The Distant Librarian

Considering Apple News+? Don't forget to check your local library first!

I guess I'll wait to see what TV+ brings later before declaring yesterday's Apple event a total yawner, but it did remind me to check out Flipster and Browzine again before spending any time and money on News+. What are Flipster and Browzine, you ask? They're digital magazine and journal platforms that you might want to check before you shell out money to Apple, since you may already be able to access the content you want for free.

Flipster is available to me through my local public library, and offers only 51 titles, though what your library offers likely differs. You can browse all potentially-available titles on the EBSCO Flipster site.

Browzine is more oriented towards scholarly literature, and is thus likely offered through your local college or university. I couldn't find a list of individual titles, but here's a list of the publishers they cover.

Both offer apps for your iOS (and Android) devices, and both work quite nicely.

Oh, and for newspapers, poke around your public library web page for PressReader.

Here's a list of the titles available in Canada for News+.

UPDATE: Lifehacker has a similar post, and theirs clued me in to something called RBdigital Magazines, which was new to me. My Public Library has it, and it appears to offer 190 titles, so depending on what they all are, possibly my best bet. Will be exploring...

4 Easy & Secure Ways to Record Screen Videos on iPhone or iPad: A Comparative Guide

I received an email from JP letting me know that a link on an old post of mine, The definitive guide to iOS screencasting, was no longer good.  He knew that 'cause he'd just finished writing a much more comprehensive post called 4 Easy & Secure Ways to Record Screen Videos on iPhone or iPad: A Comparative Guide. Interestingly, no new tools in the last 4 years - guess the ones that are out there are good enough! 

Thanks for the note JP.

13 Tips for Recording Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod

In the most recent TechSmith newsletter was a link to recent post on their site titled, 13 Tips for Recording Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod. In addition to the useful information, it was nice to see the author using screencasts of iOS devices to illustrate what was being discussed :-)

to wit:

OS X Yosemite Makes it Easy to Screencast iOS Apps

Here's a nifty feature to look forward to in the fall - the ability to record screencasts of your iOS apps in order to incorporate them in to tutorials, etc...

Once you connect an iOS 8 device to your Mac running OS X 10.10, it will be automatically available as a video camera. You can then capture anything you’re doing on-screen directly to your Mac using QuickTime Player.

Source: iPhone in Canada

5th International m-libraries Conference 2014 - in Hong Kong

Ooooh, that's a tempting location!

5th International m-libraries Conference 2014, Hong Kong, May 27-30, 2014.

Early bird registration is now open for the 5th International m-libraries Conference to be held for the first time in Asia at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. With the theme 'm-libraries: from devices to people', the programme includes international keynote speakers and parallel sessions of around 40 papers. The conference aims to bring together international researchers, educators, technical developers and library professionals to share their expertise. A pre-conference workshop focusing on mobile technology skills, and post-conference library visits are available. Please visit our conference web site http://m-lib5.lib.cuhk.edu.hk/) for details. The conference is jointly organised by the Open University (UK) and the Chinese University of Hong Kong Library.

Early bird registration runs until February 28, 2014.  Regular registration will run from March 1 to 31, 2014.  Please register at http://m-lib5.lib.cuhk.edu.hk/en/registration.

If you have any enquiries, please contact us at [email protected].  We look forward to welcoming you to the Conference.

Best regards,

5th International m-libraries Conference Organizing Committee

Postifier - yet another option for reporting available seats?

My quest continues. I didn't think it was all the way back in January that I last posted about this dream, but it was! Postifier is a little gizmo intended to be put inside a mailbox that will alert you when there's actually something placed inside:

The device lives on the inner roof of your postbox, attached with adhesive. It has a sensor that detects changes in infrared light when new mail arrives. When it detects mail, it activates the Bluetooth module and waits for the Postifier/smartphone reunion, at which point it will connect with your paired device and tell you the news.

So it's not quite the reporting structure I imagine, but the technology would be perfect to detect whether there's a pair of legs under a given study table, no?

Postifier doesn't actually exist yet, as it's looking for funding on Indiegogo. Waffling about whether to throw in some money just for testing. At $20-$25 each, it's still not an economical way to cover a couple hundred seats :-(

I should also point out this project at Oregon State that Cathrine linked to in the comments of my earlier post: http://beaversource.oregonstate.edu/projects/44x201213. Can anyone tell if these design files are enough to manufacture? I had been in touch with the students involved in the project, but haven't heard anything from them lately...

Oh, and there's this too: Wimoto.

Related articles

Wimoto is a family of tiny, low-cost bluetooth sensors

2012 - my year in reading

In 2011 for the first time I started tracking the books I was reading, and in January of 2012 I posted about what and how I'd read during 2011. Here's my post for what and how I read in 2012.

In 2011 I tracked my reads in a basic text file in Evernote. That ended up being really short-sighted for metrics and such, so I started using Goodreads in 2012, and you can see my account there if you want to follow me or dive in more deeply to my reads. I'd hoped it would allow me to show more pretty graphs of my reads than it does, but in order to really match last year's categories I still have to do a little manual work.

2012 by the numbers

• Total number of books read: 43
• Average number of books read per month: 3.6
• Total number of pages: 13,707 
• Average number of pages per month: 1,142

I entered my 2011 reads in Goodreads as well so I could start to compare year over year, but things don't match up exactly because I didn't want to enter each separate volume of the two graphic novels I plowed through (Ex Machina and Y: The Last Man), but generally in 2012 I read more books, and more of them were ebooks. Didn't do the pages per month on a graph.

2013 is off to a pretty slow start as I was plowing through A Dance with Dragons. Best recommendation from 2012: the Wool Omnibus by Hugh Howey.

Students and Technology - Educause Infographic

Here's an interesting infographic from Educause- 2012 Students and Technology (PDF).

One snippet to whet your appetite:

The Fourth International m-libraries Conference

Registration for the Fourth International m-libraries Conference is now open. The conference will be held 24-26 September 2012 at The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. The main theme for the conference this year is "From margin to mainstream: mobile technologies transforming lives and libraries". I attended the 2nd m-libraries conference in Vancouver in 2009 and found it quite useful. Won't be able to make this one though.

 

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.

 

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 Reflector 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?

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!

CFP: Fourth International M-Libraries Conference

Found onthe m-libraries blog, information about the call for papers for the 4th M-Libraries Conference, to be held at The Open University on 24th-26th September, 2012. The Open University is headquartered in Milton Keynes, UK.

Please submit your abstracts (up to 300 words) by 15^th of March 2012 to [email protected]