Tag Archives: OCLC

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.