Monthly Archives: June 2009

“Friday” Tech Sharecase, 25 June 2009

Beginning this week, the college will be closed on Fridays for summer. Since we usually hold the Friday Tech Sharecase on Fridays, this week’s meeting was on a Thursday (as will be the case for the rest of the summer).

Attendees

Louise Klusek, Ryan Philips, Stephen Francoeur, David Brodherson, Joseph Hartnett, Frank Donnelly, Jin Ma, Jean Yaremchuk, Linda Rath, Mikhail Gershovich, Luke Waltzer.

Scribd

Scribd is a service for sharing documents. Simon & Schuster will begin selling e-books on this site. Upload your own documents, then get an embed code that you can put in your blog or website to display that document in a viewer (see example below).

Francoeur Effective Chat Reference METRO 28 April 2009

100+ Alternative Search Engines You Should Know

List of search engines that focus on specific content or that search or present results in ways notably different from traditional search engines. via ALA Direct, 24 June 2009

“What is a Browser?” Video

People in Times Square interviewed by Google staff to see if they knew what a browser was. Much confusion ensues…

Library Mashup

The web site for the Manchester City Library (NH), which was spotlighted at a presentation at the recent SLA meeting, features content that is pulled in from a number of different sources and aggregated on the library’s home page.

VOCAT

A project of the Schwartz Communication Institute, VOCAT stands for Video Oral Communication Assessment Tool. It offers online rubrics for scoring oral presentations and videos of recorded presentations (there are 6400 scored and recorded presentations in the system now). Used by Zicklin, Wall Street Careers, and other groups/units in the college. The system generates reports; data can be output to Excel. Maybe we could pull out scores for citations to help us assess the library’s efforts to instruct COM 1010 students about doing research. The Schwartz Communication Institute want to add the abiity to score group presentations and to allow for peer evaluation. They are alsofiguring out how this system might be shared with other institutions.

WordPress and the New Blogs

Demonstration of how to login to the Reference at Newman Library blog, edit your profile so your full name is displayed next to any posts, change your password to something more memorable, and add a new post. The brand new blog, Newman Library Idea Lab, was also shown. This latter blog features an automated way to apply tags to posts using Tagaroo, a WordPress plugin from Calais (a Thomson Reuters company).

Feed2JS

The Baruch Blogs page and the LIS Blogs page (found on Reference at Newman Library and Newman Library Idea Lab) feature automatically updated displays of recent blog posts using a free service called Feed2JS, which gives you embeddable JavaScript based on any RSS URL you provide.

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Google Book Search Copyright/Monopoly Controversy

Recently a few articles have highlighted the ongoing Google Book Search controversy. The CNET article linked below does a good job of outlining the competing interests as pertaining to the copyright issues/proposed settlement and the monopolistic implications of the Google Book project.

One article I find really interesting is the second below from Reuters. This article glosses over the finer details of oppositions arguments to defend Google Books. The argument the author presents is that Google is advancing human knowledge, granting access to information where there was none, and in light of this the opposition concerns are either invalid or outweighed by Google’s lofty goal.

Shankland, Stephen. “Google’s digital-book future hangs in the balance.” CNET. 15 June 2009. Web. 24 June 2009.

Gimein, Mark. “In Defense of Google Books.” Reuters. 24 June 2009. Web. 24 June 2009.

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Elsevier Tries to Rig Recommendation System in Amazon

This week, it was reported that someone at Elsevier had concocted a plan whereby professors who had adopted a clinical psychology textbook would be encouraged to write positive reviews of the book on Amazon; in return, those professors would receive a $25 Amazon gift card. Read Scott Jaschik’s piece on this in Inside Higher Ed for more details.

Jaschik, Scott. “Elsevier Won’t Pay for Praise.” Inside Higher Ed. 23 June 2009. Web. 24 June 2009.

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TED Talk Tuesdays

Eric Frierson, a librarian at the University of Texas, Arlington, wrote recently about an interesting way to engage library staff about core issues:

A couple of weeks ago, I sent out an e-mail to the library inviting them to join me on something I called ‘TED Talk Tuesdays.’ If you haven’t been to ted.com, you should check it out. It features videos from leading thinkers in the technology, entertainment, design, business, science, and other fields – speakers are asked to give ‘the speech of their life’ in under 20 minutes.

So what is TED Talk Tuesday? It’s people in a room watching a TED Talk and spending the rest of the hour discussing how it impacts the library and each other at work. No discussion questions, no formal presentation, just watching a video and talking to each other.

Read the rest of his post here. Below are some of my favorite TED talks.

Ken Robinson Says Schools Kill Creativity

Ray Kurzweil Announces Singularity University

Tim Berners-Lee on the Next Web

Brewster Kahle Builds a Free Digital Library

There are many more videos to explore on this page, where they are organized by themes and topics.

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Rogue Assignments

Last year, Nina McHale offered in College and Research Libraries News some interesting advice about how to handle the rogue assignment, which she defines as one that “is a faculty-created, library-related assignment that, having been developed with the best possible intentions, is in some way out of sync with a library’s resources or does not provide students with a thorough introduction to them.” The article by McHale and an interview of her can be freely found online.

McHale, Nina. “Eradicating the Rogue Assignment: Intervention and Prevention.” College and Research Libraries News 69.5 (2008): n. pag. Web. 19 June 2009.

McHale, Nina. Interview by David Free. ACRL insider. Association of College and Research Libraries, 9 May 2008. Web. 19 June 2009.

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Mashups at SLA

I attended a program on Mashups at SLA yesterday. Nicole Engard, the editor of the forthcoming book on Library Mashups (published by Information Today), was the speaker. You can find more about the book here. Although I thought some librarians in the audience where more knowlegable about certain technical aspects of working with mashups, Nicole engaged the audience throughout.  She spent most of an hour actually showing examples of mashups used in business settings and in libraries and then did a live demo of how to use Yahoo Pipes to bring together news streams from the Washington Post and the New York Times.  She suggested going to programmableweb.com to search for more examples and reading an article by Jody Fagen, “Mashing Up Multiple Web Feeds Using Yahoo! pipes” in the Nov/Dec 2007 issue of Computers in Libraries. The slides from her talk are on the Library Mashups blog here.

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Guide to Working with Sources in History Research

[openbook booknumber=”9780806317816″]

Elizabeth Shawn Mills has written a terrific and detailed book that delves into what is a source in history and how to evaluate, interpret, and cite sources.

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Friday Tech Sharecase, 12 June 2009

Attendees

Arthur Downing, Jean Yaremchuk, Linda Rath, Louise Klusek, Lucas Waltzer, Mikhail Gershovich, Ryan Phillips, Stephen Francoeur.

EtherPad

Free service that offers collaborative simultaneous editing of documents. We used this service for taking notes for today’s meeting. EtherPad was used at LibCampNYC last week by people in sessions so they could collaboratively take notes.

backchan.nl

Free service that allows attendees in a presentation or class to post questions and vote on them. Can be displayed in the room where the presentation so everyone can see it and respond to it (including the presenter). A similar service come from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, which offers its Question Tool for free use.

Berkman Institute Center for Internet & Society

Has lots of great presentations and lectures available as audio and video files.

CUNY Academic Commons

Social network for members of the CUNY community. Uses BuddyPress, MediaWiki, and other services. If you want to sign up, contact Mikhail Gershovich directly, as the site currently has problems accepting new accounts from people with Baruch email addresses (a problem that will soon be fixed). Among the many functions offered here, users can use this site to create individual and team blogs. Another example of the use of BuddyPress in higher ed can be found in the example of the Macaulay Honors College at CUNY, which has created a network of students, faculty, and administrators who are part of that community.

Blogs @ Baruch

New theme search functionality coming soon that will make it to do more refined searches for particular aspects of themes. The admin panel for Blogs @ Baruch is being redone this summer. Blogs @ Baruch features course blogs, professional development blogs, faculty blogs, and even a student magazine (in the works).

Open Book Plugin

The Newman Library Idea Blog (soon to be launched; see below) will have this Word Press plugin available. It allows blog post writers to display jacket art for books they discuss in posts and offer links to Open Library pages for books mentioned. It was noted that due to moves from OCLC regarding ownership of cataloging records, CUNY is looking into getting our records in Open Library so that we can always have a place to access our own records.

Newman Library Idea Blog

Discussion about this new blog that Stephen and Ryan are working on. It was agreed that the reference blog, which is currently hosted on Blogspot but will soon be migrated over to Baruch’s WordPress service, should have a similar layout to the Newman Library Idea Blog but have a different color scheme to help distinguish the two sites.

Google Book Search

We discussed the possibility of putting links in the records for the Docutek system for course reserves to Google Book Search records if the book we have on reserve is also partly or fully available online in Google Book Search. An example is Howard Gardner’s Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, which is almost entirely available. If you look at too much content, though, Google doesn’t let you see any more pages (unless you close your browser and then come back to the book, perhaps).

Ebooks and the Kindle

Discussing Google Book Search brought up the matter of whether our students would want to read e-books. It was noted that Simon and Schuster announced they’ll sell digital books exclusively at Scribd. It was also mentioned that Mike Waldman and a CIS professor are working on a grant to get Kindles for each member for a CIS class whose textbooks will exclusively be titles found in Books 24×7.

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