The Distant Librarian

ERIC Restores Online Access to Full Text from 2005-2013

Well here's some good news!

ERIC Restores Online Access to Full Text from 2005-2013

 

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Clippick: Copy. Paste Anywhere.

Oh wow, this might actually be a real game-changer. Clippick is a cross-platform (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android) tool / app that does one thing only: you copy something on one device, and then the next time you hit Paste on any of your other devices, whatever you copied on the first device ends up there. In my very limited testing so far, text and URLs are available to paste almost instantly. Haven't tried yet with images. 

I distinctly remember sitting next to a student while helping him work through a search back in, probably 1995 or 1996 - it was when I was working at Nova Southeastern University. We were running the same search on computers next to each other, and I had found something with a long URL that I wanted to share. I thought, "self, wouldn't it be cool if there was some way I could just copy this URL and have it appear on his screen?". THIS is that tool!

As it's currently configured, you couldn't just install this on all the machines in your reference area 'cause people would be pasting other people's peanut butter all over their chocolate. But if this could be configured with multiple accounts, or some sort of trigger that support staff could flip when desired, this tool could come in play as necessary.

Check out the intro video - There's no specific iPad app, but you can install the iPhone app there and it works just fine.

How to make library instructional (or other educational) videos and screencasts

Chad Boeninger continues to make good use of both screencasting and traditional video in introducing research topics to his business students at Ohio University. In this post Chad "discusses the inexpensive equipment and software needed, and shows how to make a video from start to finish. Discusses camera selection, how to use Screencast-o-matic.com, how to edit the video in Windows Live Moviemaker, and how to upload to YouTube."

 

Nice work Chad, and nice to see you! 

After 244 years, Britannica announces it will discontinue its print version

As reported in the New York Times, "Encyclopaedia Britannica will focus primarily on its online encyclopedias and educational curriculum for schools. The last print version is the 32-volume 2010 edition, which weighs 129 pounds and includes new entries on global warming and the Human Genome Project."

It'll be interesting how this will change basic intro to research courses when "check an encyclopedia to get started" isn't actually an option...

The state of screencasting on iOS devices

With more and more apps coming out that can support your library's resources (Ebrary, BookMyne, EBSCOHost, WorldCat, and possibly something from your library, to name a few), wouldn't it be nice to be able to easily record some screencasts of the app in action on your device?

Well, unless you jailbreak your iOS device (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch), at this time you're not able use an app to record a screencast of what's happening on your device. On one hand that makes sense in that it would require one app to be running on top of another (or the rest of the OS, really) in order to record it. On the other hand, the fact that newer iOS devices offer "mirroring", the ability to display the entire device to an AppleTV, shows that it's technically possible for a whole-device screencasting application to work. Over the past few weeks there have been a few posts discussing what you currently CAN do for screencasting on your iOS device, so I thought I'd round them up here.

First up, a Profhacker post from The Chronicle of Higher Education takes a look at the apps Educreations and Explain Everything. I have a copy of Explain Everything and plan to review it here soon.

The Screening Room, Screenflow's blog, has the best post on this topic, with links to other posts that prove you CAN do this by outputting to a desktop machine, but it's gonna cost you a fair amount of money.

I had posted earlier about some similar hoops you can jump through using some different technology.

Finally, if you want to use your iPad to learn more about Camtasia Studio (on your Windows or OSX machine), Amit points out that Techsmith has released an iPad app called Fast Track that consists of a series of tutorials for that product.

How are things in the Android world, anyone know?

The importance of sweater vests and screencasting

Over at Library Voice, Chad Boeninger pops out of hibernation with an excellent post titled How I make instructional library web videos and screencasts and how you can too. In this post Chad distills his six years of experience with screencasting by answering the following questions:

1. Why Web Video?
   
2. What type of content?
3. How much time does it take?
4. How much time is saved?
5. How long should my videos be?
6. Script or no script?
7. Which software for screencasting?
8. How do I record my voice?
9. Where do you record your videos?
10. Which resolution?
11. Why and How do you add the video of yourself in the videos?
12. To edit or not?
13. How do I know when my video is done?
14. Where should I upload?
15. But you don’t use just use YouTube, do you?
16. How do I promote my videos?
17. What else should I know?

Yes, it's a long post :-)

Tips for making mobile-friendly screencasts

Over at The Screening Room, the blog to support the Mac-only screencasting product, ScreenFlow, you'll find a recent post with some guidelines for creating screencasts optimized for the iPhone and iPad. Note though that down in the comments you'll find some corrected information, so you should probably go with those figures.

While this post talks about ScreenFlow and iOS devices, the information obviously can be applied to other tools and other devices.

Update on Ebrary downloadable content

Last month I complained that it wasn't possible to download ebrary content directly to the iPad, but that's changed sometime in the intervening weeks. As outlined in this ebrary knowledgebase post, you'll first need to create an Adobe ID (you probably have one already if you've dealt with their DRM in the past), and also pre-install the free BlueFire reader. Interestingly, BlueFire is also available for Android, so I suspect this means you could download directly to Android devices as well...?

Thanks to @jolietjosh and @heidisteiner for clueing me in!

Will a librarian be crowned as ScreenChamp?

Techsmith is running a contest to determine who will be crownded the first ScreenChamp, and there's a librarian in the running! There are 15 screencasts in total, covering Education, Industry, and Entertainment. What's neat about seeing them all in the same place like this is how easy it is to compare and contrast the different styles that are used, some to great effect, and others not so much. Which one's your favorite?

ScreenConnect - another remote-assistance tool

A year ago I blogged about an article I had read that looked at different tools that could be used to either create screencasts, or allow screen sharing, in support of virtual reference transactions.

Six months ago a representative from ScreenConnect sent me an email suggesting that tool would be a good addition to the list from that post. I finally got around to taking a look (can you say "swamped"), and have to agree. A full cross-platform remote-control product, ScreenConnect is a self-hosted solution, which may be a turn off for some libraries, as so many services appear to be cloud-hosted, but I guess that's how they keep the price down. 

Lots of good documentation on the site, including this page describing how ScreenConnect fits in amongst its competitors. I also like the "Charlie Brown Teacher" component of their screencast. I must admit I didn't actually use the product, but you can download a fully-functioning 30-day free trial if it looks like something you want to explore. Oh, and there's an app for that too.

Google Kills Its Other Plus, and How to Bring It Back

From the Wired article you really should read:

(Last) Wednesday, Google retired a longer-standing “plus”: the + operator, a standard bit of syntax used to force words and phrases to appear in search results. The operator was part of Google since its launch in 1997 and built into every search engine since.

Of course I won't leave Google over this, but it does give me a reason to check out DuckDuckGo... (do you continue to use it, D'Arcy?)

Holy Crap, know what else they ditched? Google Labs! Apparently this was announced in July, but I was out of the country then and totally missed it! :-( Either follow my wayback machine link above, or troll through the painfully-slow-to-load pages at the CIO Magazine website to refresh your memory on all the goodness that once was...

Lifehacker's Five Best Screencasting or Screen Recording Tools

No surprises in here really, as Lifehacker rounds up the five best screencasting tools as submitted by its readers. My fav, Camtasia Studio, comes out on top all around, offering both a Windows and Mac version. There seem to be a lot of folks who like the free CamStudio though, if the after-poll is to be trusted:

And in related screencasting news, Techsmith, makers of Camtasia Studio, is running a contest to crown the first ScreenChamp, with a first prize of a MacBook Pro. Details here. I thought I'd use this contest as an excuse to update my screencasts on creating persistent URLs, but am concerned about the rule that says the screencast can't contain any 3rd party trademarks, logos, insignia, location signage, photographs, artwork or sculptures without the appropriate permissions... Guess I could seek permission from the database vendors... We'll see. It'd be great if a librarian won the education category, wouldn't it? :-)

Recording a screencast of your iPad2 or other tablet device

Kelly Rush of Techsmith has just posted a video showing how you can record a screencast of your iPad2 or other tablet device. To do it you have to capture the video out from the tablet; you can't do the recording on the tablet, which would be ideal, IMHO. Kelly's solution consists of the following pieces:

• A tablet (tested and verified with an Asus Transformer and Apple iPad 2; iPad 1 DOES NOT work)
• An HDMI cable (preferably 6-10 feet so you can pull it a ways from the computer tower)
• An adapter for your device (HDMI to iPad adapter, HDMI to mini HDMI, etc. Varies depending on your tablet)
• PCI-Express Avertv HD DVR High Definition Capture Card by AverMedia
• Camtasia Studio or Jing
• A computer with an open PCI-Express slot

I'm guessing based on a quick search that the speed of video capture is important, and that's what the PCI-E slot is required for. I couldn't find anything that would do the trick as a USB2 external capture solution, but did find the Blackmagic Intensity Shuttle, which is an external USB3 device that should allow the same trick. There's also a PCI-E capture card that works for Windows, Mac and Linux (for the Mac you'd obviously need a Mac Pro). 

Guess I'll take a peek at the office machine to see if I have room for such a beastie and maybe come up with an excuse to record screencasts off the iPad :-)

Screencasting on the iPad (almost)

Just ran across a link to an in-development iPad app called ShowMe, which acts as a whiteboard, recording whatever happens within the app, including audio, and then exports that to a website. I would SO love to have an app like this that can record whatever is happening on the iPad rather than just itself, but it's a start.

EBSCOHost releases an iPhone app

I haven't seen a press release or anything, but someone mentioned it on Twitter last night, so I went looking and found that EBSCO has just released an iPhone app. It'll also work on an iPad, but not at full screen.

So how does it work? Log in to one of your EBSCO databasese and scroll alllllll the way down to the bottom. There you should find a new link that says EBSCOHost iPhone/iPod Touch Application:

Click that and enter an email address, and you will receive a link to the App Store (yes, you can search and find it there w/o that link), and also a link to click that will marry the app to your specific institution. Very seamless and straightforward process. The only glitch is that the authentication code seems to work for anyone; I forwarded it to some folks in the States who corroborated that they were now seen as University of Calgary users.

I do notice that part of what that authorization does is include my institution's ezproxy prefix, so I suspect at some point it's still secure enough. Oh, and I do see in the Help file within the app that you'll need to regenerate that code every 9 months. Even w/o a code, the app gives you an option to search as a guest. You're limited to searching GreenFILE at that point.

There's just a basic search box, no option for "advanced search". Limiters such as Full Text, Peer Reviewed, date etc, appear under the Settings tab, but all the way at the bottom of the screen, below the list of databases. All databases appear to be checked by default.

The app helpfully remembers recent searches, and you can save both searches and articles for later viewing. Individual articles can be emailed, with full text, though I don't see an option to select multiple records. PDFs are available within the app. Results can be sorted by date or relevance.

Here are some screenshots for you. Overall it's a pretty nice app - well done EBSCOHost!

 

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