6/27/2006

CARCIT (Collaborative Action for Reference Competencies and Information Technology)

I had the pleasure of attending a CARCIT forum last week “Showcasing Innovation”. It was held at the lovely Murdoch University campus in the Freehills Lecture Theatre and attended by librarians, mostly from other Perth universities, with a smattering of those from other colleges (four of us from Central TAFE). I was particularly interested in the ways that blogs, wikis, podcasting and other Web2 features are being used in the library world. University libraries are better funded and have more staff to enable them to spend time on these ideas but Central is doing its best to keep up with them.

The CARCIT wiki is at http://carcit.lis.curtin.edu.au and has the outlines of most of the presentations plus many other useful ideas.

“Down with Blogs”BBC article about their new blog

“Blogs can be many things - trouble-making, independent, cool, nerdy, peppered with annoying links, even full of kittens who look like Hitler. They can also be abused for attention-seeking headlines (eg "Down with Blogs"). But one thing they have in common is that they work best when they go both ways - when they are a true exchange.”

By Giles Wilson
BBC News

6/23/2006

Free eBooks

One third of a million ebooks are available free between July 4th and August 4, 2006 from the World eBook Fair, http://www.worldebookfair.com/ . This event is brought to you by the oldest and largest free eBook source on the Internet, Project Gutenberg, with the assistance of the World eBook Library, the providers of the largest collection, and a number of other eBook efforts around the world.

RSS Feeds

Two new examples of RSS feeds are available , one from Amazon at http://www.onfocus.com/amafeed/ and a toolbar for quick feed reading in Firefox or IE http://www.rsstoolbar.com.

Checkout the reviews on Research Buzz http://www.researchbuzz.org/wp/.

6/16/2006

ResourceShelf has so many amazing titbits that you really should read yourself to get a feel for what is out there. Some from the current newsletter:

Wikipedia
A Wiki Situation By Scott McLemee
"To wiki or not to wiki? That is the question."
http://digbig.com/4jgks " There is no benchmark for quality. It is an intellectual equivalent of the Wild West, without the cows or the gold."

Tomorrow never knows: the end of cataloguing?
http://digbig.com/4jgkt

Abstract
This paper (to be presented at the 72nd IFLA General Conference And Council) reviews the perceived threats to the future of cataloguing posed by the increasing volume of publications in all media, coupled with a resource base which is declining in real terms. It argues that cataloguing is more rather than less important in such an environment and considers some of the ways in which cataloguing will have to change in order to survive.

A rose by any other name?: from AACR2 to Resource Description and Access
http://digbig.com/4jgkr

The readers editor on ... the downside of Google
http://digbig.com/4jgkm
“Search engines such as Google find acres of instant information and more ‘experts’ than you can shake a stick at, but every computer screen should carry the warning: ‘Beware:
all is not as it seems.’

Research Buzz also came out today. What a wonderful way to spend a Friday - finding the best of new resources.

Imagery: an alternative interface to Google's Image Search

If you want to search Google's images with a different interface, check out Imagery at http://elzr.com/imagery/.

Warning: It will work only in Firefox 1.5 or higher.
I did a simple keyword search for 'wave' and came up with some amazing images. Mousing over each one gives you the option to open it in the source page or in a new window. Clicking on 'Preferences' will give you the option of searching by size, colour or file type and turns SafeSearch on or off.

Publisher Offers Free Computer Books

A new line of computer books called In Pictures http://inpics.net/ is giving away books for free .... Normally these books are downloadable PDFs that cost $3.95 each, but until the end of July lower-resolution versions are available at no cost.

In Pictures computer how-to books are based on pictures, not text. Step-by-step instructions will give you a foundation - somewhere to start from. The books tend to be beginner-level -- topics include Computer basics, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, and a few programming, web layout, and web graphics books.

6/13/2006

Things to do with your iPod

I was thrilled to receive an iPod Nano as a Christmas gift last year. I may be a grandmother but I still like to keep up with technology trends and feel very much in vogue as I travel to work on the train accompanied by other people with plugs in their ears, oblivious to their surroundings.

I've loaded all my favourite CDs and would like to add more Beatles' music but can't obtain it from iTunes. I do, however have a DVD with Beatles' music in .WAV format that is not compatible with the iPod. Audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ is the answer. Not only can I convert .WAV files to .MP3 but can also cut segments from a track and save them separately.

The past week or so I've spent little time at home as my husband and my mother are both in hospital (fortunately the same one). When I do get home late in the evenings I find it therapeutic to play with these files and work out how to do new things with them. Playing the iPod through my car radio (another trendy attachment that I was given for my birthday) also helps to keep me sane in rush-hour traffic.

Wikibooks - Free Open Content TextBooks
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page


I'm sure everyone is familiar with Wikipedia, now we have Wikibooks, a collection of free, open-content textbooks that you can edit. They have 13,357 book modules in over 1000 books.

6/09/2006

Resource Shelf Newsletter


If you don't subscribe to the ResourceShelf Newsletter by Gary Price then you are missing a lot of great information. I will add snippets of information gleaned from it to this blog but obviously cannot cater to everyone's interests - not even amongst my own colleagues.

In today's edition I found a link to Gary's growing compilation of links to the Deep Web , direct search, useful for anyone interested in finding information that is inacessible to most search engines
.

His Resource of the Week refers to an article by Mike Steckel Ranganathan for IAs in which Ranganathan's five laws of library science are applied to Information Architecture.


6/08/2006

FreePint

The new edition of FreePint (every Librarian should subscribe to this newsletter) has a feature article about blogs and wikis "Q&A with Christopher Barger, IBM's Blogger-in-Chief" By Tim Buckley Owen. In my organisation we've been nibbling around the edges of these methods of communication and this article gives several reasons to make better use of them.

Technorati Profile

6/06/2006

Maeve's Blog

I try to keep up to date with new developments and interesting websites that I feed to my colleagues at Central TAFE in Perth, Western Australia. By adding them to this blog I will be able to keep a record of sites of interest and hopefully get feedback from them and anyone else who may find something useful here.

The June edition of Internet Resources Newsletter is now available. It is always worth reading but some sites particularly caught my eye:

Scholarly, evaluated web sites now available in every ISI Web of Knowledge Crosssearch
http://scientific.thomson.com/news/newsletter/2006-03/8318097/
The Current Web Contents module provides access to over 5,000 editorially evaluated and carefully selected Web sites
From: KnowledgeLink Newsletter

In a link to Stephen's Web I found this article that will give me some good material for the educational session I am planning with Sylvie Huveneers:
blog.ac.uk: Guidelines or Tramlines - blogging safely towards digital literacy by Peter Ford, looking to arrive at the sort of guidelines which would give institutions the confidence to make a start with blogging. http://elgg.net/mberry/weblog/29878.html

Have you tried the new look Ask Jeeves - now simply Ask.com? This article from Search Engine Watch shows some of the features I haven't seen in other search engines:
Ask Binoculars Improving Search Results?