Gale is providing a variety of search widgets for its databases – boxes we can use to easily embed their searches in LibGuides, etc.

Various library vendors have twitter accounts. (Some more interesting than others…)

Library Journal have published a Periodicals Price Survey 2009.

Both these resources have RSS feeds so you can keep up-to-date with them yourself:

• April’s Intute Spotlight has articles on the synthesis of a new material with a complicated pore structure, the potential use of graphene in computer chips, and the possible relationship between certain volcanoes and global warming.
• The Internet Resources Newsletter no. 171 has piles of links of interest to librarians.

Deborah

Faced with budget cuts, MIT Libraries have put up a webpage explaining their response – a nice way to communicate with users and to promote their services to the budget decision-makers.

The World Wide Web in Plain English (YouTube video; or with subtitles) provides “A short explanation of what makes the World Wide Web work: browsers, packets, servers addresses and links.”

Doing a 15 Minute Presentation in 10 Easy Steps sets out an easy way to create an effective powerpoint show without that “Death by Bulletpoint” effect.

Has anyone seen an image like the one above? I’ve just started seeing them appear on movie posters. It’s called a QR code, and the idea is that people can take a photo of it with their mobile phones and a piece of software in the phone will decode the image and follow its instructions – eg link to a website with more information. University of Bath Library is already using it in their catalogue (see a blog post and an image of what it looks like). Educause have written 7 Things You Should Know About QR Codes (pdf) and QR Codes made an appearance on CSI (YouTube).

This is very much emerging technology – but I wouldn’t be surprised if it emerges very quickly. Once it catches on it could become as fundamental as clicking a link on a webpage. How could it be useful in libraries? Other than the catalogue example, it could be used:

• on displays, to take users to a webpage with more information
• on books in new book displays, so users can request a book without having to hunt it down in the catalogue
• on a map, taking users to a video tour of the library
• advertising in Canta, so people can go straight from the ad to our website
• anywhere else we want to link some physical object to some online information.

Deborah

Springshare have announced some new products, CampusGuides and LibAnswers.

A newspaper article re the cost of textbooks sparked discussion on open access textbooks. Links posted include:

• An analysis of the college textbook marketplace
• a library directory of Open Access Books
• a list of free organic chemistry resources

NZ publishers line up for slice of Google Books copyright settlement.

The editor-in-chief of Journal of Medical Internet Research blogs about how to cite twitter and other ephemeral websites – and given that most websites are ephemeral… He recommends, instead of citing the website’s url, using the WebCite tool to get a snapshot archive of the website and citing the link to that instead. Read more here. Will be great if something like this catches on.

Google Images’ advanced search lets you refine your search to find faces/photos/clipart/line drawings, or black-and-white/greyscale/full colour. A recent hack reported is to run your search and then paste &imgcolor=orange at the end of the url, eg this search. Not sure how many colours this works with.

Deborah

These are much more low-profile for the library but if you get any questions about Cambodia or about jelly then you might be talking to an ENGR 101 student. As per usual, refer them to the appropriate topic guides on the Engineering Intermediate subject guide.

The best search word for jelly is “gelatin” – “jelly” in the US means something different so is liable to bring up irrelevant results, and “jello” as a brand name is even less useful.

Deborah

A field guide to misunderstandings about open access. This comes not long after MIT adopts a university-wide open-access mandate.

You’ve heard of libraries sharing photos on Flickr (Library of Congress, NatLib NZ, Christchurch City Libraries. Now the Library of Congress is sharing first-person accounts of slavery and interviews with notable authors on YouTube, and the Land Library of Saxony-State and University Library Dresden will upload 250,000 images to to Wikimedia Commons on a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

Google Scholar Search Performance: Comparative Recall and Precision portal: Libraries and the Academy 9(1) 2009 finds that, “within the multidisciplinary field of later-life migration”, “In terms of both recall and precision, Google Scholar performs better than most of [Academic Search Elite, AgeLine, ArticleFirst, EconLit, GEOBASE, MEDLINE, PAIS International, POPLINE, Social Sciences Abstracts, Social Sciences Citation Index, and SocINDEX].”

Library of Congress Authorities – less user-friendly but more wrist-friendly than hauling down the LC Subject Headings.

Deborah

(Links of interest is an irregular series of stuff I glean from the blogs and other social networking of various librarians – sometimes subject resources, sometimes useful tools, sometimes… just whatever I can’t bear not to share. I’ll stick with the same title format each time so if you’re not interested you can skip it.)

The Computers in Libraries 2009 conference has been running, which packs everything that’s most awesome in librarianship into three days of awesomeness. Online reference, libguides, adding functionality to the catalogue, federated search, enhancing learning, etc etc are the kinds of topics that come up. The CiL2009 wiki includes a “Tracking the Conference” section where you can find blog posts, photos, presentation slideshows and more as they’re added to the web.

Awesome Highlighter lets you highlight information on a webpage and get a short url which you can send to someone (eg someone asking a reference question by email or asklive) and they can see what you’ve highlighted. eg http://awurl.com/Bdets4sk5.

Cornell Law Library’s custom Google search engines (so people can do a quick search within appropriate sources)

The Law Library of Congress began harvesting legal blawgs in 2007. The collection has grown to more than one hundred items covering a broad cross section of legal topics.

CAS launches Common Chemistry which provides free chemical information. ChemSpider comments.

The latest issue of Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research
(You can register for email alerts of new issues)

Ways librarians can use Google Book Search. Also an informal discussion a couple of weeks ago about more ways to use it.

A day late for us here in New Zealand, but Johnson County Library is now offering brain chips for patrons to access all the resources and services of the library.

Deborah

YouTube have just launched a new Education portal containing videos from “our college and university partners”. There’s a *lot* of good stuff there.

(Btw, I’ve recently been emailing out to info librarians updates of library-related resources and news that I come across during the day. If anyone else (IT? Collections?) would like to be in the loop, please absolutely let me know and I’ll add you to the list; or I could add the stuff to Counterculture (I’m just conscious of not wanting to clutter it up); or I could set up a separate blog.)

Deborah

We sometimes get asked who’s booked the Cave or when the room will be free again. It’s not quite as easy to find out as for library rooms but can be done:

Facilities Management has a timetable reports page. Click “by room”, select the appropriate day/time, then “Click here to view report”. You next need to select the building you’re looking for, which can be tricky. (The Cave is under “Engineering Library”.) “Continue”, select the room you want, then “View timetable”.

Deborah

A couple of items of interest I came across this morning:

• Choice Reviews Online is publishing 5 free email newsletters and
• the new version of the MLA handbook will include significant online content – see the comments for librarians discussing the problems in making this online content available for users. More discussion is on this article and in this FriendFeed conversation where I first heard about it.

If you haven’t heard of FriendFeed before, it lets you put all your social networking accounts (blog, twitter, flickr, facebook, youtube, bookmarking, etc) into a single place; to see all this stuff of your friends who have an account; and to start up a conversation about any of it right there. See eg my stuff, other people’s stuff I’ve commented on and all my friends’ stuff. (I use this just for library-related news so my ‘friends’ are mostly librarians, and I’ve set up filters so I only ever see the most useful fraction of this.) As soon as you comment on or “like” something, all your friends can see it — so it’s extremely good for finding and sharing news very quickly. If anyone’s curious I’m happy to answer questions, or you can just sign up, subscribe to some interesting people (pick me!), and play around.

(The main thing with any social networking system is finding the right people to subscribe to. A propos of which, are there any other Twitter users in UC Library? Again I primarily use it for library stuff but/so if anyone’s interested I’m at deborahfitchett.)