Tag Archives: RSS

Tech Sharecase, 22 July 2010

Posted on July 30, 2010 by Stephen Francoeur
Attendees
Janey Chao, Stephen Francoeur, Ellen Kaufman, Jim Livornese, Ryan Phillips, Linda Rath, Mike Waldman, Kevin wolff

LibGuides
We discussed Steven Bell’s study of LibGuides (pdf), which he presented at 16th Annual Reference Research Forum at the ALA Annual Meeting this year. Bell asked whether LibGuides help students do better research? The results of the student were inconclusive.

Gartner Research
On the CUNY Portal, we have limited subscription to Gartner Research (we do have access to the magic quadrant charts).

IT Needs for the Library
Jim Livornese asked us to talk about what IT needs the library has. Suggestions we discussed included:
  • better, faster, more stable PCs at the ref desk (the best we can offer) that have dual monitors (one angled for the patron, another for the librarian) and speakers (so we can play videos to patrons as needed)
  • digital signage
  • longer period for guest logins (2 days? 3 days? 1 week?)
  • better sense of who to contact in BCTC for what
  • software that makes image on instructor’s classroom PC display on the student PCs
  • multiple projection screens in the classrooms (and more whiteboards)

BCTC Projects
Jim Livornese ran through a list of projects that BCTC will be looking into or developing further: podcast producers, Boxee, iTunes U, media development, etc.

Videos
We watched the BYU video that was just released and parodies a recent ad campaign from Old Spice. Here is the BYU library video:

[kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.youtube.com/v/2ArIj236UHs” width=”425″ height=”350″ wmode=”transparent” /]

Here is the original Old Spice commercial:
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/uLTIowBF0kE" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

It was noted that Yale and Middlebury have similarly well-produced videos for aimed at attracting applicants.

RSS Reader in Microsoft Office 2010
The new version of Outlook in Microsoft Office, which we are all getting in our desk PCs soon, has a RSS reader built in.
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New Feed for Posts AND Comments

Posted on July 15, 2010 by Stephen Francoeur

I did the same thing with Yahoo! Pipes here that I did today for the Reference at Newman Library blog so you can subscribe to a feed that gives you all new posts and comments. If you’d like to see how I did it, I created a screencast and wrote step-by-step instructions on this post from my other personal blog, Stephen Francoeur’s Stuff.

Here’s the URL you can add to your feed reader for the new combined feed:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=19704accb2e2d2d8f97de2ac204b75c6&_render=rss

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Tech Sharecase, 18 June 2010

Posted on June 18, 2010 by Stephen Francoeur

Attendees
Saad Abulhab, Joanna Cruz, Arthur Downing, Stephen Francoeur, Harold Gee, Joseph Hartnett, Ellen Kaufman, Wilcina Longdon, Jin Ma, Louisa Moy, Christina Muniz, Peter Philips, Ryan Phillips, Ester Ramos, Michael Waldman

Baruch iPhone App
We watched a screencast from the developer of the forthcoming iPhone app that is being designed for the Office of Student Development. There are placeholders in certain sections where library services and resources can be added. This app is being designed primarily as a student recruitment tool.

Microsoft Office 2010
If you are a faculty member, you can go to the CUNY Mall within the CUNY Portal and download for free the latest version of Microsoft Office, which was just released this week. The license is for home use only and not for work PCs. It is very possible that this fall, though, our work computers will get upgraded from Office 2003 to Office 2010. The 2010 version of Outlook (and the earlier 2007 version) has a built-in RSS reader, which will work once we get our Exchange server here on campus upgraded this summer.

Pew Report on Use of Social Media and Mobile Devices Among Teens
We took a quick look at the recently released report from the Pew Internet and America Life Project that about how teens use mobile devices and social media.

Online Education
This fall, the statistics department will use online course content developed by Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative for its intro statistics course. We also discussed briefly the large library of video tutorials created by Salman Khan and published on YouTube. Over 1400 videos are available; most of the videos are about science, math, finance, economics. Here is a sample video on balance sheets:

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Tech Sharecase, 2 October 2009

Posted on October 14, 2009 by Stephen Francoeur

Attendees
Jin Ma, Mike Waldman, Matt Haugan, Ellen Kaufman, Mike Waldman, Stephen Francoeur

EBSCOhost Integrated Search
Mike Waldman showed us this tool that CUNY is looking at and asked us to think about how it compared to Bearcat Search. EBSCOhost Integrated Search will search everything that CUNY Central pays for (as well as the unique EBSCOhost databases we’ve subscribed to). We can customize the display of search results so that the databases are grouped into first and second tiers. We took a look at how Brooklyn College has set up their instance of this tool. One difference that we noted was that Bearcat doesn’t have search field for “source” but the EBSCOhost Integrated Search does.

xFruits
We talked about how the free xFruits web services can be used to repurpose RSS feeds or to create new ones. For example, you can convert email into an RSS feed using this tool.

Google Wave
In light of this week’s release of beta invitations to Google Wave, we talked again about what this new tool might allow us to do.

Software for Collaboration and Communication
Ellen Kaufman talking about technology at her old job and how they used Microsoft Sharepoint, portals, and Confluence.

ticTOCs
This free service from JISC offers table of contents alerts as RSS feeds.

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Tech Sharecase, 4 September 2009

Posted on September 4, 2009 by Ryan Phillips
Attendees
Ryan Phillips, Louise Klusek, Stephen Francoeur, Jin Ma, Arthur Downing, Randy Hensley.

We started this Friday’s Tech Sharecase with a discussion of the recent news that Amazon, Microsoft & Yahoo will join the alliance opposing the Google Book Settlement. The Guardian interviewed Peter Brantley, director of the Internet Archive, who heads The Open Book Alliance’s opposition.
See the Searchengineland post about these developments with links to the Wall Street Journal & New York Times articles.

Blog Posts: Reading & Written Language
Next we discussed a couple posts at the Newman Library blogs from the past week. First, we discussed Stephen’s post on Groups/Tribes with no Written Language at Reference at Newman Library and David Broderson’s response. The impetus for the post was a class assignment that was driving several students to the reference desk. I brought up an example I’ve seen illustrating the difference between the interpretation of an illiterate vs a literate seeing the FedEx logo. A literate person fails to see the arrow in the FedEx logo between the ‘E’ &’ x’ while this is the first thing an illterate person sees.
We then discussed the Newman Library Idea Lab post about Maryanne Wolf and the current state of reading. Louise mentioned the Sunday New York Times article on the future of reading. The article discusses giving students the ability to choose the titles in their reading curriculum. Instead of adhering to the standard, required classics like “To Kill a Mockingbird” or “The Great Gatsby” the article highlights one teacher’s effort to engage students interest in reading by allowing them to choose what they read.

Feed Readers

We revisited Feed Readers as a topic given a few of us have changed or are considering a change in our preferred reader. Stephen offered Feedly, a Firefox extension, as an alternative to the Google Reader format.

New EtherPad Feature

EtherPad recently introduced a new Time Slider feature that displays the complete history of a document’s alterations. To demonstrate, the following link allows you to view Stephen and I taking notes for this week’s Tech Sharecase.
Google Books Metadata Trainwreck article
Stephen discussed the Language Log post concerning the multitude of metatdata errors found the the book records in Google Books. The Language Log post discussed the origin of the errors and also, featured in the comment section, has a response from an individual at Google Books.
The blog post was filed by Geoffrey Nunberg who also authored an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the topic.
Screenjelly
Stephen gave a quick tour and tutorial for Screenjelly which he’s used to build tutorials for “How to Look up Books on Reserve” and to display an online tours of the New Reference Wiki and New Reference Blog
View Stephen’s hands-on example from this Friday’s Sharecase.
Text Messaging Reference Service
The last topic of the day was SMS text messaging as a reference service. We discussed getting a smart phone for the library equipped with a QWERTY keyboard. The idea is similar to NY’s service where a phone is shared among the librarians with each scheduled a time to cover the service. We discussed the benefits of adding this service. If this extended service was still within the regular operating hours of reference service, might this be best wedded to the deskstop?

Stephen mentioned MyInfoQuest, cooperative service designed to meet the need for text message reference. To demonstrate the need, a survey of library services desired by patrons via cell phone/mobile device was conducted at Ryerson College. The results are below.
Meanwhile, Questionpoint is integrating SMS text service through twitter feeds into their system in order to accept and push out answers to patrons via text.
Another service mentioned at the Sharecase was Text a Librarian, powered by Mosio.
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Tech Sharecase, 20 August 2009

Posted on August 20, 2009 by Stephen Francoeur

Attendees

Ryan Phillips, Stephen Francoeur, Randy Hensley, Mike Waldman, Jean Yaremchuk, Joseph Hartnett

Squirrelizer and Cornify

Because we like to have fun as well as talk about serious topics, we started off with a couple of silly sites. Squirrelizer will insert the newly famous squirrel image into your pictures. Cornify will add pretty rainbows and unicorns to a web site or image (until your stomach turns).

Bing News vs. Google News

Google News offers a richer interface with better faceted navigation. Bing’s news section suffers at the moment from not having enough sources to provide, but Microsoft is likely working on lots of deals with news publishers now. It may be that Bing is also working on a finance section to rival Yahoo! Finance (although with the Yahoo!/Microsoft deal from last month, it’s not clear what’s going to happen). It was remarked that Bing is making a more competitive landscape now.

NewsGator
NewsGator announced that they are dropping its longtime desktop RSS reader and focusing on a mobile app version instead. Since Microsoft Outlook 2007 was released, which featured a built in RSS reader, the market for desktop RSS readers has declined. Jean mentioned that she used PHP to code her own desktop RSS reader.

Visio

Jean used Visio for a couple of things recently: for planning display cases layouts and for creating a Gantt charts. Maybe at an upcoming sharecase where there is a critical mass of library staff attending, she can give a demo of the software.

Exporting from Aleph

Jean created a script that will allow us to run reports on our subject areas and export to Excel.

Library Technology for Assistive Services

We talked about assistive technology that we have in the 3rd floor room and on the 2nd floor.

Library Web Site Design

A discussion about how we update content in our library web site led to a broader discussion of library web site design and looks at lots of notable sites. One resource that is helpful when talking about web site design is Jon Kupersmith’s Library Terms That Users Understand.

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METRO Universe

Posted on July 7, 2009 by Stephen Francoeur

Jason Kucsma, the Emerging Techologies Manager at the Metropolitan Library Council of New York, has recently created a portal web site of library news and commentary using Netvibes, a free service that allows you to create your own customized start page. The METRO Universe offers a quick way to dip into the river of news that streams by daily in great volume. The eight pages on the site feature:

  • News: RSS feeds of news items from METRO, ALA, Library Journal, etc.
  • Libraries: RSS feeds from blogs created by staff at local libraries (NYPL, BPL, Pratt Institute, Baruch, etc.)
  • Librarians: RSS feeds from personal blogs of local librarians
  • Groups: RSS feeds from blogs of local library organizations (ACRL/NY, LACUNY, etc.)
  • LIS Schools (RSS feeds from blogs of local library library schools)
  • Tech Scan (RSS feeds from library tech blogs and general tech blogs)
  • Also of Note (RSS feeds from notable personal blogs of librarians around the country)
  • Search (widgets with search boxes for various search engines)

I sometimes get asked how I keep up with all the feeds I subscribe to. The answer is that I don’t “keep up,” I take dips periodically. If I miss a really important blog post somewhere, I figure that it will eventually get mentioned again in Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, someone else’s blog post, or even an old-fashioned listserv message. I’ve pretty much given up on thinking of print LIS publiciations (especially the trade ones) as must reads; if there is an interesting article it will likely get mentioned online somewhere, probably repeatedly, in one of the channels that I monitor.

For an interesting discussion of the shifting habits of professionals to “keep up,” you might want to check out two recent blog posts from Roy Tennant on his Library Journal-sponsored blog. Read the comments, too, as they add useful clarifications and disagreements over Tennant’s idea.

Tennant, Roy. “‘The Flow’ Revisited: The Professional Angle.” Tennant: Digital Libraries, 30 June 2009. Web. 7 July 2009.

—. “‘The Flow’ Revisited: The Personal Angle.” Tennant: Digital Libraries, 3 July 2009. Web. 7 July 2009.

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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.

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