Information Literacy blog

Librarians, particularly in educational institutions, are always concerned with improving their clients' information literacy skills. Here is a blog that might help us by sharing ideas.
Information Literacy meets Web 2.0

How does Web 2.0 affect our delivery of Information Literacy? How do librarians cope with the Google generation and what does this mean for Information Literacy? This site will be a sounding board for us to exchange our views and good practice!

More Web2.0 stuff

In ResourceShelf I saw this post: 2.0 Worth A Look #3: Timeline, Nowsy, Calcoolate and particularly like the look of Nowsy. This appears to be a combination of aggregator and search engine., ie. you search for terms that appear within your chosen feed.
You can customise the look of the aggregator and some links are already displayed so you can see how it looks. One of them is YouTube and the first clip on the list was Evolution of Dance. Although I became a bit lost after Greased Lightning (it's a long time since I last went dancing) I really enjoyed this comedian's antics.

Things to do with Library 2.0

Among the articles added recently to Maeve's Shared Items is this one from The Shifted Librarian:- 23 Library 2.0 Things in 15 Minutes a Day

It includes a link to 43 Things I might want to do this year , an article from Information Outlook. It actually suggests only 38 and I'm pleased to say that I've already done more than half of them. It has given me some ideas of more things to investigate, though, such as #33, JibJab and #6, LibraryElf.

Google Reader

I recently changed aggregators from Bloglines to Google Reader. GR has many cool features, one of which I've included as "Maeve's shared items" in this blog. It means that anything that takes my interest in GR can be added to my shared list without the hassle of saving it to del.icio.us and then pasting into a new post.

On the downside, once you've scrolled past an article in GR it is marked as read and can't be seen again. I'd sometimes like to be able to backtrack or reread articles that I may not have starred.

Wiki recognised at last

Seen on Library Stuff:

"If you think "wiki" doesn’t sound like English, you are right. But it’s English now. This word born on the Pacific Island of Hawaii finally got an entry into the latest edition of the online Oxford English Dictionary (OED) along with 287 other new words."

Read all about it here.

Referencing Tool

I haven't used this but it could be a useful tool for Information Literacy classes.

clipped from www.google.com

1:34 PM (seconds ago)

Citation formats on WorldCat.org

from Library Stuff by Steven

New to Worldcat.org They now provide citations for numerous formats directly from any book display. I use this tool everyday, and this is pretty useful.

Now I've seen (almost) everything

I started blogging perhaps because I just wanted to investigate something new in the online scene. It is now such a widespread phenomenon that this month there is even an International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media with the following areas of interest:

The conference aims to bring together researchers from different subject areas (e.g., computer science, linguistics, psychology, statistics, sociology, multimedia and semantic web technologies) and foster discussions about ongoing research in the following areas:

• AI methods for ethnographic analysis through social media.
• Blogosphere vs. mediasphere; measuring the influence of blogs on the media.
• Centrality/influence of bloggers/blogs; ranking/relevance of blogs; web pages ranking based on blogs.
• Crawling/spidering and indexing.
• Human Computer Interaction; social media tools; navigation.
• Multimedia; audio/visual processing; aggregating information from different modalities.
• Semantic analysis; cross-system and cross-media name tracking; named relations and fact extraction; discourse analysis; summarization.
• Semantic Web; unstructured knowledge management.
• Sentiment analysis; polarity/opinion identification and extraction.
• Social Network Analysis; communities identification; expertise discovery; collaborative filtering.
• Text categorization; gender/age identification; spam filtering.
• Time Series Forecasting; measuring predictability of phenomena based on social media.
• Trend identification/tracking.
• Visualization, aggregation and filtering.

Perhaps its time I took it more seriously.

Will it make me famous?

In Roddy McLeod's latest Internet Resources Newsletter (one of my regular feeds) he kindly mentions this blog. Thanks Roddy. Now I hope for more feedback from all the readers that this will hopefully drive to my site. In the months that I have been intermittently blogging only two people have written anything in the comments boxes - except for one comment that was obviously spam.

Talking of spam, I had difficulty publishing the previous post while using Firefox earlier this morning (I'm now on IE) as the word verification characters didn't appear and when I tried to investigate the cause of this was told that Blogger though it might be a spam blog. Heaven forbid!

My latest tagged sites

I've tagged several articles in del.icio.us recently but not had the time (or motivation) to comment on them. Here are ten sites that are well worth a second look.

1. » Vista Hands On #4: Clean install with an upgrade key Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report ZDNet.com"It's a perfectly legal workaround for an amazingly stupid technical restriction that Microsoft imposes on upgraders."
2. BlinkLife Never Lose Touch with Your family and Friends Again" BlinkLife is the next-generation Email - designed to help you keep in touch with your mom, your classmates, your lover and other people who mean a lot to you."
3. Vidipedia - The web's first video enclyclopedia - Web 2.0 ExplanationThis video would make a great introduction or finale to any presentation about Web 2.0
4. mediaconverter.org - the free online file converter I haven't yet tried this as I already use Audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net/, however the comment "You don't need any special software. Just upload the file and convert it" means that you are not limited to any particular computer
5. Colour Order Systems in Art and Science (English, Français, German) "We present you with a total of 59 easy-to-understand, richly illustrated colour theories from the Antiquity to modern times: in short, a complete cultural history of colour"
6. Top 25 Web 2.0 Search Engines OEDb"new search engines that may stand the best chance to become the next Google all share one common element — the use of Web 2.0 technology that they hope will increase search result relevance.Here are 25 such engines. Some offer functionality that's slowly making its way into traditional search engines. Others further the attempt to traverse the invisible Web and index other previously unsearchable research sources.
7. How to Best Use Page Monitors For Online ResearchFrom the book "Information Trapping: Real -Time Research on the Web" by Tara Calishain
8. Widgipedia: A Widgets Supersite"Widgipedia.com lets you search and browse for web and desktop-based mini-applications across a number of different platforms."
9. Will Tagging Replace The Dewey Decimal System?"tagging is clearly not a fad, and it may even eventually replace hierarchical indexing systems used by most libraries, according to new research by the Pew Internet & American Life Project."
10. ResourceShelf » SplashCast Goes Live!"SplashCast, a free service, makes it easy to syndicate and share content from disparate sources across the web on your site, blog, just about anywhere. Another plus is that SplashCast can offer a great deal of content in a small amount of space."