The Distant Librarian

Google Unveils Cellphone Version of Digital-Book Collection

As reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Google has just made 1.5 million of their scanned books and made them available in a format suitable for reading on mobile devices.  Oddly, at this moment getting there is not an option from their official iPhone app, nor does visiting http://books.google.com on the iPhone automatically redirect to http://books.google.com/googlebooks/mobile/.  Here are some screen shots for you:

New Journal: International Journal of Library and Information Science

Not entirely sure we need another one, but the International Journal of Library and Information Science will launch in May 2009.  Oh, well this is good - it's an Open Access publication.  Grr, they offer email alerts for TOC, but no RSS.  Doesn't look like any of their titles do.

Magic Sharing Box - USE IT!

Wow, hard to believe it was 2.5 years ago that I wrote about The Pig and the Box!  Surely you remember the story of the pig named Pig who finds a magic box that can replicate anything?  Well this kids book about the folly of Digital Rights Management (aka DRM) is being reprinted (here's the free PDF) and is now more widely available. 

This time I really am going to get a copy and see what my kids think of the parable.  I think some more libraries need to pick this up too!

3 services to monitor website changes w/o RSS

Here are three free services that will monitor changes to websites and notify you by email when they do change.

• Watch That Page
• ChangeDetection.com
• Follow That Page

Followup on New Media into Old

Last week I mentioned a couple of interviews that had tweaked my interest in a solution for automatically creating a printed "newspaper" of individual blog postings that I wanted to devote more time to.  Clint Lalonde left a comment suggesting FeedJournal, so I went to take a peek, and it's almost perfect for what I want to do.  FeedJournal allows you to subscribe to any RSS feed(s) and then spits out a nicely formatted PDF for you to read.  You can specify the number of columns and whether it's justified or not - looks pretty good.  But I didn't want to subscribe to entire feeds - just individual posts.  Well, the tool's author suggests subscribing to a specific tag within Google Reader; any other filtering mechanism should work as well.  Last step for me though is that the RSS reader I use on my iPhone doesn't allow me to re-tag articles, so I decided to just grab the feed for my shared items, which I then fed to FeedJournal and voila!

Except I don't want to have to visit FeedJournal each time I want to generate my "newspaper", and FeedJournal doesn't have any scheduling options.  Well, they do with a different version of the product that costs $59/month.

So I found this comparison of FeedJournal of Tabbloid, an HP project (isn't that brilliant for a printer company?)  Does the same thing as FeedJournal, though with fewer options for customization.  But it allows me to schedule delivery of the PDF created by the feed I gave them.  I just received the first delivery, so it seems to work well!  oops, except it has all the items in the feed, not just the most recent.  No problem, I just printed the first few pages, and perhaps the next delivery will only include new stuff.

I'm a happy reader!

That's Infotainment! - Great screencasting article

Ellyssa Kroski has an article that 's just been published in School Library Journal titled That's Infotainment, and it provides a really good overview of the current state of screencasting, with the following topics covered: What is screencasting?, Web site tours, Library functions, Software and database training, Slideshow screencasts (slidecasts), Staff training, Student assignments, Hardware, Software, The process, Distribution, Fast Tips, and More Resources. 

Check it out!