Thing 20 –

We’re nearing the end of our initial 21 things, though I’ll admit that the last few have been a bit of a struggle, since the earlier ‘things’ were easier to figure out, and have broader applications. For this thing, we need to talk briefly about communications, and how best to keep the library blog site updated over the course of the summer.

http://blogs.northcentralcollege.edu/library/

While some postings are pretty obvious, like changes in hours for holiday weekends, it continues to be important to keep the blog postings updated with things that are current and that are of some interest to our patrons.

To that end, I hope that everyone will find something to contribute to the library blog over the course of the summer, even if it is a bit of a stretch to get something broadly interesting out of your specific area in the library. Let’s do what we can to be creative, while not inundating Aimee with things in the next few days. I think that we can do all sorts of things that may be a bit different from what we’d otherwise do during a term – everything from finding an unusual resource and writing a brief review of it to explaining the latest bulletin board to having Tom come up with something about one of the classrooms he’s working on. I suspect some of the green initiatives in Tech. Services could carry us through a few postings as well… Helicopter flights in Giere, however, are probably not a particularly good topic………

So, have at it, have fun - if you can - and be creative.
Send proposed posting to Aimee, and she’ll get them onto the site itself.

Thanks,
jjs

GoogleBing. BingGoogle?

I knew that there would be something along these lines, though I couldn't find it yesterday:
http://www.blackdog.ie/google-bing/search.php
It's a split screen that allows you to input your search at the top of the page and see the results from both Google and Bing in twin panes lower down on the page. It's kind of interesting, and the more complicated your search is, the more you can make the results diverge...

Thing 19 - When to Bing. When to Wolf. When to Google.

All,
Welcome to the 19th thing -
In the last couple of weeks,
Wolfram|Alpha
has come online, and Microsoft Live Search has morphed into
Bing
.
Bing?
Yes. Bing. No one seems to know why. I'll admit, Wolfram|Alpha isn't really a great name, either... but... Bing? Google it. OK. It took a a while for that phrase to take hold, but can you imagine using the phrase, "Bing it"? Time will tell, I suppose, though I've no memory of anyone ever saying "Yahoo it", either.
The question for the day is, when to use these three, and what kinds of things differentiate them? Google is a known, though as we've all seen in many of the recent postings of 21 Things, it's more than just the search function, more than just the maps. Google is becoming a complicated set of interconnected tools. Bing is a variant of the older Live Search tool, a site that got relatively little use and even less respect in a world composed of Yahoo and Google. Bing appears to be a bit different, and is actually a pretty good general purpose search engine. Pick out a couple of interesting search term variations and try them in both Bing and Google and see if the differences are very great. If your search is fairly complex, the odds are that they'll return pretty similar kinds of sites and pages.
If your search is very simple, you're likely to see a bit more diversity of results. This is generally thought to be the difference between the two search algorithms, and is actually to be expected. For the most part, the two are similar enough that you're likely to get results from either tool, though the Google Advanced interface is still my default search tool, and Bing doesn't yet appear to have an equivalent.
Alpha, on the other hand, is trying to do something pointedly different, and to me that makes it a good deal more interesting - while it does do some level of general web searching, it really is designed to be a "Computational Knowledge Engine". The main page of examples give such things as: beta distribution, European Union, and Archimedean Solids. Fascinating, right? Well, when you're looking for numerical information, sure - Alpha is a great place to look for population stats, currency information, statistical information of any sort. A quick search on North Central College will give you an indication of the way the designers of Alpha view the world [for an interesting test, input stephen wolfram into all three search engines, and compare the results].
These are three interesting options, and while it's always good to HAVE these options, if you're really curious to learn more about either Bing or Wolfram|Alpha ---- I suggest you Google it.
For now, at least.

jjs

Post 18 - 3 things left!

This week, we have a guest poster. Aimee has done a write up on Facebook.
I'll admit that, though I have tried, I can't seem to figure out what to DO with Facebook. I see the utility of the site for the Library, and occasionally check in to see what it is doing, but I just don't have the urge to connect with individuals in this way -
What am I missing?

----------------------------
Facebook is a social networking site that was originally designed as a place for college students to network among each other. I know that many of the library staff have already created a Facebook account either to become involved in the phenomena that is Facebook or to try and figure out what all the fuss is about. So here's a little bit of background information mixed in with some personal experience.

Facebook is the brain-child of Harvard drop-out Mark Zuckerberg. While a student at Harvard Zuckerberg created Facebook for his Harvard classmates as a sort of get-to-know-your-fellow-classmates website. The idea, launched in February 2004, stemmed from a paper version of a facebook that was passed around his high school for the same purpose. Due to popular demand, within four months it had grown to include 30 colleges and universities. As of September 2006 Facebook opened itself up to to anyone with an email address and is no longer considered a place just for those associated with colleges and universities.

Now, here are some interesting Facebook facts. Facebook has remained a private company despite some extremely generous offers and is now estimated to be worth over $15 billion (yes, I said billion). In the Fall of 2007 Facebook was signing-up an average of more than 1 million new users every week, which works out to over 200,000 new users every day! Users spend an average of 19 minutes everyday on Facebook (based on my experience that number is probably much higher here at NCC!). You can find more interesting information able Facebook at CrunchBase or through our Lexis-Nexis Company Dossier.

Now if you're trying to figure out a reason for all of this hoopla, I'm afraid to tell you I have still yet to figure one out. When comes down to it Facebook is really just a "place" to keep up with people you may not have time to call or email regularly. Another fairly new feature is the ability to group your friends into categories that have different levels of access to see information in your profile, which is a great way to control who gets to see your personal information and maintain some level of privacy in this voyeuristic culture we have become! So if you're leery about Facebook feel free to create a profile and keep it private until you've had some time to explore and determine if it's something you're interested in becoming involved with.

Another interesting aspect of Facebook are the fan pages. Anyone can create a fan page, but creators are most often attempting to market something. "Fans" of something on Facebook can find out information about and discuss that something within the realm of the fan page. Fan pages can also send regular updates to all of their fans regarding new information. For example, I am a fan of ACRL on Facebook. So just recently I received an update through Facebook about the recent ACRL election results. I can also go on to the ACRL fan page and discuss ACRL or issues in the library world with other fans of ACRL (who would most likely be librarians).

The library developed a fan page back in the Spring '08 to launch with the website. Unfortunately that page had been fairly neglected for some time. With Jane's help, I am currently working to restore activity to the Oesterle Library Facebook page. Feel free to check it out! You might even see yourself on there! :-)

Week 17 - Depending on how you count -

Perhaps Post 17 is a better way of putting it?

We're going to try and finish the 21 things in the near future, with some Facebook material and a few more interesting things. There will probably be a recap before we're done, too!

This time around, there are a pair of interesting things, though nothing earth shattering or ground breaking. Item one is a current events posting, dealing with Flu Pandemics past and present. It's an interesting way of looking at the situation, and may well come in handy for those working at the ISD, because I suspect that people may well be looking for statistics on the subejct before the term is over. The image itself is located at: http://www.interbent.com/images/flu-pandemics.png though with this sort of resource, it's often hard to tell how long it might be available, or if it will be updated in the near term, as well, so you may wish to take a quick look at it.

The second element for this posting is a bit more fun, and I know that we have some animal lovers around. There is a site that tracks Library Pets worldwide - http://www.ironfrog.com/catsmap.html primarily cats... I wonder, since they list at least one ghost cat, and some stuffed tigers and cheetahs, are our dragon heads close enough to cats, or to pets to try and get them listed in this? Probably not, I suppose, though it does seem like an amusing idea.

jjs

Searching in a new way?

All,
Before much longer, we may have the opportunity to search for information, and particularly data, in a whole new way - Wolfram Alpha will debut sometime in May, and sounds interesting. Here is a quick overview, taken from: http://www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/ai/wolframalpha-searching-truth

Let me give three random examples. If you enter the query, “3/26/2009 + 90 days” you’ll get a page that gives a date ninety days later than the first date. If you enter “mt. everest height length of golden gate” you’ll get a page expressing the height of Mount Everest as a multiple of the length of the Golden Gate Bridge. If you enter “temperature in los gatos,” you’ll get something like the current temperature, a graph of the temperatures over the last week with projections for the next few days, and a graph of the temperatures over the last year.

While I'm not sure how often we might need to know how many Golden Gates equal Mt. Everest, I can think of some imaginative things to search this way, and if it's as good as doing this type of thing as I hope... It is the kind of tool that could turn out to be really useful over time.

For those of you that hacven't come across Wolfram in the past, his bio is commonly available - http://www.stephenwolfram.com/about-sw/ - and contains such things as: Born in London in 1959, Wolfram was educated at Eton, Oxford, and Caltech. He published his first scientific paper at the age of 15, and had received his PhD in theoretical physics from Caltech by the age of 20.

Once the site goes live, we'll take it for a test driev, and see what uses we might be able to make of it -

In the meantime, here is an interesting site to play around with:
http://www.papervision3d.org/demos/panorama/

More soon,
jjs

Blog Following, Redux - Week 15

Very early on, in Week 3, as a matter of fact we took a look at blog aggregators, Bloglines and Google Reader - That seems to have been quite a long time ago and it occurred to me, as I was getting ready for this week's posting, that it might be a good idea to return to the idea again - we're now fairly regularly communicating things via Belinda's ISD blog and using an aggregator regularly can make that a whole lot easier.

Assuming that you've created an account with one of them, and most likely Google, log in and see what blogs you read with the most frequency - there are many that will be interesting, either personally or professionally. Since starting this process, my own blog reading habits have changed pretty radically. I dropped Bloglines for Google Reader, I tend to scan more blogs, but only once a day, as opposed to checking in a few times and reading parts of the updated postings each time.

For this week, let's try going back to updating our own blogs, since some of them have been languishing a little bit. Take a look at the blogs you've read in the past, or are reading now, and create a simple post on your own blog that tells us of a newer blog that you've been following, or that you'd like to follow, if it's been a while since you added one, and give us an idea of why you chose that one?

Second, how about giving us a hand and suggesting something interesting for the Oesterle Library blog to cover? We've had a series of really good posts in that forum lately, so if there is something you'd like to suggest, post it to your blog, and we'll see what we can do!

Also, note the new survey in the upper right hand corner!

Next Week - a few new, fun tools to try -

jjs

A Google Earth Update -

"Once obscured by pixilation, Google Earth's aerial image of the vice presidential residence on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington is now nearly as clear as its view of the White House."
read all about it at the L. A. Times

jjs

Google Earth!

Hi all:
Last week we took a look at MapQuest and Google Maps, two tools that have interesting daily uses. This week, we'll take a look at something that is perhaps less useful and more entertaining, Google Earth. Earth is a tool that has to be downloaded from Google and then installed, as opposed to running within a browser window, but it is all the more powerful for that. You can get a copy of the program itself at: http://earth.google.com/ and then download and install it. [If you have any questions about this process or want some help, send me an IM and I'll drop by to take this step for you].
Google Earth is particularly interesting because it allows you to look at nearly anywhere on the planet, and to 'fly' from location to location. Once you have it installed, and start the program, there is a "Fly To:" search box that shows up in the left hand pane, and you can input your initial destination there. Naperville, for example, or virtually anyplace you can think of. It's worth noting that sometimes you have to try a couple of different spelling options to find the right place, but most work pretty simply.
There are, of course, some locations that have less detail than others. A close up of the middle of the Pacific Ocean offers little detail, and there are relatively well known instances of geographical locations that have little to no detail - The US Naval Observatory, for one, and that place known as Area 51 for another, as well as some locations in China. {http://www.ogleearth.com/2008/09/google_and_cens.html}
A bit further down in that left hand pane, there is a section called "Places" and this area has a built in sightseeing tour - if you click on 'sightseeing' and then press the "Play" button [looks like a triangle facing to the right] just below that pane, it'll 'fly' you through the whole tour, starting in the grand canyon.
There are a whole series of websites, like: http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/ubbthreads.php/Cat/0 that are dedicated to explaining the expanding the use of Google Earth, though most casual users simply find sightseeing fun, and I suppose that there is a library application that would be useful, as well. There are also lots of sites that give the coordinates of... interesting things.
Copy and paste the following lat/long numbers into Earth's Fly to: box and then hit enter...

30 30'38.82"S 115 22'56.14"E

37°41'27.13"N 121° 4'29.99"W

and many other possible locations that you'll have to discover for yourselves!

Once last idea - type in point lobos state reserve and hit enter, and it'll take you to the Northern Calif. coastline. Once you're there, you can use the wheel on your mouse to zoom in and out a little bit. Set up a nice view and the hold your left mouse button down on the map itself and gently 'flick' it down, letting go of the mouse in the same motion. What will happen [and it might take a few tries to get it right] is that the map will scroll to the south, past Big Sur, following the path of Highway 1 [though you may well have to readjust the path of the map scrolling by grabbing it with the mouse and moving it one direction or the other. Once you get a feel for it, you can choose a path and watch the earth rotate as you go...

What else have you found? What part of Earth seem most interesting, and do you see a library application for this, or is it just fun?
Write a Blog post about it, and let us all know!

jjs

Week 12 - Maps

Hi all,
and welcome to Week 12. This week, we'll take a look at two map utilities to see what the differences are, and also to see how they're similar.

For quite a while, MapQuest was the dominant Internet-based map and direction creation tool. It is still very useful, and a lot of people prefer the interface and some of the options that are available. One of my favorite options within MapQuest is the ability to create directions in varied ways. The fastest route versus the shortest route can often give alternatives that are worth looking into. Another option that is very useful when moving about the Chicago area is the ability to choose to avoid tollways.

As is nearly always the case these days, a successful sites like MapQuest has spurred Google to create it's own variant of a mapping and direction generating site. Google Maps offers many of the same features that MapQuest does, and some prefer the interface. For my part, I tend to prefer Google Maps, because it acts in a way that I am used to - for instance, the scroll wheel in Google Maps zooms the view in or out, and I use that feature all the time. Google Maps also has an interesting "street view" option {like this one} for some areas that allows you to look at things from street level.

One of my favorite tools, though, is the ability to get directions for public transportation from Google Maps, in addition to walking directions. That makes a difference, and is rather a unique view, I think.

How about you? Try both interfaces out, look up your house, the campus, perhaps someplace that you'd like to visit or have enjoyed in the past? Create a blog post in your own blog about what you found, and about which tool you prefer -

There is also the interesting idea of the Google Maps Mash Up, where the maps interface if used by individuals or companies to create new maps of types that might not have been thought of. Here is a link to a large collection of these things - http://mashable.com/2009/01/08/google-maps-mashups-tools/ I think you'll find that some are rather interesting, others are just odd.
One example of both is Tall Eye - the flag represents where the hole would come out if we began excavating a hole in Oesterle Library's basement, and dug straight down.
Perhaps a project for Spring Break?

jjs - [next week - Google Earth!]

Week 11 – Social Bookmarking

Hi, all! We've now moved into the 2nd half of our 21 things exploration. I hope that you've been enjoying our journey so far...

Bookmarks, or Favorite lists, have come a long way since the early days of the Internet. One of the more interesting tools to help manage them is http://delicious.com – the most common site for "Social Bookmarking". Delicious manages three primary, and useful, activities – and all three can be used in conjunction, or individually.

The one that I started using allows you to save your bookmarks to an online location, so that you can use them on any Internet connected machine [and you probably won’t be doing a lot of browsing if you’re not connected to the Internet!]. To do this, all you have to do is go to: http://delicious.com and create an account. When you do that, one of the options you’ll have is to upload your local bookmark file to delicious. Then, when you’re logged in, you can use them, add to them, and etc. If you keep it updated, you can always have access to your bookmark file wherever you might be. I find this to be useful, and particularly if there are reference type sites that you want to have access to, but can’t always remember.

A second use of http://delicious.com is the ability to discover new sites and share them with others, or see what others have shared. One example: let’s say that you’re interested in modern art – you can do a search of popular bookmarks within Delicious that have been marked as being about modern art – that means that the most popular bookmarks in everyone’s collections will show up at the top. They won’t always be what you’re looking for, but it’s a great way to discover new sites that relate to your interests.

The third major use of Delicious is in sharing. I haven’t done any of this yet, but as we work through this week, we might find that it’s an interesting exercise. Briefly, you can choose to share your bookmark sets with other Delicious users, and they can share their sets with you. In library terms, it means that we could put together a delicious site that is a collection of our best and most useful Library related or Reference sites.

So, for this week, head on over to http://delicious.com if you haven’t tried it already, and create an account. Upload your own bookmarks, or choose to start from scratch. Add a few, delete a few, organize a few and give them tags if you’d like. In general, just look around and see if this would be a tool that is useful for you, or even for the Library.

Explore the Tags, and look into the popular section, to see if there are things in your areas of interest that you’ve been missing. One of the other things you can take a shot at is to go to the popular bookmarks section, and then choose to look at a randomly bookmarks site from the popular list. By selecting “Jump to a Random Bookmark” – but beware… not everything will be academic in nature…

Once you’ve spent a little time with http://delicious.com write a blog post in your own bogs about what you’ve found, what you liked [or didn’t] and if you think that this might have some work application.

See what you can discover!

jjs

Week 10 – just for fun

Hi All,
After thinking about the fact that it’s a short week, I thought that it would make more sense to find simple online toys – a pair of things that may be useful, but that are also uncomplicated and interesting. After looking around, and spending rather a lot of time trying to find things that amused me as well as seemed to have some utility, I settled on two:
The first is: http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/
I get a lot of questions about finding things [outside of work, of course] and many of them are fairly simple – Let Me Google That For You seems to be a useful tool to cover some of those things. The idea behind LMGTFY that you can build a complicated search in google [or a simple one], and simply send someone the link created on the site. It then reruns the search within their browser, like:
http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=cardinals+playoff+%22north+central%22+site%3Ad3football.com
I’ve no idea how long this site will be around, as I can’t imagine that Google is delighted by it. You might find it interesting, though – and perhaps helpful around the holidays.

The second thing is something that I find sort of fascinating – perhaps you will, too, or perhaps you’ll decide that I’m vaguely mad – Wordle creates java-based, on the fly "word clouds". If you haven’t seen one of these, they’re quite interesting.
You can paste in some text [or the link to a blog feed] and the application will parse the words in it, finding the most common ones. Those are then displayed in varying sizes, with the most common words in the document or site being the largest. There are a lot of layout options, from font choices to colorways, adjustments for language, general layout and number of words to display. Some of the things that are returned are very nearly word art -
Please note, however, if you save it to the online gallery, they’ll be visible to anyone who uses the Wordle site. While I don’t think there are any copyright implications…

Here are some of the more interesting ones I built:
Text copied from a series of our web pages:



The Fall ’08 Ex Libris


The recently updated Library Disaster Plan [Thanks Belinda!]

and last, though surely not least: The entire 2nd book of the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Andros to Austria…

http://www.wordle.net/create

The biggest trick with Wordle is that you have to copy the image and paste it... though printing is also possible.

Have fun with these - if you have alternatives, by all means post them, and we'll give them a try!

jjs

Week 9, Part 2 - Fun with Language redux

I hope that everyone has been discovering new fun phrases to use [or that may make you cringe, depending]. We've got a good number of comments to the initial posting, so it's about time to post the translations or expansions of the acronyms for those who decided not to search all of them out -

Let's see if we were right about the familiar ones, and learn some new ones!
jjs

Week 9 – fun with language

Netspeak: chat and text messaging has caused a sub-genre of language to emerge and this week we’ll take a look at some of the commonly used abbreviations and acronyms that we might come across as we’re working in an online environment. Of course, some of what we’ll find will also be a bit amusing, I hope.

As with most specialized languages, netspeak is created to show an insider status, but also to allow communications to occur in shorthand, and to save time. On the Internet, and particularly within chat, these kinds of terms allow for a simpler and faster level of communication [as long as you can make sense of what the term means]. Text messaging took this a few steps further, because texts are limited to a specific number of characters.

Netspeak
The most common one, which we probably all know, is LOL – though it would almost always be more accurate to type LIH. Don’t know LIH*? JGI*!

Text shorthand
tst msgs Rnt alw ez 2 figa ot, bt f u try, n f uv sum lvl of imagntn, ur ahed of d gme.

or:
Test messages are not always easy to figure out, but if you try, and if you have some level of imagination, you are ahead of the game.

For this week, let’s do a little research, and see how things go. Try to find between 5 and 10 examples of netspeak that amuse you, and a couple example of text message language, if possible.

Post the examples you find without translation, as a comment on this post – blog comments are something new, too, but easy to do – and include at least your name, so we know who has posted what we’re looking at! After a few days, we can start giving the translations to the harder ones. Have fun with this one!

[n.b. some of the more common ones can be relatively crude – so make your own decision about those!]
jjs

next week: Bookmarks!

*
[LIH - Laughing In Head]
[JGI - Just Google It]

Week 8, Part 2 – Gtalk

GTalk is one of my favorite internet tools, and I hope that you’ll also find it useful. There are a number of different ways to access GTalk, and part of the decision depends on what you’re going to use it for. For our work-based purposes, we’re going to want to download and install the GTalk desktop application, which you can get from: http://www.google.com/talk/
Either follow the download GTalk instructions on that page, or let me know, and I’ll come and help out. You can use your existing Gmail or Blogger userid and password to access GTalk. GTalk can also be run in a browser window [for when you can’t or don’t want to install the application]. This option can also be started from the http://www.google.com/talk/ page by choosing Launch Google Talk Gadget [help is also available from here]. This pops up a window that looks quite like the application and has most of the benefits of it. You can also run the Talk application from within Gmail [too many options?] it starts automatically when you log into your gmail account, and is on the left hand side of the page.


Here is what I’d like to do, to get everyone up and running with this, and to gain some experience with the program. The best solution is to download the application itself, since it’s the easiest one to use, and offers the most flexibility. Once you’ve done that, log in and look at the program itself. If you’ve used an Instant Messaging application already, it’ll look pretty familiar to you.


What I’d like to do is to have each of us log into GTalk for at least the rest of November, and let’s find reasons to use the program, to get comfortable with it. To make that happen, I’ll shortly send a piece of email with my Gtalk userid in it to everyone. Once you’re up and running, add yours to the list, and we’ll all add them. Once that’s done, as long as you’re logged in, we’ll all ‘see you’ and be able to chat.

There are a lot of interesting options that we can talk about once we’re all going, so if you’re a GTalk user, or explore and find interesting things, post them here are comments!


It’s easy, quiet simple and can be fun – so let’s see how it works for us.


One of the most important things to try and get accustomed to is to mark yourself as ‘away’ when you leave your desk – this takes a bit of practice. There is a little down arrow next to the default ‘available’ icon, just click on that, and you’ll see the options.


So, let’s try this out, and see how it works for us! If you're having trouble, let me know!


jjs

Week 8 – Time to Chat, part 1

Well, we’ve made it to week 8, having been through a lot of different tools and ideas so far, so here is another weekly post. Chat programs have been around for years now, and there are different tools and different interfaces that we can choose from. The one that we’re going to work with is, not surprisingly GTalk from Google. I chose this one for two primary reasons. First, we all have Google addresses from the Blogger/Gmail trials we have already done. Second, and probably more important, we’re probably going to be moving the Chat Reference service over to GTalk in the near future, so if we’re going to take a look at one of these tools, and spend some time getting used to it, it’s probably the best solution.

There are two primary uses for a chat program in our Library. One of them is for external communication, like the Chat Reference that we’re already doing. The main benefit of GTalk in this area is that we can create a direct chat function on the web page that doesn’t require the student to have to download software or even a Google account in order to chat with us. That’s a project that we’ve been looking into.

The other primary use is for internal communications. I’ve been in libraries where everyone was logged into a chat program for most of the day, just marking themselves away when they left their desk, or turning the program off when they needed to really concentrate on something without any interruption. While we already have a lot of possible tools for internal communication, from phones to email to walking, chat is another possible tool, and so we’ll take a shot to see how useful it might be for us. If you think of it as a sort of email lite, you may get an idea of how it might be useful.

If all else fails, it will give us a chance to practice with the idea of using a tool to chat, among ourselves, and will also allow us to prepare for using GTalk as a tool to talk to the outside world. That does bring up one of the downfalls of chat-based program use in a work setting, though, and that probably should be mentioned here. It’s pretty easy to find yourself in a situation where chat extends beyond the work place, and begins to consume more time than any of us would want. I hope that we can avoid that particular issue, but we do have to be aware of it.

More follows on Friday, about how we’ll want to proceed with this test, and the different ways that we can move forward with the Week 8 trials!
jjs

Week 7 – myEBSCO and alerts, RSS feeds, etc.

Is it really week 7 already?
That seems impossible!

Last week, we looked at MyEBSCO, and this week, we’ll take it one step further. Within the customization settings, there are a few interesting things that you can do to automate your searching. If you have a favorite author, perhaps, and would like to be automatically reminded whenever something by or about them shows up in an EBSCO database, you can create an RSS feed that automatically shows up in either Google Reader or Bloglines [remember those? Week 3.] You can also use this process to create an automatic piece of email as a reminder, too.
To do this relatively simple operation, perform a search in a EBSCO database that actually retrieves results. I did a simple keyword search for: Ondaatje, Michael

Once the results come up, look for Search History/Alerts, immediately below the search fields. Click on that to expand it and you’ll get a series of options. The options will vary depending on the search you performed. In my case, I was given a choice of a straight keyword search, a SU or subject search or an AU or author search. I’m going to choose the straight keyword search [mostly because the last name is odd enough it’s not going to give me a bunch of false positives…]
To actually create a link for my search, I’m going to choose the little orange icon [which is the standard icon for an RSS feed]. When I do that, a window pops up giving me some options. I can enable an email alert by choosing “Edit Alert” and adjust the settings there, if I wish. Since I am a regular user of Google Reader, though, I prefer to incorporate my EBSCO feeds into that platform. To do this, all I have to do is to copy the “Syndication Feed” link by right clicking on it and choosing “copy link location”. Then I can go to Google Reader and paste it in as a new feed. Alternatively, you can just click on the “Syndication Feed” link, and it’ll take you to a page that gives you directions on how to do this simply.

Once you get a feel for this, you can begin to be pretty creative with it. If you have a favorite magazine or journal that is in EBSCO, you can set up an alert that let’s you know whenever a new issue has been published – you can set up an alert that gives you tables of contents [for many publications], and all sorts of other ideas. Want to get really creative? Set up a search that looks for recipes containing an unusual ingredient and every time one is indexed in an EBSCO title… you get the idea, right?

So, this week, give this a try, and see what you think about it. If you choose your alerts carefully, they’ll be very interesting. If you build them too broadly, you’ll get 50 chocolate cake recipes every day [which may, or may not, be a bad thing…]

Use your blog to give us an idea of how this process went for you, and if you find it to be interesting or useful. Did you decide on an email alert, or an RSS feed? Also, if you come up with a creative use for this, by all means let us know about it!

Next Week – It’s time to Chat.
Happy Halloween,

jjs

Week 6 - MyEBSCOhost

Hi all,
And welcome to Week 6 – Today, we’ll begin a two part look at one of our primary tools, the EBSCO databases. Academic Search Premier is our largest and most diversified database, and is the default starting point for nearly everything we do, the database automatically selected from the library home page, so it’s a good idea to take a look at it. I know that we’re all familiar with the basics of EBSCO, so thought we’d take a look at some of the more hidden things.

In our first part, let’s look at customization. There is an interesting tool called My EBSCOhost that allows for some interesting alternatives. My EBSCOhost allows a valid user to create a personal log in, which offers some interesting possibilities. First, once you’ve created a login of your own, using the top ribbon and choosing the link “Sign in to My EBSCOhost” it will ask you to log in, or to create your own account… do that now, please, we’ll wait……………………………………

OK, welcome back. Once you’ve created your account and logged into it, you’ll see, right under the search boxes, the word preferences. This allows you to make some changes that persist over time, so they don’t have to be adjusted every time. Things like automatically putting in your email address, changing the citation type, APA, MLA, etc. and adjusting the results per page. It also allows you to set up an automatic export to EndNote, a citation management tool available on campus, which we’ll talk about later.

These are pretty simple changes, but they’re a beginning for the more interesting parts. Once you’re logged in, if you add articles or citations to your own folder, they stay in the folder over multiple sessions. That means that you can easily add things to come back to later. Students particularly like this feature, as it means that they can print when it’s convenient, or add to research when time allows.

It also means that a faculty member or students working in groups can create a folder that can be shared [as long as they share the email address + password]. That makes group work and class readings a lot easier to manage, but you have to know it’s there!
For this week, let’s get individual accounts set up, and write a quick blog entry about the differences in the preferences, and if there are any interesting things you observe, or ideas that you have about how we could use this.

Also, if you liked the concept map in Credo Reference, take a minute or two to look at the Visual Search interface in Ebsco – it’s quite different, but does offer some interesting ways to look at your results, and some interesting ways to limit them.

Next Week - My EBSCOhost part two, the cool stuff: automatic searches and RSS feeds

trivia time: what does EBSCO stand for?

Week 5 – The E-Book

Hi all,
and welcome to Week 5. This week, we’re going to try a library specific activity, and we’ll take a quick look at two collections of electronic books. While I’ll admit that few people like eBooks per se - they’re not particularly comfortable to read, nor can they be transported very easily [unless you’re using a laptop] they do have some interesting advantages. The major advantage is that they are immediately accessible, from wherever the student happens to be. That makes them particularly useful as a last minute sort of tool. Additionally, they’re easily searchable – not just the bibliographic information, but the entire text of the eBook. They also have some interesting features, one of which we’ll look at a bit later.

For this week, what I hope you’ll all do is take a look at a NetLibrary eBook that interests you, record the bibliographic information on your blog, and talk a bit about how useful you think it might be for our users. Also, take a peek at the Concept map in Credo Reference, and give us some indication about whether you think that would be useful.

Oesterle eBooks are available from: http://library.noctrl.edu/books/ - netLibrary is the larger collection of eBooks, and contains the full text of a large portion of the Project Gutenberg free e-text collection as well. Searching is easy, and most subjects are covered, though our collection is limited.

Credo Reference is a collection of 100 reference titles, dictionaries, subject encyclopedias and etc. Take a look around, but by all means, make sure that you give the Concept Map a try. If nothing else, it can serve as a good overview of a subject area, and can give you some additional ideas for search terms. If nothing else, the Concept Map is a fun piece of technology to play with, and make sure that you use the slider for the Link Levels, to add more nodes to the map. I think you may find it to be fun.
We have a few other collections of eBooks as well, and they’re all located on that same page. If you’re interested, give those a quick look, too.
jjs

My Gmail experience –

I’ve been using Gmail from very nearly the beginning, and have gotten so used to it, that I don’t always think about why I like it, and why it works so well for me. Part of it has to do with a level of comfort with the interface and tools, of course, but I think there is more to it than that. One of the things that I really like is the way Gmail files email as conversations, as opposed to a bunch of discrete pieces of email. With my daughters, I have email conversations that range up to about 50 pieces of email, and they’re all automatically kept filed together.
One other thing I like very much is that the search facility is a standard Google search within the email itself. Since I don’t even have to think about the process of formulating a search, it’s easier to find what I’m looking for, and there is no time spent building indexes or opening another search interface, it’s just all right there. The last strength is that my mobile connects directly and happily to Gmail, so that I have fairly constant access to my email account. Not a vital selling point, but a nice one.

jjs