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The Krafty Librarian reports that in response to customer feedback, OvidSP will be introducing some platform enhancements on Monday, March 31. Looks like some good tweaks, though no mention of the ability to tweak the OvidSP Tip box.
Technorati Tags: OvidSP
Two different ways to explain the same weird situation - which one works better for you?
PBS NewsHour (thanks for the link Dad)
The Subprime Primer, explained by Stick Men (contains potentially offensive language)
Hope not too many of you are directly caught in this mess :-/
Another CBC Podcast to recommend, or at least a specific episode: Spark podcast. In the most recent episode they interview Lee Lefever, part of the creative force behind the ...in Plain English series of screenpapercasts. The title of this post comes from the end of their interview where Lee is put on the spot to explain the concept of podcasting but w/o his usual props. He did a good job. Common Craft's latest papercast is Twitter in Plain English, and I think it does a really good job; I'm only on Twitter because other people I care about are on Twitter, and I'm curious to know what they're doing in their day-to-day lives...
Primary Research Group is about to release the results of their Survey of Library Services for Distance Learning Programs. I participated in this survey and am supposed to receive a free copy - will let you know if it's worth buying, but here's what it covers.
This 145 page report gives extensive data, broken out by size and type of college, for public and private colleges, and for U.S. and Non-U.S. libraries. Among the more than 500 tables of data presented is information about: use of real time chat and virtual reference services for distance learners; percentage of libraries that offer special classes for distance learners; future plans to offer information literacy courses to distance learners; policies on providing web pages, blogs or listservs that specifically serve the needs of distance learners; number of interactive online tutorials provided to distance learners; state of relations between the library and distance learning instructors; percentage of libraries with equivalent of library orientation program for distance learners; the role that libraries play in distance learning orientation; percentage of libraries that maintain agreements with other colleges to offer library services to their students; percentage of libraries with an official liason to the distance learning program; percentage of libraries with a full time position devoted to distance learning; staff size for library distance learning staffs; policies on line item in the library budget for distance learning; evaluation of distance learners use of the library; evaluation of distance learners information literacy skills; distance learner attitudes towards the library; assessment of the reference needs of distance learners; electronic reserve policies for distance learners; spending on shipping costs to serve distance learners; library’s primary means of shipping books and other materials to distance learners; library staff responsible for serving distance learners; provision of remote assistance by the library in how to use the courseware management system; level of access to library databases provided to distance learners; copyright issues; annual salary of librarians devoted to distance learning.Sounds pretty interesting!
Cool! Not a program I would've watched ordinarily, but I'll be giving it a shot. Michael Geist points out that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation plans to freely release a high-resolution version of Canada's Next Great Prime Minister via peer-to-peer networks without any DRM restrictions. And in a Naked Conversations moment, Tessa Sproule, CBC's Executive in Charge of Digital Programming, weighs in with a comment.
On a side note, I haven't visited the CBC's home page in a while - check out all the links for podcasts and oooh, the archives. Here's a piece from December 1979 - a Buyer's Guide to Digital Watches (one model even has an alarm!)
Technorati Tags: CBC, Bittorrent
Search Engine Showdown posts that Amazon appears to be dropping the Search Inside this Book feature! And the end of the post they note the apparent partial reappearance of the links, but when I went in today, while I could find plenty of logos on the book covers, I couldn't search inside books that I had previously been able to. Anyone hear any official scoop? The publisher sign-up page is still there... I'd sure hate for this to go :-/
Technorati Tags: Amazon
Techsmith is currently running a couple of brief surveys to find out what folks think are the most important features for their under-development-versions of SnagIt and Camtasia Studio for the Mac. Why not take a couple of minutes to let them know what you think:
Just in time for the weekend, of course.
I couldn't resist the headline when I saw that as part of the layoffs they were going to refocus on "providing answers to its core audience of women searching on... reference topics". ;-)
Stephen Abram has a good number of links on this shakeup.
Technorati Tags: Ask.com, restructuring
This year, the 37th Workshop on Instruction in Library Use (WILU) is held in Kelowna, BC at UBC Okanagan, from May 14-16. The preliminary program has just been announced.
Technorati Tags: WILU08, InfoLit
