I have put two copies of the 2007 mid-year exam papers onto one-hour loan. They are for in library use only.

I’ve put them on the shelf above the non-library books.

Thanks
Theresa L.

If any students ask for these please direct them to the class folder on ENGCAD as the lecturer won’t be putting them on Restricted Loan this year.

Thanks
Theresa

The Copy Centre has checked the Engineering Library Change Machine and it has run out of money and will not be refilled until Tuesday morning by Chubb. 🙁

An out of order sign has been placed on it.

As is the season at the moment, be on the watch out for the Hot Chips and Pie Eaters. You can usually spot them with guilty looks (or not, for the brazen few) and turning slightly away from the desk trying desperately to disguise the contraband.

Today’s brief incident, involved a skateboard, guilty look and a half eaten pie. Upon catching the dastardly daring delinquent he enquired how his salacious scheme was uncovered. Well, I don’t mean to brag, but after watching the latest Doctor Who featuring Agatha Christie, I concluded that the predisposed guilty look, eye avoidance, and steady chewing were all clues that gave this aspiring amateur crime fighter all the clues he needed. Not to mention a smelly half eaten packet pie.

Today’s score is only 1 as I’m been informed that the competition will start from today. This last weeks brave efforts are not counted.

Hi all,

I’ve had a shuffle of the Restricted Loans tonight to make some more room and have updated the shelf markers.

Please let me know if there are any problems.

Theresa L

(i love to share by creativecommoners
under CC-BY-2.0 license.)

[For curious non-EngL people: 23 Things is a web-based professional development programme designed to introduce librarians to new web technologies of relevance to libraries. Feel free to email me if you want to know more.]

Officially Thing #14 is about Technorati, a ginormous blog-ranking and -tagging website. Have a read about it if you’re interested, but I think it’s not so relevant to us, whereas it would be useful to play with using del.icio.us and Google Reader to help us share information with each other.

Continue reading 23 Things #14 – Sharing news and info →

The Toner for the Engineering Student Printer is running low. More toner has been ordered from Office Max this should arrive monday as they cannot promise that it would arrive today.

Students desperate to print can transfer printing jobs to the Cave’s printers.

This week we’ll look at social bookmarking – a way to bookmark your favourite websites and share them with your friends. For example, I can easily give you a link to my del.icio.us bookmarks about 23 Things and when I’ve posted this I can add this blog post to the list as well.

A lot of libraries are using this for subject guides and current awareness. (You can get an RSS feed of a del.icio.us tag so you can get notified when the library adds another website to its collection of “chemical engineering” bookmarks.)

Here’s

• Social Bookmarking in Plain English (CommonCraft video, ~3min)
• Del.icio.us tutorial (8 min)

In our groups this week we’ll create a del.icio.us account and practice browsing tag clouds and adding bookmarks.

I’ve had a few people asking if we can print to OHP straight from the file on their USB/flash drive. I wasn’t sure at first how the computer print set up worked with the manual feed needed for OHP transparencies but it works fine to:

1. Open the file from the USB drive
2. File -> Print…
3. Check that Fred is selected
4. Properties
5. Paper/Quality
6. Paper source = Manual feed

If they want anything in colour they’ll have to go to the Copy Centre.

The original 23 Things post asks: “Do you have a group of websites that are your favorites? Or a set of online resources that are similar that you frequently use to answer homework or reference questions?”

If you go to Google it will search over all sorts of sites you’re not interested in. And if you search on the university site search it’ll miss out information on other universities. But you can create a custom search engine that allows you to search on all but only the sites you ask it to.

In libraries this could be useful for:

• searching over subject guides (or other resources) in multiple libraries
• searching for a review of a particular book on multiple book review sites
• …

The 23 Thing post suggests trying out Rollyo (‘roll your own search engine’). Another service that does the same thing is Google Custom Search. I think it’d be fun and useful to divide into two groups, look at one service each, and compare how each of them works.