The Distant Librarian

Adobe Captivate 3 Trial now available

I'm not sure where the actual blog post has gone, but Silke Fleischer reports that Adobe Captivate 3 trial is now available for download. I tried to get in as a beta tester for this release, but neither the beta nor this trial version run on Windows 2000, though Silke says the full release version will.

2007 Survey of the Biblioblogosphere

Meredith Farkas is repeating the survey she did a couple of years ago to try and get another snapshot of the Biblioblogosphere.  If you're involved in the library world and are a blogger, please consider taking her survey. I just finished it and have a couple of suggestions for clarification in the next iteration :-)  1) Define large urban area (Calgary's pretty large for this country, but maybe not for the world - I said we were large at just over 1 million in population).  2) For the revenue question, I'd be really interested in learning how much people earn.  From my Google Ads I make just enough to cover my annual subscription to TypePad...

The results of the 2005 survey can be found here, including the following breakdown: Demographics, Blog Demographics, Attitudes and Behaviors, and Why we blog.

RSS Updates

A couple of things to note before the weekend - Roddy MacLeod has a really good overview article on RSS in the most recent issue of the FreePint Newsletter: "RSS Update: It's RSS, Jim, but Not as We Know It".  Lots of good links in there, including one to a project he's working on called TicTOCs.  TicTOCs, an RSS Table of Contents alerting service, will be free to all when launched, hopefully by Spring 2008, and will initially be aimed at the UK crowd (major sponsor is JISC), though  Roddy says it should be usable worldwide.  You can follow along with developments at the ticTOCs blog. 
And if you're interested in that article, you may be interested in the SIRSI/Dynix Institute presentation Meredith Farkas and I are doing on August 7 on RSS for Libraries.  Registration is free for the one-hour session, and a recording will be made as well.


Technorati Tags: RSS, Libraries, ticTOC

Blogs vs traditional literature

The opening section in Walt Crawford's most recent issue (August 2007) of Cites & Insights really resonated with me.  Entitled On the Literature, he begins with, "I believe that gray literature—blogs, this ejournal, a few similar publications and some lists—represents the most compelling and worthwhile literature in the library field today."  He goes on to describe how he uses blogs for his primary source for information on contemporary library literature, and cites his recent book, Balanced Libraries, as evidence of that. 

I, too, get most of my current library info from blogs; both the original thoughts of their authors, but also pointers to the best of the traditional print literature.  I try to stay current with the print literature, but it's so much more convenient to receive postings in my aggregator (though I do of course receive what TOCs I can via RSS).  I recently read an article about IM reference service, and actually started at the list of references to see if any blog postings were referenced.  Not a one.  While the article was solid, I wondered if the authors had read the most current information from the front lines - the reports from the bloggers.  Why no mention of the coverage of this topic in the Library Best Practices Wiki for an organic way of keeping up-to-date on this (or almost any other) topic?

Later in this same section, but also creeping into a later seemingly unrelated section, are quotes from bloggers on why blogging is so much better at disseminating current tech information than the traditional literature (mostly a matter of currency) and why librarians decide to publish in which medium.  Stephen Bell is quoted (out of context by me and with emphasis added) as saying,

I can’t say any individual has developed a blog that has emerged as the ‘voice of academic librarianship,’ ” noted Bell in response to my query. “Why? If I had to advance a theory I’d say that as academic librarians we are still geared towards traditional, journal publishing as the way to express ourselves. I know that if I have something on my mind that I’d like to write about to share my thoughts and opinions, I’m more likely to write something for formal publication (e.g., see this piece.) 

That couldn't be further from the truth for me!  If I've got something on my mind now, I want to get it out there now, now months later.  It's exciting for me to get a good thought-provoking post up (rarely though that may be ;-) and see what other people have to say about it.  It's satisfying to see my name in a peer-reviewed journal a year after I started the submission process, but it's not exciting.  Lorcan Dempsy, responding to the same opening in Walt's essay, understands that too:

Gray? Gray! Blogs, reports published on the web, web journals: these are brightly colored and shining. They are connected to the life of the web - link and search - and are visible, referencable and available.

In contrast most of the formal library literature is a very dreary affair. Dull publications, hidden for the most part from the web. Determined not to have any influence outside their niche. Gray, Gray, Gray ....

I guess all I'm trying to do here is side with Walt.  There's great information in the traditional literature, but there's also wonderful information, sometimes even written by the same people, in the blogosphere.  I read it and I'm proud of it.  I write it, and I'm proud of that too.  But I'm preaching to the choir here, aren't I?

Self-destructing email

  BigString 
  Originally uploaded by ppival

Saw this post at Ars Technica describing a service called BigString that allows one to send self-destructing email.  They do it by sending an image of whatever text you type, and then depending on the parameters you set, make that image (still actually hosted at BigString) expire after a certain time.  What intrigued me about this is that we're about to launch a post-to-web document delivery service here that supposedly does something similar.  Once the recipient has printed the article once it's deleted from our servers.  I was curious to know if BigString could be used as a poor-man's post-to-web document delivery service.  Alas, only text entered at the site can be converted and tracked, so no way to scan an article and send it through the service.  Neat idea though.

Worldcat Meets Wikipedia: Open Library

I haven't been paying much attention to the announcement early this week about the new demo of Open Library, but I finally found myself on the site of the Disruptive Library Technology Jester, Peter Murray, and he's got a 12-minute screencast of how the thing works.  In a nutshell, to me it seems like Worldcat meets Wikipedia - the idea is to create records about every book on the planet, and anyone can add data about any title.  Not much there yet, but who knows - I'm sure everyone scoffed at Wikipedia when it launched too :-)

ARL White Paper on Interlibrary Loan

Stephen Abram points to a recently-released white paper on interlibrary loan, from ARL.  You won't find any actual numbers in this 4 (barely)-pager, but you will find some interesting trends.  ILL for returnables (books) is generally up, according to statistics from several sources, but ILL for non-returnables is generally pretty far down.  There are some possible reasons for these trends discussed. 

I found it interesting that in the preamble the author made it sound that ILL is quite the restrictive service; I've always thought of it as an enhancing service...

"Research and academic libraries provide ILL services only to their own clearly defined user community. Since ILL services are costly to operate, libraries attempt to control the volume of lending requests that they handle. Research and academic libraries set up reciprocal arrangements with very specific and limited numbers of partner libraries. Fees are charged to libraries not in those consortial arrangements to set up a barrier for non-reciprocal sites and discourage use of interlibrary loan."

What she writes is all true, it just sounds as though we're really begrudging the service!

More Screencasting News - ViewletBuilder 5 released

Qarbon's ViewletBuilder was the first piece of software I seriously used for screencasting, way back before we knew what to call it :-)  I haven't used it lately, but see they've just released version 5, so I'll have to give it a quick try.


Technorati Tags: Screencasting, ViewletBuilder

Technology Readiness

Stephen Bell at ACRLog posts about data from a survey of technology readiness that may help explain why you feel overwhelmed by all this new stuff there is to play with, but also why your more experienced colleagues are even less likely to want to play with it.  Interesting stuff.

Jing - Techsmith's first screen capture and screencasting product for the Mac

Interesting that I'm more excited about Jing being Techsmith's first foray into OSX than I am about the product itself, but there you go!  It's available for Windows too, but only XP and Vista, not 2K, which is what I run at the office, so I haven't played with it on the Windows side.  Techsmith makes SnagIt and Camtasia Studio, two screen capture products I use regularly (pretty much every day for SnagIt).  Jing is a different twist on those products.

Jing is like a stripped-down version of SnagIt and Camtasia in one small package.  The idea is to be able to quickly capture either an image (with annotations if you like) or a short video screencast (5 minutes or less, can include audio) and then immediately upload that puppy to Techsmith's Screencast.com site (account included with the software) and have a URL pasted to your clipboard ready to paste into a blog comment field or an email.  That's it.

Doesn't sound revolutionary, but it could really come in handy - it's almost impossible to leave any rich media in a blog comment field, but it's usually possible to leave a URL, so if you want to illustrate something (picture or video) to go along with your comment, this is a really easy way to do that.

This is beta software so expect a glitch or two, but it does seem to work pretty well.  There's no documentation on how it works that I can find, but it's simple enough that you don't really need it.

How will I use it to support my distance students?  I often use a series of screen captures to illustrate how to search for a particular subject in one of our databases.  A screencast might be a more effective way to illustrate a simple concept, but firing up Camtasia Studio and then rendering and uploading the finished product is too much of a hassle.  Jing is always on in the background, ready to capture what you're doing - I could capture the few steps I took for the student along with audio, immediately have it uploaded and then just pop that URL into the email to the student.

A history of previous captures (image and video) is always available as well, so if you make that first video generic enough, you can send it over and over again to as many students as necessary (and remember you're just sending the URL, so no email filesize limits to worry about).

So here's a quick video capture for you.
And here's an image capture.

Doesn't make a lot of sense in this context where I could just as easily embed an image, but again imagine a blog comment field, or a Facebook Wall post, or anywhere bandwidth is an issue and you'll start to see some possibilities.

I'm really hoping that this means a full-fledged version of SnagIt and Captivate are on the way for OSX!  Jing is free to download, and there's a blog for the project as well.


Technorati Tags: Jing, Techsmith, OSX, Screencasting

Taking a cue from Brian

One of the nice things about Google taking over the Newsgroup and archives several years ago is that I can subscribe to them with an RSS feed and consume them along with the rest of my daily updates.  One of the ones I subscribe to is the local forsale newsgroup, and this AM I noticed the following posting:

I'm a U of A alumnus in Calgary and I need to do some online library research at the U of C for the next month. I need to borrow a UofC library card. No books will be taken out. Any charges guaranteed covered. Best offer.

Of course it's a violation of our licenses and the Terms of Service each student signs to share their ID numbers.  I responded in the newsgroup:

Rather than enticing a current student to break his/her terms of service re: their ID card, why not come to campus - you can use any of our databases w/o authorization as a walk-in user.  Did you know that Calgary Public Library also offers a pretty good suite of online databases? http://calgarypubliclibrary.com/elibrary/

Hope this helps, your friendly neighborhood Newsgroup-reading librarian,

Paul

Wonder if he'll bother to respond?  Wonder if the rest of the group will flame me?  How's that for being ubiquitous? ;-)

Librarian 2.0 - Interviews on the future of libraries

A couple of months ago Will Sherman, writing for DegreeTutor.com, interviewed me as part of a series on the Future of Libraries.  Will came to the attention of the library world earlier this year with his good piece, 33 Reasons Why Libraries and Librarians are Still Extremely Important.  The series of interviews with Librarians and others involved in the industry has just been posted, and I'm really surprised by the company I'm with.  <garth>"I'm not worthy!"</garth>.  Seriously, you can read my thoughts, but I'm off to read what these other 24 folks are thinking.

Recommended article in ONLINE

I second Judith's recommendation to read William Badke's new column, InfoLit Land, in ONLINE.  You can't find it on the open web, but it's in all the big aggregators (ProQuest, EBSCO, InfoTrac, though none yet have the July/August issue up).  Last issue's column (May/June Vol. 31(3), pp. 50-52) was Bill's intro, A Champion of Information Literacy, in which he outlines his credentials, but also gives us a hint at things to come:

For upcoming columns, I hope to look at ways to help students optimize thesaurus use in databases and to guide practitioners in new online noncommercial tools for plagiarism detection. I would like to evaluate the good and the bad of federated searching, enter the dark world of those who use only the open Web as an information source, and provide tips for those of us who are trying to convince our personal powers that be that information literacy is crucial to an educated work force. I want to explore the use of analog resources to teach digital navigation. I hope to determine whether or not it is possible to write a decent research paper using Google Scholar, Google Book Search, or A9.com alone. If so, the implications for up-and-coming researchers are promising and terrifying.

I've worked with Bill before - when it comes to InfoLit, he knows his stuff!  More on this current column, Blind Co-Browsing, Teachable Moments, and the Power of Gaming, soon.

Technorati Tags: Badke, InfoLit

Setting them free

I did some searching on Google News and it doesn't look like this story was widely-distributed, so here's a link to my local paper's version.  Unfortunately my local paper's website sucks and this link will most likely disappear within the week, so read it quickly if this interests you.

The article profiles three authors who've decided to make their work available for free on the web, and tell how successful they've been in this endeavor.  'Course the article's pretty one-sided in the genre discussed (all three are sci-fi writers) and by not pointing out that there are probably plenty of writers who've failed at this as well.  But still, it's nice to see this mentioned in the mainstream.


Technorati Tags: open_access, online_books

Trillian Astra to include web option

One of the nicest features of Meebo is that it can be used w/o any installation - if you've got access to the web you can use it.  One of the nicest features of Trillian is that it also includes Google Talk in its stable.  I just saw this video of the upcoming release (no date yet) of Trillian Astra in which the developer suggests Astra will have a web interface as well:


The other killer feature of Meebo for me is the MeeboMe widget, which allows anyone to chat instantly even w/o an account on any service.  If Trillian Astra offered a web-embeddable widget AND allowed me to interface with all four of the big IM clients I'd probably switch.  Personally I prefer to have a client on my desktop as well, so if Astra offers the choice of client or web, and if they offer a widget (I've seen no mention that they are though, unless this is it), I'd be pretty darn happy!


Technorati Tags: Meebo, Trillian, IM, Astra