With the recent redesign of the Libraries web pages, and our own redesign of the Foster Business Library home page, I decided it was time to do something about our big long list of business related databases. The design of this page hadn’t really changed much in probably eight or ten years and the addition of so many new databases over the years has made it unwieldy. Simile Exhibit seemed like the perfect tool for the job. It would allow us to create facets or groupings of databses based on type of information or use and having only the single JSON file to edit would make for easier maintenance.

It took a couple days to do everything from copying and pasting the information from the big long list into the JSON file, tagging each database with the facets, and building the page and futzing with the CSS. The result is a much cleaner databases list page that will hopefully much easier for our students to use. You can see the result at:

http://www.lib.washington.edu/business/guides/databases/

In the immortal words of Tom Hanks in Big, “I don’t get it.”

There’s a rundown of all the new features in the What’s New page on delicious, and ReadWriteWeb has a pretty good writeup of the changes.

7 Things You Should Know About Wii

The Wii is a video game system that uses a wireless controller capable of sensing position and motion, allowing users to interact with the game applications through physical movements. The controller has captured the interest of academic researchers and hackers, who have used the technology to create applications such as a collaborative choreography tool and an inexpensive, interactive whiteboard. Wii technology is used as an input device in virtual worlds and as a training tool that allows learners to perform physical tasks in a digital, risk-free environment.

There’s some very cool videos of what on researcher did to turn the Wii-mote into a lowcost interactive whiteboard and a multi-touch finger tracking device. The discussion boards for this project can be found at: http://www.wiimoteproject.com/

In this issue you’ll find:

• Alternative Solutions for Off-Campus Authentication
• Distributed Version Control and Library Metadata
• The Planets Testbed: Science for Digital Preservation
• Bringing Sheet Music to Life: My Experiences with OMR
• Building an Archival Collections Portal
• Developing an Academic Image Collection with Flickr
• Making Patron Data Work Harder: User Search Terms as Access Points?
• Collecting Virtual Reference Statistics with an IM Chat-Bot
• WordPress as a Content Management System for a Library Web Site: How to Create a Dynamically Generated Subject Guide

7 Things You Should Know About Second Life

Second Life is a virtual world with tens of millions of square meters
of virtual lands, more than 13 million “residents,” and a thriving
economy. Large numbers of colleges and universities—or, in some cases,
individual departments or faculty—are active in Second Life, not only
for academic purposes but also for campus visits, recruiting activities
for prospective students, and fundraising. Second Life lets educators
easily build and modify learning spaces to test how different
strategies for a physical space affect learning, and a similar approach
can be taken toward educational activities in those spaces.

I have an account in SL and spent way too much time trying to make my avatar look even remotely like me (although for some people, maybe that’s not the goal). I haven’t explored very much but I do know there is a Second Life Library Project. Right now my first life is leaving me barely enough time for sleep and a small guilty dosage of bad television.

Now I think I’ve found just the thing. ScribeFire is a Firefox plugin that lets you easily post to your blog. By default it runs in split-screen mode, but you can also have it launch as a new tab or in its own window. It has some nifty features that make it very easy to include a link to the page your looking at or to drag and drop formatted text. Best of all, it’s always there in the browser so I don’t have launch another app or open a new tab and go to my blog to add a new post.

This is the second post using ScribeFire and so far no deal-breaker irritations. I’ll keep you posted.

Wired Campus: Twitter Ideas for Libraries - Chronicle.com

The Web site College@Home has put together a nice list of ideas for libraries interested in using the instant-blogging service Twitter.
More…

I’ve resisted Twitter so far because I’m trying to reduce the number of distractions that keep me from… well… work. I can see though how it could make it easier to do some things. Just yesterday I was trying to help diagnose a IP authentication problem with a new database. It seemed to be working from some subnets but not others. I was going through my IM list looking for people to help me test but it would have been much easier to send out something over Twitter so that whoever was available could to respond or not.
Maybe it’s time to jump in.

Through internet research and emerging UW Libraries’ tools, students created a research repository online that was required to be at least 20 resources deep. The “bookmark & share” widget that has been added to UW’s WorldCat catalog, for example, enables students to seamlessly post specific research resources to del.icio.us and annotate them. The faculty and I recently evaluated the students’ work, and are currently working on compiling their reflections and feedback about the assignment. I look forward to reporting on the success of using this free web 2.0 technology to enhance student research.

I recently discovered ibreadcrumbs, which is specifically created for online research and collaboration. This will be an interesting tool to track. -AH

I finally got tired of dealing with my clunky admin module and decided to look for a better way.  I found this article in Library Journal: Tags Help Make Libraries Del.icio.us and looked at the page at the College of New Jersey Library for inspiration.  From there it was just a matter of setting up an account for the library in del.icio.us and bookmarking and tagging all 440(!) sites from the database that we had collected over the years.

The end result is a collection of links that is much easier to maintain and, more important, much easier for me to give to someone else to maintain.  I’m able to use the link roll function to pull in the links into a static page in the Libraries web space.  And, it has the flexibility to create many more discrete collections of links and could make it easier to create situationally specific collections such as for a particular class or assignment, or even for a reference transaction.

Links:

Foster Business Library - Business Resources on the Web
International Business Resources page with del.icio.us links
International Business links in del.icio.us
Foster Business Library del.icio.us collection (http://del.icio.us/FosterLibrary)