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 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.
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).
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.