Technically Random

This just in from Oren Sreebny’s Blog. Web Alpine has been quitely released to the UW community.

Alpine is the open source successor to the venerable Pine email client. Web Alpine is web based client that is generations beyond the current Web Pine client. Web Alpine is currently available for folks at the UW to test. It’s not perfect and still has some bugs, but already it’s only a couple enhancements away from ridding me of desktop email clients forever.

Have you been wondering about this “Zotero” thing you keep hearing about? Then join your colleagues for a Zotero play date!

In this informal discussion, we’ll take a look at Zotero’s basic features and compare it to other citation managers. We’ll also chat about other tools that your students and faculty might use to work with their personal libraries and extend their research beyond the UW Libraries. Bring your questions and experiences with Zotero, and your laptop too, if you like.

When: Monday, March 23, 10-12
Where: Suzzallo 5th fl. West

(Brought to you by Corey Murata and Emily Keller, Zotero fans (but not experts). Please forward to anyone else who might be interested.)

The Zotero folks release the beta of Zotero 1.5 a couple weeks ago.  The big new feature is the ability to sync your Zotero library across multiple computers.  This is a huge step forward and may finally allow me to settle on a single citation management tool.  Web-based tools like Refworks and EndNoteWeb are just too slow and don’t fit into my workflow.  Desktop EndNote is tied to a single machine and, at least for me, suffers from bloat the same way that MS Word can feel sometimes.

So, having a fast, multi-platform, cloud based tool seems just what I need.  Add in the ability to view my library online at zotero.org and share and publish my library and I’m there.

What else is in there?  Automatic detection of PDF and saving pdf attachments to citations.  Backup of PDF attachments to a WebDAV file space (BTW, if you haven’t looked conecting to your webfiles space via WebDAV, it’s worth a look.  Instructions here for WinXP, Vista and OSX).

On the downside?  The automatic detection and support for proxy servers can be problematic.  If you’re not careful it will attempt to do automatic proxy rewrites that effectively breaks access to our databases and electronic resources.  I’ve done a short screencast on how to turn on the proxy detection and rewrites, but I would prefer it to be turned off by default.

All in all, it’s pretty nifty.  We’re already getting questions about it from faculty and students.  Emily and I will be setting up a meeting to share ideas about using Zotero and related tool.

Oh, and one last thing, if you’re already using Zotero and haven’t looked at Zotz, you need to check it out.

Things have been a bit slow on this blog lately, we’ll try to remedy that.

Here’s a couple articles from Read/Write/Web about a couple screencasting tools:

Jing Goes Pro: One of Our Favorite Screencasting Tools Just Got Better
“…Pro version of Jing, which, for $14.95 a year, allows users to record their screencasts in HD H.264 video, directly upload them to YouTube, and remove the Jing logos that appear at the beginning and end of videos produced with the free version of Jing.”

ScreenToaster 2.0 Takes on Jing and Screencast.com
“ScreenToaster is an easy to use screencasting application that lives in your browser. When we first reviewed it, it was still in private beta, but today, the company has started its public beta test and added enough new features to make it a viable competitor to Jing, one of our favorite screencasting tools.”

It’s very cool to have these tools available for some quick and dirty screencasts. I’m sure Camtasia and Captivate have a lot of features for more complex screencasts, but sometimes I just need something that will save me from having to write out a whole bunch of documentation and take a bunch of screenshots to do a 30 second task.

The latest in the Educause “7 Things You Should Know About …” series.

Flip video devices are small, inexpensive, digital camcorders. For about the price of a low-end digital camera, the Flip offers up to an hour of video from an easy-to-use, self-contained device. Because of its simplicity and affordability, the Flip allows virtually anyone to be a producer of video content. For educators, these small camcorders facilitate visual learning, which is frequently more engaging than other kinds of instruction and can transcend language barriers. A video artifact can be a highly effective tool for assessment, and the Flip camcorders offer easy access to this medium.

The world of easy video is getting more interesting by the day. Increased quality on cell phones, growth in inexpensive ‘flip’ video recorders and the introduction of HD video capture on the new Nikon D90 DSLR. I want it all, but I don’t want to carry it all around.

From the Google Blog:

We’re excited to announce the availability of never-before-seen images from the LIFE photo archive. This effort to bring offline images online was inspired by our mission to organize all the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. This collection of newly-digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by LIFE dating all the way back to the 1750s.

Delicious is a great place to discover important new web resources (literally hundreds of links are added every minute).  But how to keep up?

One way is through a very powerful RSS feed which supplies the most recent and “hottest” links.  You can determine the number of items to display.  Add the feed below to Google Reader / Feedly or your favorite reader to display the constantly updated latest 100 most popular new links in Delicious. Tweak it to display the number of items desired:

http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/?count=100

Obivously, you can also create RSS feeds to pinpoint links in your exact subject of interest, but that’s for another post!

-J.

Recording streaming online video and audio is a bit arcane due to a great multiplicity of file formats. You could purchase software (Highly recommended btw is Replay AV from www.applian.com, which downloads multple streams and acts like a super-vcr for online video and audio). It’s far more fun to do things on the cheap however.

If you haven’t already, download and open the totally free -  VLC Player

From the top menu, click on Media, then Convert/Save

Under the Network Tab in the box marked “Network Protocol” paste in the URL of your streaming source.

For our experiment, we’ll use:  Museum TV (it’s in Dutch, but you’ll get the idea) which is at :

http://www.museumtv.nl/asx/avro=live801.asx

VLC player generally will suss out the protocol based on your url but you might need to supply it if not.

Click the Convert / Save button. The “Stream Output” Window will appear.
Tick the Play Locally and File boxes, then specify your desired file name and location. The extension should match the kind of video or audio you are recording. (.asf,.flv and .mp4 are some of the most common)

Under Profile, choose the profile that matches the video type.
(ok, this part is a little technical, but not difficult) Since our url has an extension of .asx, we’ll choose Windows (wmv/asf).  Experiment and see what works best for you. (are we not geeks here?)

Click on save and your video should soon start playing and recording.  Hit the Stop button when done (or you’ve had enough).  The video is now saved in the specified file and ready to view or convert further.

(This procedure also works for audio streams, of course)

You need to read the whole announcement, because there’s a lot there, but here are some tidbits:

If a reader in the U.S. finds an in-copyright book through Google Book Search, he or she will be able to pay to see the entire book online. Also, academic, library, corporate and government organizations will be able to purchase institutional subscriptions to make these books available to their members.

…

As part of the agreement, Google is also funding the establishment of a Book Rights Registry, managed by authors and publishers, that will work to locate and represent copyright holders. We think the Registry will help address the “orphan” works problem for books in the U.S., making it easier for people who want to use older books. Since the Book Rights Registry will also be responsible for distributing the money Google collects to authors and publishers, there will be a strong incentive for rightsholders to come forward and claim their works.

It’s an exciting time for e-books.

The Google Book Search settlement reached today has huge implications for academic libraries and our users.   There are many interesting points in the settlement, but one of the most striking is that libraries and other institutions will be able to purchase institutional subscriptions allowing users full-text access to Book Search’s millions of scanned books, many of which are out of print and were available only on the shelves of geographically scattered libraries.

From Google’s explanation of the settlement:

“We’ll also be offering libraries, universities and other organizations the ability to purchase institutional subscriptions, which will give users access to the complete text of millions of titles while compensating authors and publishers for the service. Students and researchers will have access to an electronic library that combines the collections from many of the top universities across the country. Public and university libraries in the U.S. will also be able to offer terminals where readers can access the full text of millions of out-of-print books for free.”

All of which raises even more questions of course (DRM, download to reading devices, formats, and our role in all of this -  among others). It will take time for everything to filter through legal channels, but once the smoke clears and details are hammered out, the Google Book Search settlement could have enormous impacts.