The Distant Librarian

Accessing MeeboMe Widgets in Pidgin

Chad Boeninger has a comprehensive post at Library Voice describing how to view your MeeboMe widgets while using Pidgin (formerly GAIM), thus obviating the need to have Meebo open in a website at all.  I haven't tried Pidgin in a long time, but would LOVE not to have to have a web page open in order to receive chats via the MeeboMe widget, so I'll be trying this one out.  In the comments, Caleb points out that "you can monitor MeeboMe with any XMPP client", which makes me think that Trillian Pro might be able to be made to talk to MeeboMe as well.


Technorati Tags: IM, Meebo, Pidgin

Jossey-Bass O-T-L Conference Online

I'm cleaning out email after my vacation and wanted to get this one out as there's a fee increase after August 31.  I have no affiliation with this group, but Jossey-Bass is promoting several of its books through an online conference October 17-18.  When you register you can also choose three book titles to keep.  One of the sessions is called Exploring the Digital Library: A Guide for Online Teaching and Learning and is being facilitated by the authors of the book by the same title, Kay Johnson and Elaine Magusin, both from Athabasca University here in Alberta.  The description of their session is as follows:

This session addresses the key issues in providing library services for faculty and their students in the online learning environment. Facilitated by librarians at Athabasca University, a leading institution in distance education, this workshop shows how faculty can effectively use digital libraries in their day-to-day work and in the design of electronic courses.

Might be worth the registration for that session alone :-)

On vacation

Neglected to warn y'all that I'm on vacation almost until the end of the month.  Installed Google Gears earlier today and really do like it in my situation of very limited wireless access - am going to be able to keep up with the RSS feeds at my leisure now :-)  See you when the kids are back in school.

Gale now offers RSS feeds

As part of a suite of interface changes, Gale is now offering the ability to subscribe to search alerts via RSS.  Just as with EBSCO, when I added the alert to Google Reader it came back with no results, so I'm assuming it will start feeding me new results when they're added to the database.  Easy enough to find the option; it appears to the right at the top of your search results, and if you subscribe to Gale databases you should be finding that option right now.  (that's also where you'll sign up for email alerts, should you swing that way).  The feed does include my institution's EZProxy info, so I'm hoping I'll be able to click through to read full text from off campus:


(click for full size)

Also of interest to those of you who build persistent URLs to Gale results, you won't be looking for the "InfoMark" anymore, just look for the option to "Bookmark" the page:



Technorati Tags: RSS, Gale, InfoTrac, PURLs

Comparison of online Powerpoint hosting options

Amit at Digital Inspiration has a great comparison of the following tools, all of which can be used to host PowerPoint presentations online: Zoho Show, SlideShare, Scribd, SlideAware, and Splashcast.  You can also skip to the end result and see the same slideshow displayed from each site all on the same page.


Technorati Tags: PowerPoint, Zoho, SlideShare, Scribd, SlideAware, Splashcast,

iLibrarian: Subscribed

Over the past few weeks especially I keep seeing references to the iLibrarian blog run by Ellyssa Kroski at Columbia University.  If you're at all interested in the stuff that makes up "Library 2.0" you should check it out.

Everything you'd want to know about Full-text searching in Books

The title's obviously a bit of an exaggeration, but LISNews has posted an article by Scott Boren that is in fact crammed full of interesting information about the state of full-text book searching.  Scott appears to have initially written the article for the National Library of Education, and credits a talk given by Greg Notess at Computers in Libraries earlier this year as the inspiration for this article.

Cool tool I hadn't known about before - Booksearch x3, which simultaneously searches A9.com (aka Amazon), Google, and MSN Book Search.  That should prove to be a real timesaver!  Got some time to kill?  Check out the site of Alan Taylor, the guy who whipped together Booksearch x3.  Wow.


Technorati Tags: ebooks

CafeScribe - online textbooks

Not very much content there yet, mostly law titles, but CafeScribe seems to be somewhat like ebrary for textbooks - you can search, highlight and take notes in the volumes you purchase.

Found via Mashable.

Social Bookmarking in Plain English

The latest tutorial from Common Craft is out - Social Bookmarking in Plain English.  I learned that I no longer have to remember where the dots go in del.icio.us, I can just type delicious.com:



Technorati Tags: Delicious, Common_Craft

Demotivator Lithographs on Sale

It's Friday, it's raining, and the end of the summer is in view already.  It's time for some Demotivators.  Despair.com has a sale on all their Demotivator Lithographs ("they're like posters, only swankier") until August 15th.  Not familiar with them?  Here are a few of my faves:

 

$9.95 for 24"x30" - what's not to like?  :-(

Adobe Captivate 3 Library examples

In response to my earlier post about the pre-release of Adobe Captivate 3 (screencasting product), Kristofer Scheid at The Nexus 6 has posted his initial thoughts on the product, along with a couple of examples.  Thanks Kristofer!


Technorati Tags: Screencasting, Captivate

EBSCO RSS Feeds

Jenny Levine at The Shifted Librarian breaks the news that EBSCO has finally fully integrated their RSS alerts.  Confirmed on my institution's subscription as well.  See her post for full details.


Technorati Tags: RSS, EBSCO

WIMZI - AIM anonymous chat widget (like MeeboMe)

If for some reason you wanted to have a single-platform embedded widget to allow users to talk to your AIM account, you now have WIMZI, which is exactly like MeeboMe, except it only connects to AIM.

Technorati Tags: IM, AIM, WIMZI, Meebo

Top 10 e-learning tools

From the July issue of TL Infobits comes mention of the results of a survey conducted by the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies in the UK in which 64 e-learning experts (I saw one librarian on the list) recommended their top e-learning tools.  The results of the survey can be found at http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/recommended/index.html.  #1 is FireFox, followed by del.icio.us and then a whole whack of different Google products.  Check it out, you might find something worth trying.  I currently (and regularly) use 13 of the top 15, missing only WordPress and WikiSpaces, though I use alternate platforms for each of those tool types.  You can contribute as well, if you're an e-learning pro with a different toolbox.

APA Exposed!

No, there's no scandal, I just threw the exclamation point on there to catch your eye.  APA Exposed is the title of a really well-done tutorial on how to format papers using APA style.  Put together as a flash slideshow by Wendy Mages, a Harvard Graduate School of Education, it runs 40 minutes, so is definitely on the long side, but it's quite entertaining and I'm sure would prove useful to may students.  Wendy's got a really good and engaging speaking style, and there's a navigation menu to help you jump around if you want to skip sections.

CFP: Off-Campus Library Services Conference

The Call for Participation for the Thirteenth Off-Campus Library Services Conference has been posted.  The deadline for submission is September 30, 2007. All presenters will
be notified regarding their proposal status by October 31, 2007. The
written paper will be due January 5,  2008.  Submissions are accepted for Presentations, Workshops, Panel discussions or Poster sessions.

The conference is to be held in Salt Lake City, UT April 23-25, 2008.


Technorati Tags: OCLSC