, innovation

Conference: m-libraries Information on the move..

This is way beyond what we're currently playing with at the U of C, but there's a conference coming up in November in the UK that "aims to explore and share work carried out in libraries around the world to deliver services and resources to users 'on the move,' via a growing plethora of mobile and hand-held devices. The conference will bring together researchers, technical developers, managers and library practitioners to exchange experience and expertise and generate ideas for future developments." 

Check it out:
The First International m-libraries Conference
13th -14th November 2007 at The Open University,
Milton Keynes, UK


Technorati Tags: mobile_computing, libraries

The Ultimate RSS Toolbox - 120+ RSS Resources

Mashable has just posted The Ultimate RSS Toolbox - 120+ RSS Resources which provides briefly annotated links to tools in the following categories: RSS Readers for Windows, Mac, Linux, Web, Cross-platform, and Mobile, RSS to email converters, Feed validators, Browser plugins, RSS Managers, Feed mixers, Ping tools, Feed Directories, Tips and Hacks, and Miscellaneous.  Impressive!  I'm aware of a few tools that didn't make these lists, but it's a pretty darn good place to start!

Did I mention that Meredith Farkas and I are doing a SirsiDynix Institute web seminar together?  It's on RSS for Libraries. August 7, 11AM Eastern.  Free.  If you're going to be on vacation then, subscribe to the podcast feed.

Technorati Tags: RSS

Lat/Long Bookmarklet for Google Maps

Not your typical distance education-related posting, except you might want to know where your students are - yeah, that's the connection!  ;-)

Last week my family started geocaching - great fun and I highly recommend it if you don't live deep in a big city.  Even then it can be done, but it's different.  Anyhoo, I happened to come across a post at Tech Recipes that shows a little snip of javascript that you can use while viewing Google Maps to obtain the latitude and longitude of that particular location.  They suggested,

When the location you want is in the center of the map, copy and paste this code into the location bar of your browser and press enter:

javascript:void(prompt('',gApplication.getMap().getCenter()));

A little dialog box will pop up displaying the coordinates which can be copied and pasted for use elsewhere. This code can be bookmarked and then used in the future by selecting the bookmark.

But you know there's no dang way anyone's going to remember that, so why not make it a bookmarklet?  After I whipped one up, then I checked to see if it had already been done, and found this version, but it doesn't allow you to easily copy the coordinates to another application, so I think mine's better. :-)

Drag this to your bookmarks toolbar in Firefox, then find a location in Google Maps, hit the bookmarklet, and voila!  There's your latitude and longitude ready for copying into any application.

GMaps Lat/Long  <-- Bookmarklet

Anyone want to test/modify for other browsers?

CFP: The Journal of Web Librarianship

Boy, Haworth does crank out the LibSci journals, doesn't it?

Just received a call for papers for a new title, Journal of Web Librarianship. 

The Journal of Web Librarianship is a vital journal perfect for Web librarians, digital services librarians, electronic resources librarians, and researchers who see an application for Web librarianship to their own work.

Looks like Brian Matthews has a column called Social Eyes in this publication - might have to pick it up for that alone, though there does appear to be some other good content in the first upcoming issues as well.

Room Change: LITA Distance Learning Interest Group meeting at ALA

FYI, from Karen Wetzel, co-chair of the group, this is the updated room information for this meeting - the information in the printed guide is incorrect:

What: LITA Distance Learning Interest Group Meeting
Where: Renaissance Washington - Room 2
When: Saturday, June 23rd, 10:30 a.m. - 12 noon

These meetings have been fairly informal in the past, providing an opportunity for us to engage with each other as a community about ongoing issues, new projects, and shared success stories. Please let Karen know if you have any specific items you would like to see on the agenda.

I am also pleased to let you know that the interest group now has a new co-chair: Lauren Pressley, Microtext Specialist; Research, Instruction & Information Services, Z. Smith Reynolds Library, Wake Forest University. Lauren has helped us create a new blog for our group, so please come with ideas on what you would like to see there and let us know if you would like to contribute. I hope to see you in DC!

Technorati Tags: LITA, ALA, Distance_Education

David Lee King crosses over to the Mainstream

Well ok, probably not mainstream, but a different niche area; Tim O'Relly at O'Reilly Radar has just discovered David's "Are you Blogging This" video from last August.  As a result, or coincidentally, David's website is down as of this posting.  It is a cute video...


Technorati Tags: Web_2.0, YouTube, David_Lee_King

Web-based IM - More than just Meebo

Meebo certainly seems to be the weapon of choice, at least amongst libraries, but did you realize there are other web-based IM options out there?  Robin Good provides details on a cool dozen in his post, Web-Based Instant Messengers: A Mini-Guide.  Don't want to Meebo, why not Snimmer or Mabber?  (the names aren't all that silly).


Technorati Tags: IM, Meebo, Chat, KoolIM, eBuddy, Radius, Snimmer, Mabber, EasyMeessenger, IMunitive, Messenger_FX

She's Baaaack - schwagbag

Well it's been an awfully long time, but Sherri Vokey, with three posts in the past week, really really does seem to be back posting at schwagbag.  Yay!  Sherri's a librarian at the University of Winnipeg, and was a prolific and most excellent blogger a couple of years ago, but gave it up about a year ago when she moved from UNLV to the U of Toronto.  Back in Winnipeg, where she was an intern to start her career, she seems to be itching to blog again, and 'bout time too!  So if you've just started reading blogs in the last year or so you won't have hers in your aggregator, but you should.  In the past, lots of similar interests to what you'd find here (we spoke together at Internet Librarian in 2005), but different too, of course.  Definitely check it out, mkay?  Hey Sherri, where's the link to your archives by date?

Lazy Web Request - Inserting Hyperlinks in Thunderbird with a right click?

I've searched and I can't find, can someone out there help?  I hate having to highlight and then move to the composition menu bar to insert a hyperlink within Thunderbird (v2).  I think there should be an option to highlight the text and then just use the right-click menu pop-up on my mouse. 

Clarification:

Technorati Tags: Thunderbird, Hyperlinks

How many distance students do YOU support?

Diana Oblinger of Educause is currently visiting China, and in a recent post about just how many people there are involved in Higher Education in China she notes: "Distance education in China also takes on amazing dimensions. Two million students are enrolled in their distance education programs. The day I visited Beijing Normal University, historically a teacher education institution, they were conducting in-service training for 10,000 teachers."  Wow!  Lots of other interesting tidbits in the post. 

Of course, the Sloan-C Foundation, in their Online Education in the United States, 2006 survey, reports that, "Nearly 3.2 million students were taking at least one online course during the fall 2005 term, a substantial increase over the 2.3 million reported the previous year."


Technorati Tags: China, Size, Distance_Education

What does "Library services for distance learning" mean to you?

Laurie has a thought-provoking post wondering if the concept of "library services for distance learning" has died.  She cites primarily the lack of participation in regional and national distance education interest groups (CLA and COPPUL here in Canada, and the OFFCAMP listserve).  She and I briefly kicked around this question last week, and one group I didn't consider is the ACRL Distance Learning Section - is that more active, or does it follow the same trends noted by Laurie?  Looks like they got 270 respondents to a membership survey a couple of years ago - that's pretty good!  If ACRL DLS is more active, what's the secret of their success?  Is this niche only big enough for one such group?  Any thoughts?  Leave them here, or with Laurie, if you would :-)


Technorati Tags: distance_education, librarianship

Promoting digital collections in YouTube, Flickr, etc.

A couple of followups to my post on putting content where your users are; Jenny Levine points to this YouTube video promoting the digital collections at the University of North Texas,



and a colleague alerted me to this Flickr set promoting the NCSU Libraries Special Collections Research Center.

We've got some great digital collections here at the U of C, and I suspect we could do more to promote them.  These types of collections are gold mines!


Technorati Tags: promotion, YouTube, Flickr, Libraries