The Distant Librarian

Campus Community Advisory!

Bet most of you don't have this much fun on YOUR campus! This arrived via email a short time ago:

Moose tranquilized and safely removed from campus

Alberta Fish and Wildlife Officers successfully tranquilized and removed a young moose from campus this morning.

The moose wandered onto campus at about 8:20 a.m. and broke through a window in the link between Reeve Theatre and Craigie Hall. Fish and Wildlife Officers had been in the area and were able to tranquilize the moose shortly after 8:30 a.m.

Alberta Fish and Wildlife Officers were to monitor and then release the moose.

Poor moose.

Road trip survival - children's music you'll actually enjoy too!

Absolutely no relevance to libraryland, but as a public service I thought I'd throw you the names of several artists your children will love to listen to in the car, and that you'll actually appreciate too! 

1. Wiggles - NOT!
2. They Might Be Giants - not only their three wonderful kids albums (123 and ABC are my favs) but many of their "adult" songs will go over with the rugrats too - my kids love Birdhouse and Dr. Worm.
3. Ralph Covert (aka Ralph's World) - any of his albums - there's some damn good and funny stuff in here.
4. Barenaked Ladies - Snacktime.  Not as good as either of the two above, or even some of their adult stuff, but still pretty good.
5. Peter Puffin - A Calgary artist, so you may not have much luck tracking him down.  Maybe try that ILL thing I've heard about.  Again, not quite as good as #2 and #3 above, but much better than the average kids crap, and will really instill a sense of earth conciousness in your kids.
6. StoryNory Podcast - Great stories told with a lovely English accent.

I'm sure there are many others, but these have worked really well for my kids, and should work well for ages 3-9 and their parents.

Your turn - what do you listen to with your kids in the car that doesn't drive you insane?

Oh, and check out Audiobook Builder for easily building slick audiobook files for your iPod (Mac only).

Happy Road Tripping!

Educause Webinar—The Gutenberg-e Project: Opportunities and Challenges in Publishing Born-Digital Monographs

Kate Wittenberg Director, Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia (EPIC) Columbia University Topic: The Gutenberg-e Project: Opportunities and Challenges in Publishing Born-Digital Monographs Date: August 1, 2008 Time: 1:00 p.m. ET (12:00 p.m. CT, 11:00 a.m. MT, 10:00 a.m. PT). International participants: You may wish to visit this external time-conversion website to calculate the event's start time in your time zone. Duration: 1 hour

The Gutenberg-e project was created as a bold experiment to explore whether peer-reviewed, born-digital monographs would alter the way historical scholarship is presented, whether scholars would receive the same professional credit for these publications as they would from work published in print, and whether the project would enable the publication of monographs that would otherwise be turned down for financial reasons by university presses. The project has a history that includes both exciting breakthroughs and significant challenges. A number of the authors have created completely new models of collaboration in the scholarly communication process as well as new models of historical scholarship and narrative. We have come to understand that e-books require a significant level of investment in both editorial and technical staff time in order to create publications that reach their full potential as works of digital scholarship. We have also learned that integrating and sustaining this work within a collaborative publishing, library, and technology organization presents significant challenges and great opportunities. Wittenberg will discuss the project's findings and cover both the breakthroughs and obstacles encountered during the course of the project's development.

The event is free, but registration is required and virtual seating is limited. REGISTER NOW.

Jing has a Birthday, you get the gifts.

Jing is now a year old, and Techsmith is officially adopting it as a product (it used to be a project). In addition, the free Screencast.com account that comes with Jing (also free) has been upped to 2 GB of storage and 2 GB of transfer. The Jing Blog suggests that there will be some premium options available in the future. Here are my thoughts on Jing over the past year. This is one of those tools that I use on an almost daily basis to send quick how-to's to people.

O'Reilly starting to offer DRM-free PDFs

O'Reilly Press is now offering a small number of titles as print, DRM-free PDF, or both.  They've got 30 titles where you can choose your medium, and a dozen of those are also available on the Kindle.  Interesting comments, including a brief discussion of why electronic books aren't 90% cheaper than print even though there's no printing and binding and shipping costs involved, and some discussion of the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of Digital Rights Management.

Where are the library-related iPhone apps?

Peter Brantley has an interesting blog post in which he laments the lack of ebook or library-related apps for the iPhone, citing this past weekend's 3G launch as a missed opportunity. Is anyone working on such an application? If it's for a small audience (patrons of one community or institution) will Apple even allow it in the store, or does it have to be an application from someone like OCLC that can scale to collections worldwide? Accessing the library's website is one thing, but surely there are task-specific things that can be well-served from an application? (Peter points out GPS-enabled "where's the closest library with this book?" as an example).



an SMS message from the catalog - uploaded by misterbisson

Bug Shooting - Poor Man's Snag-it

Amit at Digital Inspiration writes about a pretty slick program called Bug Shooting that does much of what Snag-it does. That's quick screen captures or area captures that can be marked up to illustrate or explain. It says it's WinXP or Vista only, but it's running on my Win2K machine as well. It's not nearly as slick as Snag-it, but if you need to capture and annotate and want to do it for free, this'll definitely do the trick!

EBSCOhost 2.0 to debut on Wed July 16?

I've been wondering when in July EBSCOhost 2.0 was going to go live - just heard a rumour that it'll be this Wednesday, July 16th. TWT.

Distance Education in the world of Document Delivery

It appears that the current issue of the Journal of Interlibrary Loan, Document Delivery & Electronic Reserve has a whack of articles around Distance Education:

Journal of Interlibrary Loan, Document Delivery & Electronic Reserve (ISSN: 1072-303X)
Volume: 18 Issue: 2
Cover Date: 2008

While the Haworth Press Website says the issue's not yet published, you can at least get the abstracts from some of the EBSCO Academic Search databases. Here are the relevant citations to whet your interest.

Desktop Delivery of Printed Materials at Auburn University: AUBI Express. By: Rumble, Juliet; King, Pambanisha. Journal of Interlibrary Loan, Document Delivery & Electronic Reserves, 2008, Vol. 18 Issue 2, p229-237, 9p; DOI: 10.1080/10723030802099855; (AN 32650389)

Document Delivery for Distance Learners: Not as Difficult as You Fear. By: Washburn, Allyson; Wages, Brian. Journal of Interlibrary Loan, Document Delivery & Electronic Reserves, 2008, Vol. 18 Issue 2, p255-263, 9p; DOI: 10.1080/10723030802100034; (AN 32650392)

Providing Library Services to Distance Education Students. By: Oldham, Bonnie. Journal of Interlibrary Loan, Document Delivery & Electronic Reserves, 2008, Vol. 18 Issue 2, p219-227, 9p; DOI: 10.1080/10723030802099749; (AN 32650388)

Streamlining Document Delivery and Interlibrary Loan Services for Distance Learners: Survey and Case Study. By: Behr, Michele D.. Journal of Interlibrary Loan, Document Delivery & Electronic Reserves, 2008, Vol. 18 Issue 2, p129-139, 11p; DOI: 10.1080/10723030802097289; (AN 32650382)

Registration now open for Internet Librarian 2008

Monterey, CA • October 20 – 22, 2008
Monterey Conference Center

Full details at http://www.infotoday.com/il2008/

5 Things You Should Read about Copyright and Sharing Instructional Materials

The ACRL Instruction Session is adopting the Educause "7 things you should know about..." model with a new series entitled Five Things You Should Read About... The first publication is 5 Things You Should Read about Copyright and Sharing Instructional Materials (PDF) and was brought to my attention because it mentions the ANTS (Animated Tutorial Sharing) project I was involved with a while back. I also LOVE the Larry Lessig video they recommend you "read".

Gale's new eCatalog

Received an email about Gale's new eCatalog which I almost deleted, but then decided to take a look at.  I thought they did a good job in the email selling it as a green alternative, but was curious to see how useful it'd prove.  It's actually pretty nifty - you can link to a specific page (and send such links directly to various social networks), and each entry in the page leads out to Gale's website for more info.  It's a Flash application (Nxtbook - worth exploring?), which precludes me from highlighting specific text to use with LibX, but I wouldn't have been able to use LibX with a print catalog either, would I?  And at least after clicking through, then I can use it.  You can search, print (looks great).  Overall a pretty nifty implementation.  And now I have it bookmarked here for future reference :-)

Call for Chapters: Using Emerging Technologies in Distance Education

You are invited to submit a chapter for a new publication on using emerging technologies in distance education. Details and submission guidelines are below.

"Using Emerging Technologies in Distance Education"
- edited by George Veletsianos

Part of the "Issues in Distance Education" series
- edited by Terry Anderson
- planned publication online and in paper format by Athabasca University Press as an Open Access publication
http://www.aupress.ca

Introduction
Emerging technologies - such as virtual worlds, serious games, wikis, and social networking sites - have been heralded as technologies that are powerful enough to transform learning and teaching. Nevertheless, minimal work has investigated the affordances of such tools in the context of distance education. Most often, the literature presents a description of such technologies along with classroom integration ideas, presenting an incomplete picture of how such technologies are used in distance education. In particular, the goal of this book is to amalgamate work in the use of emerging technologies to design, enhance and deliver distance education. Researchers and practitioners interested in the above issues reside in varied academic domains, rendering the sharing and dissemination of their work a formidable task. Via this book, we hope to harness dispersed knowledge and multidisciplinary perspectives. The target audience is both members of research communities and innovative distance education practitioners.

Scope
The book will be limited to the use of emerging technologies for distance education. Recommended emerging technologies of interest for the book include, but are not limited, to:

 - Blogs
 - Microblogging platforms
 - Wikis and Wikibooks
 - Social Networking Sites
 - Virtual worlds
 - Video games
 - Cell/mobile phones and devices
 - Virtual characters, Avatars, and Pedagogical Agents
 - Web 2.0 and data mashups
 - Pod and video casts
 - Online grassroots video
 - Open Educational Resources and Open Access Technologies
 - Pod usage production models

Invited Submissions
The book will consist of chapters (5000-8000 words) showcasing best practices, illustrating and analyzing how emerging technologies have been used in diverse distance learning and teaching areas. Via such work, it is expected that each chapter will contribute a list of ideas and factors that need to be considered when emerging technologies are adopted for distance teaching and learning. Equally important, contributing authors should highlight the pedagogical, organizational, cultural, social, economic, or political factors that influence the adoption and success/failure of emerging technologies.

Audience
This book is intended to be used as a one stop locale for work relating to the use of emerging technologies in distance education. As such, it is expected to be relevant to researchers, practitioners, and students. Importantly, due to the fact that interested parties reside in multiple disciplines and academic departments, chapters should be accessible to a broad audience.

Submission Procedure

By September 1, 2008
Submit a 1-2 page chapter proposal summarizing the intended submission.
Papers should be submitted via email to: George Veletsianos at [email protected]

October 1, 2008
Author notification along with chapter guidelines

December 1, 2008
Full chapters are due.

All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a double-blind review basis.

Expected Publication date is late 2009.