Ramblings, citations and "brainwaves" of a college librarian in Toronto. 475 square feet refers to the size of my home, not the size of my office or library.



Big Juicy Twitter Guide



Fuseproject


Seems there is another kiddie on the design block. First was ideo now we have Fuseproject.



Nice little SLATE ditty about declining emial usage by teens.


Exploreatree's Thinking Guides


Templates to help you through the thinking process.


Library Reference SMS to IM Hack


VR the good. Sigh...

hack


Google vs Zoho Notebook


While both of these types of programs enable users to clip and collect snippets of webpages and then organize them, each has their advantages and is compared according to their strengths in the categories; installation, clipping, organization, and sharing.

Google Notebook Pros

* Simpler UI
* Automatically links notes to web sources

Zoho Notebook Pros

* 2-D workspace
* Allows storage of actual files

UX Magazine



1. Limit your time.
2. Have a purpose.
3. Get to the point.
4. Be concise.
5. Know when to use IM.
6. Stay with one chat service.
7. Limit your friends.
8. Block unproductive friends.
9. Respect others’ time.
10. Be friendly.
11. Say thank you or congrats.
12. Bounce ideas off people.
13. Ask for quick favors.
14. Switch to email.
15. Use group chat.
16. End it quickly.
17. Think action.

Quoted in full...



Michael Geist explains...

Personally I miss the old photocopy services....



France is about to implement new rules that will require ISPs to monitor their customers' activities and disclose file sharing activity to a new independent body. File sharers will receive three warnings and then lose Internet access.

It will be here soon, too. We critique China, but the technology deployed there and tested there, is coming our way. The anarchy of the web is coming to an end. The panopticon cometh.



OpenDOAR

Now has more than 1000 repositories. In fact, OAIster searches nearly 14 million items; Scientific Commons , close to 16.5 million items.


New Rule of Innovation


Pioneers get scalped
“The theory of first mover advantage is bunk according to Nicolas Carr (author of 'Does IT Matter'), who says that when a disruptive technology arrives the real growth opportunities lie in fixing the disruption.”

LibraryBytes

From my experience...I agree.


Bloglines' Top 1000 RSS Feeds


Quite the interesting list...


Machine Migrates Raster to vector Images


Stanford University's Vectormagic converts raster images into vector images. You can select high, medium, or low level processing.


Skype a Librarian


University of Waterloo is one example.


Social Networking, if you care


350 sites. I guess I'm just getting sick of all the social networking chatter. Who has the time for all this socializing?



Seems some folks in the UK are going to put Adverts in boks being signed out as a way to make money. Sounds reasonable.

"The scheme offers advertisers 500,000 inserts in county libraries such as Essex, Dorset, Somerset and also Bromley, in Kent, and Leeds. It aims to cover the UK by the middle of 2008 with around 3m inserts being made available per month. The promotion is being run by direct marketing company Howse Jackson Marketing and Brandspace CMS. Inserts, weighing up to nine grammes, are placed in each book as it is hired from the library, with a single insert allocated per person in order to avoid wastage. Only one insert campaign will be allowed each month. Mark Jackson, of Howse Jackson Marketing, said: "Library inserts are innovative, unique and offer audience segments which can be traditionally hard to reach. "Using library books as an advertising medium provides additional revenue for the libraries to invest in books and therefore allows advertisers to contribute directly to local communities.""

BBC News


IL vs IT War is Declared


I heard it first in February 2007 at a conference. Faced with limited staffing resources who should you feed and who should you starve? While the pendulum was in the Information Literacy side for a decade now, IT is starting to gain ground. Folks are giving up on IL calling it a failed answer to a systems design problem. Stephen Abram must be happy. Bottom line, if we have to teach how to use our services, we'll go bankrupt. iTunes is easy to use for a reason...

ACRL-Log Posts

Chronicle

Library Issues


Scholarpedia


Scholarpedia

Welcome to Scholarpedia, the free peer reviewed
encyclopedia written by scholars from all around
the world.





"Results from an initial study by a professor at Coppin State University in Baltimore indicate that class capture technology that allows students to view lectures online after the fact can improve course retention rates and grades."

Campus Technology.com


Rsizr (pronounced "resizer")


"Now, a site called Rsizr (pronounced "resizer") has added a feature that isn't even in the newest version of Photoshop: the ability to shrink or enlarge pictures--horizontally and vertically--with relatively little distortion. For instance, Rsizr can compress a photo of students in a classroom without sacrificing resolution by removing the pixels between desks. Likewise, Rsizr can expand the picture to fill, say, an entire computer screen by adding extra pixels in certain places.

The algorithm that Rsizr is based on was originally developed by Shai Avidan, senior research scientist at Adobe Systems, and Ariel Shamir, a visiting researcher at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, in Cambridge, MA."

MIT Technology Review


YouTube Mashup with Google Earth


YouTube is bringing the world of online video and map-making
closer together by allowing users of its Google Earth
software to watch and hear YouTube videos mapped to specific
locations. But by allowing YouTube creators to tag their
videos as they upload them, Google Earth could accelerate
the move to tie together maps with online videos.

Washington Post


Jumpchart Wireframe



UC Berkeley Classes on YouTube


UC Berkeley has become the first university to formally offer
videos of full course lectures via YouTube. The
school has equipped twenty classrooms to record lectures and
plans to capture about fifty classes each semester, or about
three percent of the course catalog.

Check it out. http://www.youtube.com/ucberkeley

Like I keep telling folks, video content is the future. We have to develop the skills and infrastucture fast. It is going to be like the emergence of the WWW.


Zotero


Zotero is a tool for storing, retrieving, organizing, and annotating digital documents.



"it introduced a Web portal,
OncologySTAT.com, that gives doctors free access to the
latest articles from 100 of its own pricey medical journals and
that plans to sell advertisements against the content.

The new site asks oncologists to register their personal
information. In exchange, it gives them immediate access to the
latest cancer-related articles from Elsevier journals like The
Lancet and Surgical Oncology. Prices for journals can run from
hundreds to thousands of dollars a year.

Elsevier hopes to sign up 150,000 professional users within the
next 12 months and to attract advertising and sponsorships,
especially from pharmaceutical companies with cancer drugs to
sell. The publisher also hopes to cash in on the site's list of
registered professionals, which it can sell to advertisers."



Sems everything is ripe for monetization these days.

First Monday has a nice little ditty about video game modding and who benefits from it.

Similar to Dōjinshi.



"WorldCat.org has been enhanced with a social-networking feature: Users across the Web can now add individual items cataloged in WorldCat to personalized lists. They can group items owned by your library and other WorldCat libraries, and share their lists with friends, colleagues and millions of site users.

Users can add any book, video, article or another item to a list right from its WorldCat record, or use the checkboxes and "Save to" button in WorldCat search results."

Who cares about citations? Links to fulltext are all that matter these days. What a waste...


USB Key vs Google Docs


I have been shocked at how fast Google Docs and other file hosting services have been mainstreamed by students. This semester, less and less students are using USB Keys in our labs, it seems.


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