(Random book from my LibraryThing library)

LibraryThing is a social library catalogue. You can create your own catalogue of the books you own by entering the title or isbn or searching some other way, then ‘tag’ them with your own keywords, rate them, and even write a review.

But the real fun comes from clicking on a book’s “View social information” icon to see how other people have tagged, rated, and reviewed it, what discussions it’s being mentioned in, and “People who have this also have…” (LibraryThing even has a fun “People who have this *don’t* have…” feature.) You can even include a widget on your blog or other website to show what you’ve been reading recently.

What relevance does this have for libraries? LibraryThing for Libraries lets libraries add any/all all this functionality (tags, ratings, reviews, similar books) into the library catalogue. See examples at Pelham Public Library and California State University.

Enough introduction – the thing of the week is to create an account on LibraryThing (reuse your blog username and password!), add half a dozen books, and… explore.

(Original 23 Things post here)

ENGR 101 has a new assignment, due on the 28th April. It shouldn’t be as library-intensive as the last one but you may get some questions.

They have to design a device that automatically breaks raw eggs and collects the egg whites and yolks separately (and free of egg shell) for use in an automated pavlova factory. To do this they’re meant to do some research, come up with alternative solutions, construct one solution, test it, and cite references.

So they may need resources about eggs, technical drawing, and APA citation style. I’ve listed some on Cog ‘n Blog so you can give this link to any student who asks.

Image generators are websites that let you put your own text into an image. The resulting image can be useful for:

• signs
• presentations
• blog posts…

The “thing” for this week is to create your own image using an image generator, and post it to your blog. To do this you’ll need to:

1. Go to the 23 Things website and follow some of the links to find an image generator you like.
2. Save the image you create to the computer (right-click on the image and “Save image/picture as”).
3. Create a blog post and click on the image button to upload your photo (if you’re not sure which button is which, hover over each button for a moment and an explanation will pop up).
   

ENG 101 slides created from Powerpoint in to PDF not printing for one student who was accessing them from Blackboard.

Didn’t seem to make any difference if they were copied to their P: drive.

I was able to print them by saving to the Scratch on U: drive and then printing from staff PC on front desk.

Message it came up with was “Flattening x%” and then when it got to 100% just kept doing the same again.

No obvious I.T. problem so I referred student back to lecturer as it may be something that happens again or maybe for other students.

Hi,

Some students may be looking for a copy of this which includes SI Units. We currently don’t have this but I have asked Victoria to order three copies so hopefully they will be here soon.

Thanks
Theresa

*UPDATE* A wee bit late but we have these now and most students are asking for them. Thanks Theresa

Students have been looking for the 3rd edition of this text by Norman Dowling (2006)

The library has two copies of this both of which are out. I have recalled them and will put them on 3 hour loan once they have been returned.

The lecturer has given me several copies as well, one of which is currently on the non-library book shelf (I will put the rest on when I am here Tuesday afternoon). These are 1 hour in library use only copies.

Also I have removed the 2nd edition as the lecturer has said it is completley different to the third and he doesn’t want the students to get confused between the two.

Let me know if there any questions

Thanks
Theresa

*** UPDATE ***

Just to let you know I have added three non-library copies to Restricted Loan, their call number is Non-Library Book 08/01.

The books are all on the non-library book shelf when students ask for them.

Thanks Theresa

This week’s challenge is to find at least 3 new RSS feeds and add them to Google Reader. These could be

• blogs
• news
• earthquakes
• photo feeds
• current awareness from journals or databases
• anything else…

We won’t be doing this in training this week because you already know how to do it – just keep an eye out when you’re surfing your favourite sites for the orange RSS icon, and when you see it you know you can paste the URL/address into Google Reader’s “add subscription”.

If you want to look for feeds on particular topics, try:

• Google BlogSearch
• Technorati
• Feedster

And last but not least, remember to write a blog post about your experience looking for RSS feeds.

Bonus points for:

• checking Google Reader once a day
• sharing items that particularly strike your fancy

(See also the original Thing #9.)

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. “Syndication” stands for “putting news in a whole bunch of different places the original author never thought of”. And “news” can stand for blogs, or for new results from a saved search in a database, or the latest earthquake recorded on Geonet.

One place you can put news using RSS is directly in your browser (using the instructions on Camelot).

Another place is a newsreader like Google Reader or Bloglines where you tell it what blogs (or database searches or earthquakes) you want to follow and it shows you all the new posts from those places. Newsreaders are also sometimes called “aggregators” because they bring everything together in one place.

So Thing #8 is to:

1. Go to Google Reader and if you don’t already have an account, make one (Tip: use the same username and password as you used for your blog last week)
2. In the green bar on the left, click on “Add subscription”, paste in a blog URL, and click the “Add” button. Do this several times – you could add:
   • Top Gear news
   • The Annoyed Librarian
   • Library Stream
   • The blogs we shared last week
   • Counterculture (unfortunately Camelot won’t work as Google can’t get access to it)
3. Explore the different ways you can organise and view the posts: list view vs expanded view; home vs all items vs clicking on individual blog names; try starring things and clicking on “Starred items”.
4. Write a quick blog post about: What do you like/not like about using Google Reader? and/or How could you use this in your work or personal life? and/or How can/should/shouldn’t libraries use it?

(Adapted from the original 23 Things programme.)

The licenses for these have expired and can no longer be used. I have withdrawn them so we hopefully won’t get any more students asking for them.

The Course Coordinators for ENGR101 are sourcing some for the 2008 year which we will hopefully get soon.

Thanks
Theresa

We’re getting a new lift in Engineering Library due to the current one being a bit claustrophobic and not wheelchair-friendly. The project is expected to take 20 weeks.

So far a tree has been chopped down, a pit dug, and concrete laid. We’ve been doing a lot of preparation inside, too:

• in December we weeded and shifted our Z & A-Ps a couple of stacks over to make room for work on level 1
• last week we shifted the T-TA1 section a stack over to make room for work on the level 3 balustrade
• Adam’s helping us weed the Q-QDs, and then the bulk of the remainder will be moved to PSL
• we’re going to do some complicated shuffling of the S-SFs (forestry collection) and the TD-TGs which isn’t quite clear to me yet, to make room for work on the other side of the level 3 balustrade, and for the level 2 lift work.

We’re keeping a running description of the process up on Cog ‘n Blog (the “lift project” category) and we’ve also got photos up on our Flickr account.