Tag Archives: roundup

Links of interest 19/5/09

NZ On Screen gives free online access to selected NZ On Air television. (They also won the Best Entertainment Site award at the 2009 Qantas Media Awards on Saturday.) The World Cinema Foundation has digitised a selection of international films.

Professor Peter Murray-Rust says “The bit of Wikipedia that I wrote is correct.“

Wolfram Alpha has gone live. This is a “computational knowledge engine” – meaning it’s intended to read and parse your question then search its index of facts and put them together to give you an answer (rather than Google which just gives you a bunch of pages which may or may not contain an answer). It’s early days so of course a lot of questions will confuse it, but it does well on things like “How old is Helen Clark?“, “Who directed Dangerous Liaisons?“, “What languages are spoken in India?“, and “What is the meaning of life?“

Christchurch City Libraries has their annual booksale this Friday/Saturday.

Deborah

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:

University of Virginia

Ball State University

Penn Libraries

Yale Medical Library

Links of interest 5/5/09

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“Links of interest” is an irregular series of posts I started making recently to MPOW’s internal blog, based on items culled from FriendFeed, Twitter, and Google Reader. I started thinking it was a shame not to have it available publicly, so here it is. NB Dates on future posts will be in dd/mm/yy format….

Lessons from the library booth at a local festival: or how not to engage customers

A blog post on New Citation Rules in the 7th Edition of the MLA Handbook.

Merck makes phony peer-review journal to promote a drug, published by Elsevier.

Google Maps adds historical maps of Japan which turn out to accidentally facilitate discrimination.

UCOL tweets that: “UCOL Library now has over 20 wireless laptops students can use anywhere on campus. You can borrow a laptop for up to 3 hours.”

National Library explains Twitter – they compare it to Personal Items columns in early 20th century newspapers, describe the feedback and interaction they’ve had for their account, and talk about how they do it.

Non-English blog roundup #11 – the sharing edition

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“Non-English” seems to have turned into French, probably mostly because that’s the language I read best. Must remedy this. In any case, today I’ve got a collection of blog posts sharing data:

The Assessment Librarian was thinking about computer posts in his library dedicated to catalogue research only and wondered how much use these got compared to computers available for any purpose. Data collected over two weeks showed:

Arts and Sciences branch
- Catalogue-only – 12% usage
- ‘Open’ computers – 51% usage
Law and economy branch
- Catalogue-only – 7% usage
- ‘Open’ computers – 65% usage

He concludes that, while it’s not straight-forward to analyse the results, it’s worth considering whether there are other possible uses for their catalogue-only computer stations.

Inspired by this post, Des Bibliotheques 2.0:

shares Google Analytics statistics for off-campus visits to the library catalogue from 1st April 2008 – 1 Jan 2009 (a good handful of pages in pdf);
compares numbers of visitors to the homepage (site) vs the number of visitors to the catalogue (OPAC) (note the numbers were gathered using different tools;
shows the impact of a new website – ” the number of visitors has increased from 80-100%; the number of visits has increased from 30-50%; the number of pages seen per visit has tripled”.

And De Tout Sur Rien has decided “I will no longer participate in projects in which the publication of my contributions in a digital format and under Creative Commons license […] is not planned from the beginning,” and calls for colleagues and/or readers to make the same decision.