9/25/2006

Bringing Information Skills Training Up To Date

There are some great ideas here. I haven’t been able to download the audio files but the slides blew me away.

"Delivering Top-Notch Technology Training for Your Patrons" presented on August 18, 2006 by Brenda Hough, Technology Coordinator at the Northeast Kansas Library System and Michael Porter (aka Library Man), Training and Support Coordinator at OCLC Western. Sponsored by the Johnson County Library.

Archive of Previous OPAL Events about
Library and Information Science Topics and Trends

Text Chat log of the session about Tech Training.

The Internet - Past and Future

  1. New from Pew Internet & American Life Project: The Future of the Internet II

http://digbig.com/4nbfa

  1. People around the world are coming together on Friday to celebrate the world wide web.

Susan Crawford, the founder of OneWebDay, said she wanted people to reflect on how the web had changed their lives.

http://digbig.com/4nbfb

Citation Data

Scholar for Firefox is now ZOTERO, currently in beta. It works with most library catalogues, some popular dot-coms such as Amazon, and many gated databases.

http://www.zotero.org/

It captures citation information you want from a web page automatically, without typing or cutting and pasting on your part, and saves this information directly into the correct fields (e.g., author, title, etc.) of your Zotero library

This looks interesting but I haven’t been able to test it yet. It could become a very useful tool.

To Google or not to Google

When teaching web search skills I try to impress on my students the need to use more than one search engine for the best results. That's why I was impressed to see this entry from a blog by the Librarian in Black:

Ten Reasons Librarians Should Use Ask.com Instead of Google
http://digbig.com/4nbfm

I find myself using Ask.com more and more of late. It’s so easy to use a variety of search tools using the drop-down list in the Firefox toolbar.

ClickO6

Last week the ALIA Conference, ClickO6, was held in Perth. I have long thought that ALIA is more relevant to public and school libraries than to special and academic libraries and this conference did nothing to dispel my opinion. Central TAFE purchased three subscriptions and library staff were given the opportunity to attend the sessions that interested them most. I chose presentations on blogs, wikis and web design; the first two were repeats of presentations I had seen several weeks ago and the third offered very little that was new. In the exhibition hall various library-related vendors were well represented and I gathered some literature about those that interested me. (There weren't many freebies left as this was the third day of the conference. I did, however, gather enough pens to keep me writing for a year or more) Then I did a very stupid thing and left my "showbag" in one of the seminar rooms, not becoming aware of my loss until I was waiting for a taxi to take me back to work so there was no time to go back and look for it. All in all it was a wasted morning for me. I know a lot of time and effort had gone into it (one of my colleagues was on the organising committee) but I won't put my hand up to attend another similar conference. Several years ago the Health, Special and Law Librarians Group held a conference in Perth and that was streets ahead of this one in interest and variety.

9/14/2006

ResourceShelf

Designing Usable, Self-Paced e-Learning Courses: A Practical Guide
By Michael Feldstein, SUNY Learning Network, and Lisa Neal, eLearn Magazine

This guide was primarily designed to help teams of instructional designers and content experts create effective, self-paced e-learning. It teaches best practices for improving usability that can be applied by any instructional designers or content experts and was created so that no prior knowledge of usability is required to use the techniques. (Great article, precisely summarises key approaches and useable processes!)

Source: eLearn Magazine

In July, The World eBook Fair took place offering more than 330,000 FREE full text books, all in PDF format, all ready for downloading, bookmarking, sharing. We’ve learned that another World ebook Fair will take place in October. It’s sponsored by The World eBook Library Consortia that offers these materials year round for a small fee.

From a news release:

5,000 new eBooks for cellphones are being added this week and this is only 1% of the hoped for 500,000 eBooks being targeted for release on the first day of October in honor of International Book Fair Month. Up from the 1/3 million eBook files offered for download, all free of charge, on July 4, in response to requests of eBook readers around the world, more eBooks were added to include more modern selections via commercial sources and a wider variety of formats, which could total 1/2 million eBooks in October. If all goes perfectly well there will be 1/2 million free eBooks, AND over 100,000 from various commercial eBook sources.

9/08/2006

Earth Science Sites of the week

I was pleased to receive Mark Francek's weekly newsletter again this week after a long break for the USA summer holidays. I regularly forward this to the lecturers in Mining & Geoscience, Environmental Science and Surveying at Central TAFE and many of them have remarked on its usefulness. The website is http://webs.cmich.edu/resgi. Mark is Professor of Geography at Central Michigan University.

Why not recreate this as a blog with an RSS feed Mark?

9/01/2006

Feeding the OPAC

Some time this summer, the TOCRoSS project will release open source software that will be capable of delivering an RSS service to push publisher and e-journal table of contents data directly into library catalogs, allowing users to find journal articles just like they find books. The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the UK is developing the service with publisher Emerald and library supplier Talis.
From LibraryJournal.com Journals in the Time of Google
By Lee C. Van Orsdel & Kathleen Born — April 15, 2006