The Distant Librarian

Some thoughts on the Access Copyright - AUCC Model Licence

I honestly don't have anything new to add to this situation, but I wanted to throw together a few links for you to follow (legally even!) if you want to try and figure out what's going through the heads of the administrators at Canadian Universities that are planning to sign on with the Access Copyright - AUCC Model Licence. I can sure think of better places for a University to spend a large amount of money!

First, Michael Geist, as always, offers a clear and well-reasoned post: Why Universities Should Not Sign the Access Copyright - AUCC Model Licence.

Second, earlier today The Faculty Association of the University of Calgary (TUCFA) posted a link to a fascinating PDF in which CAUT, the Canadian Association of University Teachers, responds point by point to the University of Calgary's response to CAUT's concerns with the AUCC/Access Copyright model licence. 

Finally, earlier this month Ariel Katz, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, took a detailed look at how the recent decision in the Georgia State University copyright case is relevant here in Canada. He concludes that, "... American universities are much more willing to assert and defend their rights, while many Canadian ones, short-sighted, extremely risk-averse, and ill-advised, still cling to their habit of being dependent on Access Copyright."

Ouch, and spot on, IMHO!

Oh, and I notice Dr. Katz is also keeping a running list of members in the Canadian Hall of F/Sh/ame.

New Book: Screencasting for Libraries

Greg Notess, one of the first to see the possibilities of screencasting in libraries, has just announced that his new book, Screencasting for Libraries, part of the excellent ALA Tech Set series, has now been published. I had a chance to review this title a couple of months ago and found it an excellent guide for those getting started, and it also includes some good tools and suggestions for the seasoned screencaster. 

There's a companion website that provides a couple of useful tools, but I found the section where Greg covers chapter 5, Implementation, fascinating. In chapter 5 Greg walks you through 12 different projects, using several different approaches and tools. In the companion website, you can actually see the end result of each of those projects - a wonderful (and obvious, for this subject) was to complete the learning loop.

Go check it out!

Game Changers - new ebook from Educause

Educause has just released a new ebook called Game Changers: Education and Information Technologies, which you can download for free. I just ran a quick search through the 388-page PDF version and see that libraries are mentioned in a significant way about a half-dozen times, so you might find it worth your while to take a peek at least. Follow the link above to get to the table of contents as well; it's far too long to repost here! Here's the blurb from the site:

How can we reach more learners, more effectively, and with greater impact?

Education changes lives and societies, but can we sustain the current model? New models and new technologies allow us to rethink many of the premises of education—location and time, credits and credentials, knowledge creation and sharing.

Game Changers: Education and Information Technologies is a collection of chapters and case studies contributed by college and university presidents, provosts, faculty, and other stakeholders. Institutions are finding new ways of achieving higher education’s mission without being crippled by constraints or overpowered by greater expectations.

Find out who is changing the game and what we can learn from their different approaches in Game Changers.

11 tools for creating digital magazines

Can't remember how I came across this one, but over at NetMagazine you'll find a great post sharing 10 tools you can use to create professional-looking digital magazines, and most without any significant cost at all! Each entry lists the pros and cons of each tool, and links to a working example you can check out. The 11th tool in my title refers to the author's own startup, woop.ie, which is only a link at the end of the article.

 

Citing tweets in academic papers

I haven't been asked about this, but then again, I'm not dealing directly with students much these days. Amit at Digital Inspiration dug out links to the official APA and MLA guidelines on how to cite tweets in academic papers. Good to know!

 

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...

GoneReading: buy book stuff for a cause

I get about 2-3 "cold call" emails per month asking me to consider posting something "of interest to my readers" on this blog. They're pretty much never of interest to me, and thus I don't feel compelled to pass them along to you. Here's an exception.

GoneReading is a small website that sells stuff related to the reading lifestyle, such as t-shirts, bookmarks, reading lights, etc. What's great though is that GoneReading has a philanthropic mission, which donates 100% of after-tax profits to provide new funding for libraries.

Because they're new and still trying to spread the word, they've provided a discount code that's good for 25% off any purchase except the bookends, good through April 4, 2012. The code is DISTLIB25, and you can enter it on the order page towards the top, just above your billing address. There's free shipping in the US for orders over $25 too.

I don't get anything at all when you use the code; I'm just trying to help spread the word on a good cause. Do take a moment to check them out, won't you?

Some big changes from Techsmith

Two big announcements from Techsmith last week. First Jing Pro is being retired. Looks like the free version will stick around, but in order to use the more advanced features offered by Pro you'll have to switch over to the latest version of Snagit, which now records video. The folks who've taken the time to comment don't seem pleased with the decision to retire Jing Pro, so we'll see what the next year brings; maybe Techsmith will reconsider.

The second piece of news was alluded to above: there's a new version of Snagit out for both Windows and Mac, and it sports a host of new features, including greatly-enhanced video recording. From the Techsmith blog post:

What's new in Snagit?

• Video Capture (Windows and Mac)
  
• Video Outputs to Camtasia Studio, Screencast.com, YouTube, FTP, Facebook and Twitter (Windows and Mac)
  
• Image Outputs to Facebook, Twitter and Evernote (Windows and Mac)
  
• New Stamps (Windows and Mac)
  
• Paste from Clipboard (Windows and Mac)
  
• Centered Canvas (Windows)
  
• Updated, time saving profiles and more available to download (Windows)
  
• Easier Resizing (Windows)
  
• More Zoom Options (Windows)
  
• Spell Check (Windows)
  
• Change Canvas Color (Mac)
  
• Color Filters (Mac)
  
• Webcam Image Capture (Mac)
  

And here's a bit that I had forgotten: a single license is good across both platforms! Oh yeah, AND most of you can probably pick it up for 40% off with the educational discount.

I use Snagit every day on my Windows machine, but almost never on my MacBook, opting instead for Skitch. I'll certainly give Snagit another go on the Mac though...

 

The definitive guide to iOS screencasting

Well wouldn't you know it - just days after my last post lamenting the lack of options for capturing screencasts, a new tool called Reflection has been released that allows the iPad2 and iPhone4S to stream to any Mac running OSX Lion (pretty much just like airplay on AppleTV). It's $15 for a single-user license.

Over on Digital Inspiration, Amit does a nice job of wrapping up all your options to date, including examples of content produced via each method.

Stay tuned for some library-related iOS screencasts!

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?

First Annual Open Education Week - March 5-10, 2012

The OpenCourseWare Consortium announces the first annual Open Education Week from March 5-10, 2012.  Open Education Week is a global event that seeks to raise awareness about the benefits of free and open sharing in education, especially Open Educational Resources (OER). OER are high-quality, free and open educational materials that offer opportunities for people anywhere in the world to share, use and reuse. 

“The vision of the open education movement is to create a world in which the desire to learn is fully met by the opportunity to do so, where everyone, everywhere, is able to access affordable, educationally and culturally appropriate opportunities to gain whatever knowledge or training they desire. The movement encompasses producing, sharing, using and modifying content, as well as innovative models of educational delivery,” said Mary Lou Forward, executive director of the OpenCourseWare Consortium. “Open Education Week will showcase projects, resources, people and ideas so that people around the world can see the breadth of what has been accomplished already, and participate in discussions about the future of the movement.”

Open Education Week is being coordinated by the OpenCourseWare Consortium.  The event will take place online and in different locations around the world, with opportunities to participate in webinars, discussions and live events. Projects and events will be featured from institutions and organizations from around the world, including: University of Cape Town, University of Michigan, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, University of California, Irvine, Delft University of Technology, and Creative Commons. Participation is free and open to all. Visit www.openeducationweek.org for more information.

About The OpencCourseWare Consortium: The OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC) is a community of more than 250 universities and associated organizations worldwide. The mission of the OCWC and its member institutions is to advance formal and informal learning for educators and self-learners around the world through the sharing and use of free, open, high-quality education materials packaged as courses readily accessible on a digital platform.  The Consortium showcases its members to a global audience and provides information and training through webinars, newsletters, and free and open materials.  For more information, visit http://www.ocwconsortium.org.

10% of English book sales in Canada are now in digital format

I can't find the press release on the National Reading Campaign website, but a press release crossed my inbox this AM that sounds pretty interesting. Here's the PDF for your reading pleasure.

In a nutshell, the NRC now has data from a week in Jan 2011, and a week in Jan 2012, so they're able to give us some information about book sales AND book circulations from Public Libraries in Canada, including both hard and e-copy. Some of the interesting numbers:

• E-book sales comprised 10% of all books sold in English Canada. Public libraries reported that 3% of their circulation comprised digital formats. 
• 1,153,081 print books were sold by retailers including Indigo Books & Music, Amazon.ca and other national chains, as well as over 260 independent bookstores across the country. English language print book sales for the week increased 4% over 2011.
• 111,053 English language e-book sales were counted. As this is the first year counting ebook sales, no direct comparison can be made, but publishers report a “significant” increase from 2011.
• 2,141,553 print books were borrowed from 28 participating public library systems. 63,196 e-books were downloaded. Canadian libraries saw an 8% increase in print circulation and a 50% increase in digital circulation for an overall increase of 9% total circulation for libraries that participated in 2011 and 2012.

Check the full press release for further details.

Libraries & the Post-PC era

Jason Griffey's currently Down Under, and last week he gave a plenary address at VALA2012 entitled Libraries & the Post-PC era. The whole address is available online, and it's a good use of an hour of your time.

When it started, I remembered a quote I'd heard a while back that if a keynote speaker said lots of things that were new to you, then you weren't reading enough, and for the most part I *had* heard what Jason was talking about. Where it got interesting to me was about halfway through when he started talking about gadgets, and some examples of just how connected our up-and-coming users really are.

I hadn't been paying close enough attention to notice that Jason's slides were all tricked out, but he just posted how he used Keynote to do this. "My goal with the presentation was to make it look and run like no other presentation that people had seen…I don’t think I got 100% of what I wanted to achieve, but I got about 75% of the way there, and definitely got the idea across."

Neat stuff, and good infomation!

Free And Premium Video Hosting Platforms – Best Of

Looking for somewhere to host your videos or screencasts besides YouTube? Hongkiat.com has a nice annotated list of 19 video hosting services for you to take a look at. 

How Users Search the Library from a Single Search Box

A preprint from College & Research Libraries is well worth your read, even if you're not a webmaster: How Users Search the Library from a Single Search Box (from NCSU, Cory Lown, Tito Sierra, and Josh Boyer)

Abstract

Academic libraries are turning increasingly to unified search solutions to simplify search and discovery of library resources. Unfortunately, very little research has been published on library user search behavior in single search box environments. This study examines how users search a large public university library using a prominent, single search box on the library website. The article examines two semesters of real-world data, totaling nearly 1.4 million transactions. Findings include that unified library search is about more than the catalog and articles, though these predominate. Additionally, a small number of the most popular search queries accounts for a disproportionate amount of the overall queries. Also discussed are the merits of ongoing evaluation of library user search behavior.

(it's not nearly as long as you'd think upon initial download; the last half of the PDF are the images and a couple of pages of references)