Even though the Library Fairy and the last one were on the same topic, the former used humor that I liked, but the latter seemed more informative.
Some of these YouTube "instructional" library videos are just plain scary: • What the Heck is Boolean Searching? Woo-hoo, that accent! ‹and wow, those blue fingernails!› Those poor pieces of bread didn't stand a chance, yikes. I'm not sure I listened to her explanation of Boolean searching, I was too worried about the peanut butter slathering and those 2 forlorn bananas sitting on the table ("Symbolized here by 2 powerful bananas!"). Although it's important to use humor, you need to dial back the tone and not be quite so strident in the delivery of your message. It felt like a conk on the head with this video. The following one is less preachy and actually seems more informative: • Boolean Operators
Google Docs Rocks, Man! It is so easy to work with, very similar to pretty much any Microsoft application as far as functionality, etc. I went to http://docs.google.com, watched the video (loved the little strings to move the e-mail messages around!), and created a document which now resides out in "The Cloud". I also shared it with another NT23 colleague, so I'll check it out later to see if any edits have been done to it.
For even more functionality and efficiency, be sure to check out the Google Docs keyboard shortcuts list.
I've worked with Wikis before, but WetPaint has some quirky problems, as you can read about on my Wiki pages here: http://dfw23things.wetpaint.com/page/Librarian+Tech+Guru+Goddess. Thanks to the NT23 team who helped move my page back to where it belonged under "Home", instead of buried under someone else's page. WetPaint has weird hierarchy when you're only an Anonymous contributor.
I searched for "e-textbooks" on LibWorm and it gave me highly relevant hits, 954 of them. Most I'd read already, since I'd already set up "Inside Higher Ed", "LISNews", and "The Kept-Up Academic Librarian" in my Google Reader subscriptions. When I narrowed the search using "exact phrase", that dropped to 65 records returned. Not as good but, of course, that's to be expected since there's no standardized way to refer to "electronic textbooks" yet. I favor the hyphen, since just putting the "e" in front of textbooks looks like a typo. Ditto for e-books, e-mail, etc., but it's all over the place out there in the media.
I checked out the subject "Ebooks", since there wasn't one specifically on e-textbooks. Absolute ton of hits, 333 pages of them. There's also a Feed Category of "Academic Libraries" with some interesting articles. Funny though how there are a bunch of foreign-language articles and I don't see a quick way to narrow to English-language only.
The LibWorm Tag Cloud is a fun visual way to shuffle through the deck, but again e-textbooks aren't listed, though textbooks are in the Big Cloud. The topic is peripheral to libraries per se, but still one that academic librarians need to be aware of, especially with the tough economic times and its impact on state funding for university libraries. (I'm thinking about the recent announcement "Schwarzenegger's Push for Digital Textbooks" that's for K-12, but you know this will affect the higher ed level eventually, especially with the impact on textbook publishers.) I like the Storm Cloud version of the tags—looks kind of like the fat cumulus clouds that are floating through Texas this weekend.
Interesting tool, good quality hits, I'll add it to my del.icio.us links.
This is so exciting. I have been curious about LibraryThing for some time, but had not taken the time to investigate it yet. I signed up for a free account and added a few books from my home library, as well as tagged them. http://www.librarything.com/home/LibTechGuruGoddess
We've got a "coals to Newcastle" problem in our house, since I'm a librarian and my husband is a librarian. We both love books and reading. I often joke that we'll need to re-enforce the floors because of all the weight from the books—and we don't have a basement. One day I'll arrive home from work and the house will have disappeared into a sinkhole.
I'll need to add more books to my LibraryThing library, and will then explore more about adding a LibraryThing widget to put my library on my blog, as well as adding a Search widget that lets readers look through my LibraryThing library directly from my blog.
That's not surprising—the Librarians Who LibraryThing group is the one with the most members (6,366).
As a related item, Google provides a similar service with their "My Library" feature, with some nifty bells-&-whistles. There's a good YouTube video on their blogspot site on how to easily upload your titles, using a barcode scanner and the ISBN barcode on the book. I like the fact that you can then search the full text of the books in your own Google library.
Hey, man, like psychedelic, I really dug Digg. Well, at least, the concept. The idea that you can bury an article that's a duplicate or a Digger's comments that are rude is cool. If you were able to develop a library-related group of Diggers and see only their postings, this site would work great. Sadly, you get the opinion of the masses and you get stupid stuff like "Five Naked Photos of My Mum" as a top hit in the Offbeat section. Ugh. Great idea, ruined by crude people.
Mmmmm, yum-yum. Lots of good-tasting bookmarks. That was fun, although it took me 3 times to register because of their cryptic letters/numbers—even a human couldn't read them. Here's the link to my 3 saved Delicious "social bookmarks": http://delicious.com/LibTechGuruGoddess
I love the People feature where you can see who else has bookmarked the site you saved and the tags they use to describe the site. These humans, they are so clever. Most ingenious!
A site on the most popular list drew me to it: Newsweek's "What to Read Now. And Why" (June 27, 2009). Check it out (double entendre there).
Totally tubular, man! I searched on "academic library" and then followed my nose around with the suggested videos, after watching the first video from the results on YouTube. Some of those were:
