Tag Archives: resources

Links of interest 12/5/09

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Lav Notes: help for the stalled (pdf) is a one-side library newsletter posted in library bathroom stalls. A colleague of its author mentions a library which posted butcher paper in the bathroom stalls and invited temporary grafitti. Cheaper than repainting!

Finding Physical Properties of Chemicals: A Practical Guide for Scientists, Engineers, and Librarians (pdf)

From Twitter, “New Zealand music month + free performances = [Dunedin Public Library’s] YouTube channel enjoy!”

“University of Oregon Library[‘s] faculty unanimously passed a resolution requiring all library faculty-authored scholarly articles to be licensed CC BY-NC-ND.” That is, they retain copyright but authorise anyone to copy, share and use it so long as they attribute its source (BY), use it for non-commercial purposes only (NC), and don’t change it (non-derivative=ND).

Notes from a presentation “on the potential use of mobile devices and cell phones for providing library services and resources“.

More and more people have web-enabled cellphones. Examples of libraries who’ve done this include:

Non-English blog roundup #2

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Deakialli DokuMental (Spanish) writes about navigation and filtering with tags – also discusses facets. “What is the problem? That description and navigation are different concepts.” This post made me think about searching using social bookmarking sites. I use Diigo which only has an AND search – as far as I can tell (and I hunted a bit) there’s no way to do even an NOT or OR search. Del.icio.us has a few advanced search options, but still no truncation search. As far as I know, there’s no reason this couldn’t be done, and it would make a search for “blog OR blogs OR blogging” much easier.

Documentalistes (Catalan) briefly evaluates Google Image Ripper, a site where you can type in your image search and it brings up the full-size images instead of the thumbnails. I note that it doesn’t solve the duplication problem: it would be Really Cool if a search for “madame de lafayette” didn’t include both images #1 and #5 which are identical. (Literally: Answers.com took it straight off Wikimedia. Some kind of pixel-by-pixel matching algorithm? Yes, yes, strain on the server and would slow down the results. Still.)

DosPuntoCero (Spanish) talks about some surveys described in the book “Libraries and the Mega-Internet Sites” (ISBN: 1-57440-096-7) The blog has pretty bar graphs for

  • librarians’ attitude to Wikipedia (untrustworthy, use with care, as good as print encyclopaedias)
  • whether libraries have a YouTube account (yes, no, planned for the next year)
  • whether libraries have published photos on Flickr (yes, no)

The bars are blue for public libraries, red for university libraries, green for special libraries. My executive summary: public libraries are more liberal towards all these things than university libraries; special libraries are between the two on Wikipedia and Flickr but way down there on YouTube.

Biblog (Danish) links to Intute, “a free online service providing you with access to the very best Web resources for education and research. The service is created by a network of UK universities and partners.” (quote from Intute’s page) I definitely need to explore this more. My colleague reminded me that Intute also created The Internet Detective which teaches students how to work out whether internet pages are trustworthy or not.

And just for fun, betabib (Swedish) links to an (English) interview with a helpdesk operative on the Death Star. If I weren’t hungry for my lunch I’d work out how to be web2.0pian and embed it here, but my cheese and pineapple sandwiches are calling to me.