Tag Archives: Mashups

Tech Sharecase, 17 September 2010

Posted on September 21, 2010 by Stephen Francoeur

Attendees
Arthur Downing, Stephen Francoeur, Joseph Hartnett, Ellen Kaufman, Rita Ormsby, Ryan Phillips, Michael Waldman

Google Maps Mania
We looked at some of the mashups of Google Maps found on the site, Google Maps Mania:

  • Commute Map (enter a ZIP code and see where residents commute to or where people are coming from who commute to that ZIP code)
  • Public Data Explorer (this Google Labs project visualizes large data sets on maps)

Using Google Maps Drag and Zoom
We looked at an Google Map Labs tool (Drag ‘n’ Zoom) that you can turn on in Google Maps that lets you zoom in by drawing a square with your mouse on a map region.

Death of Bloglines
In talking about the recent announcement that Bloglines, a feed reader, would be shutting its service down soon, we discussed the increasing reliance of some on Twitter and Facebook for alerts to notable items from RSS feeds (especially blog posts).

Students on Twitter
We talked about whether it seems like more Baruch students are on Twitter these days and fewer are on Facebook. If you look at the Twitter search on “baruch college” you’ll see that a number of the tweets are clearly from students. It also appears to be the case that campus use of Skype is larger than expected.

Summon Adds Its 100th Customer
An announcement from Serials Solutions about Summon led to this interesting article by Sean Fitzpatrick in American Libraries.

Libraries Acquring Ebooks Rights?
An interesting blog post by Eric Hellman about whether it might make sense for a national consortium of libraries to form that would try to negotiate for rights to select ebooks.

Hathi Trust
We took a look at the Hathi Trust website to figure out what exactly the project offers (backup and preservation of digitized books). We then played around with the search inside books feature and compared it to Google Book Search and the Internet Archive’s collection of digitized books.

Google Instant
We discussed whether Google Instant might improve our students’ search skills or worsen them.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Tech Sharecase, 17 September 2010

Tech Sharecase, 21 May 2010

Posted on May 24, 2010 by Stephen Francoeur
Attendees
Robert Drzewicki, Stephen Francoeur, Gerry Jiao, Ellen Kaufman, Louise Klusek, Wilcina Longdon, Jin Ma, Kannan Mohan, Ryan Phillips, Linda Rath, Mike Waldman

Database Trial Reviews
We discussed briefly the pros and cons of writing up reviews of database trials on the reference blog and the library’s internal mailing list.

Bike Route Maps and Directions
In celebration of Bike to Work day, we looked at a number of options for finding bike route maps and directions:
  • maps can be downloaded and added to Google Earth
Google Maps
Ride the City New York
  • missing some of the human element (insider knowledge about safest, easiest routes, etc.)

Call Numbers in Catalogs and Library Floorplans
We tried in vain to recall what library has a catalog that lets you click on a call number in the catalog to show you the location of that item on a floorplan. As we tried to remember which library has this feature in its catalog, we looked at the catalog from the library at the University of Huddersfield (UK), which offers on the item record a visual shelf browse feature, a QR code for the book (which probably leads to the permalink for the item), and circulation stats for that item (see for example this record for The Iliad of Homer).

OpenSciNY
At the recent OpenSciNY conference at the Bobst Library at NYU, a group of librarians, scientists, and publishers got together to talk about open access publishing, open source software, and opens notebook science. Among the more interesting things talked about were:
  • Flickr and Astrometry.net: amateur astronomers are uploading images they’ve taken with their telescopes to Flickr. One of the presenters at OpenSciNY, David Hogg, worked with some colleagues to put together a service that uses the Flickr API to identify any images that have been recently tagged with “astrometry.” Once tagged in this way, an image on Flickr will be analzyed by the Astrometry service and a comment appended to the image that details the celestial objects visible in the image (see this one from Flickr as an example)
  • ChemSpider: Antony Williams from the Royal Society of Chemistry talked about the problem of finding reliable and comprehensive information on chemical structures on the web. ChemSpider describes itself as a “chemistry search engine” that “has been built with the intention of aggregating and indexing chemical structures and their associated information into a single searchable repository and make it available to everybody, at no charge.”

Substitute for EtherPad
EtherPad, a recently shuttered free service that allowed for collaborative editing of documents, released its source code, thereby allowing a number of clone services to be created. One such service is Sync.in

Discovery Tools
We talked a while about the difference between discovery tools (like Summon and EBSCO Discovery Service) and federated search tools (like 360 Search, which we use for our own Bearcat Search). It was noted that with the new discovery tools, the thing that takes the longest to set up is getting your catalog records into the system. What makes a discovery tool different from a federated search one is:
  • With a discovery tool, you are searching one, centralized index of records that the vendor has assembled; with federated search, your query is being transmitted simultaneously to all the vendors that you can connected to your fed search tool. Search results are returned faster in discovery tools because of this difference.
  • The vendor of a discovery tool can normalize all the data stored in its index, making results more consistent (and helping to speed up the delivery of search results) and manipulable (the facetting of results works better in discovery tools).
We wondered if many faculty outside the library use Bearcat as a means to identifying databases that were previously unknown to them but might be useful for their research needs.

ERM System

We might have demos of two different ERM (electronic resource management) products this June.

Citation Management Tools

We wondered to what extent faculty and students are aware of and maybe use citation management options available to them:

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Films to Engage Students in Discussions About Copyright

Posted on April 29, 2010 by Stephen Francoeur

In my LIB 1015 class this week, we had a really lively conversation about fair use, copyright, and the public domain after watching RIP: A Remix Manifesto (the library owns a few copies of the DVD). Here’s the trailer for the film:

You can also check out the film’s official website.

Another good film that I considered using (and which the library also owns) is Copyright Criminals. Here’s the trailer for that:

Copyright Criminals from IndiePix on Vimeo.

You may also want to check out the official website for Copyright Criminals, as well.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Films to Engage Students in Discussions About Copyright

“Friday” Tech Sharecase, 25 June 2009

Posted on June 25, 2009 by Stephen Francoeur

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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on “Friday” Tech Sharecase, 25 June 2009

Mashups at SLA

Posted on June 18, 2009 by lklusek

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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment