Technically Random

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

 7 Things You Should Know About Google Apps

Google Apps is a collection of web-based programs and file storage that run in a web browser. The applications include communication tools (Gmail, Google Talk, and Google Calendar), productivity tools (Google Docs: text files, spreadsheets, and presentations), a customizable start page (iGoogle), and Google Sites (to develop web pages).

-Corey

ACRL recently announced the launch of C & RL Preprints.

The addition of preprint articles gives the C&RL editor the ability to release important research articles online prior to publication in the print journal.

You have to be a member of ACRL to open or download the PDFs from the preprint site.  The first batch of preprints looks interesting with articles on information literacy, collection development, assessment and mentoring.

-Corey

Issue 2 of The Code4Lib Journal is out!  Here is a selected table of contents:

• Free and Open Source Options for Creating Database-Driven Subject Guides
• Using Google Calendar to Manage Library Website Hours
• Toward element-level interoperability in bibliographic metadata
• Googlizing a Digital Library
• The ICAP (Interactive Course Assignment Pages) Publishing System

It’s always amazing to see what other people are doing to address many of the same issues we are grappling with.

-Corey

To see if the Google Chart API could be useful to chart/track/assess a library collection in real-time, I created a mySQL database and dumped in 7,000 + Innovative brief records (5 fields each) which constitute our current Slavic pre-cats, then created a basic front-end page in php to display results and charts in real-time. (example is here).    We needed to not only track items by specific country but also grouped into geographic regions with totals.   The API worked very well - I was amazed at how easy it is to plug-in variables to Google’s RESTful API urls! The page is rudimentary, but the model extends well: eg. you could pull out and group items by a specific author, location, with BF call numbers only, by format etc.  - and mix statistics pretty much infinitely.   Lot’s of potential here!    Anyway,  if interested in the code,  send me a line and I’d be glad forward you a copy.

I know, del.icio.us and “social bookmarking” is kind of old hat, but how did we ever get along with out it? I use Del.icio.us a lot and keep finding new uses, especially in managing and sharing meta-information on the go. If you’ve got clients (maybe faculty or students or plain ol’ library colleagues) , you might be interested in the short screencast from Liz Davis below. Especially powerful is the ability to create “for:” tags to forward a link to a specific person in your network. Ranking right up there with being the first-in-the-world to tag an online resource in del.icio.us is the first time you realize someone else has put you in their network and is ‘following’ your additions ’cause your stuff is *good*! Anyway, check it out:

Check out this article from Read/WriteWeb about Twiddla, a web based tool for collaborative web based whiteboarding. It’s a pretty neat tool for any kind of collaborative work. You can start from a blank page or open an image or web page to draw on and mark up. Imagine doing a brainstorming session with some members of a group sitting in a meeting room with their laptops and the whiteboard displayed on a projector or display monitor, and other group members either in their offices or even across the country at a conference. Since it’s a whiteboard, you could create lists, mindmaps, task or workflow diagrams or wireframes for web page design.

The comments in the RWW post also point to a couple other online whiteboarding tools, Scriblink and Vyew.

-Corey

I started playing around with the Google Dynamic Feed Control and Yahoo Pipes to see what it would look like to bring together all the RSS and blog feeds in the Libraries.  I put up a couple of test pages:
http://www.lib.washington.edu/business/test/rss.html
and
http://www.lib.washington.edu/business/test/rss2.html

The first example is just using the Google Dynamic Feed Control and the second is using Yahoo Pipes to aggregate the feeds into a single feed and Google Dynamic Feed Control to display the feed on the page.  I like the simplicity of the second view, but (as was pointed out to me) you lose the context of the feed source that you get in the first view.

I only include the half dozen-ish blogs and feeds that I could find.  If you know of any other UW Libraries feeds, let me know and I’ll add them to the list.

And, to give credit where credit is due, Jake was playing with both of these tools long before I was.  He has a test page using the Google Dynamic Feed Control at:
http://www.lib.washington.edu/rss/intlstudies/newspage/newstest.html
and all of the new books lists that he does for International Studies is using Yahoo Pipes.

Corey

Northwestern University Library and Academic Technologies hosted a head-to-head matchup of citation management software and tools in CiteFest 2008.  The tools they looked at were: CiteULike, Connotea, EndNote, NoodleBib, RefWorks,  and Zotero.

The posted the preliminary results earlier this week and Zotero won, narrowly edging out EndNote.  Zotero is a Firefox plugin that lets you collect and manage your citations from within the browser.  They’ve made a lot of improvements in the last year so if you haven’t looked at it for a while, it might be time to give it another shot.  Close to 80 other libraries and universities are recommending or providing instruction on using Zotero.

-Corey