Whatever you do don’t use Google!reference, search

by Meredith Farkas on 11/9/2006 with 11 comments

After we teach our students how to distinguish between authoritative and unauthoritative resources, we need to actually show them how to find such authoritative resources. While our databases are great, they sometimes aren’t the most user-friendly things to search (LexisNexis anyone?). And frankly, these students won’t have access to the databases once they graduate and …

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MaintainITfree the information!, tech trends

by Meredith Farkas on 11/7/2006 with 2 comments

While at Internet Librarian, I learned about the Maintain IT Project. This three-year Bill and Melinda Gates funded initiative is designed to identify best practices for maintaining public access computers. Right now, they are collecting stories from library folks about working with public access computers and keeping them running. From these stories of success and …

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The Joy of Screencastingscreencasting

by Meredith Farkas on 10/31/2006 with 9 comments

Ever since I first started screencasting almost two years ago, I’ve been really surprised how few people are talking about how cool it is. It can be so hard to teach students at a distance how to use databases, and screencasting is the only tool that allows you to concretely demonstrate how they work. Add …

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Feed2JS – Always a hitchRSS and Syndication

by Meredith Farkas on 10/29/2006 with Comments Off on Feed2JS – Always a hitch

Ken Varnum, of RSS4LIB, and I were both speaking at the Dartmouth Biomedical Library’s Fall Conference on Friday, and we were talking about Feed2JS (which I talked about with Paul Pival at IL2006). He told me about an experience he’d had with sploggers using his Feed2JS installation (and bandwidth) to do their dirty work. This …

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Dartmouth Biomedical Libraries October Conference – Wrapupsocial software, tech trends

by Meredith Farkas on 10/27/2006 with Comments Off on Dartmouth Biomedical Libraries October Conference – Wrapup

October Conference Wrap-up – Roy Tennant Roy discusses the salient points from each talk. Wikis: Creating Collaboration in Libraries Wikis are a low-threshold way to collaborate. Doesn’t need to be open to everyone to change. Search capability. Requires trust among a community (though it is easy to rollback changes). Many potential uses. Don’t even have …

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Dartmouth Conference – Emerging Mobile Technologies for Librarieshi, social software

by Meredith Farkas on 10/27/2006 with 2 comments

by Gabriel Rios, University of Alabama, Birmingham Mobile devices are another way to get content into the hands of our patrons. Types of mobile devices – PDAs/Smart Phones, Cell phones, ipods, MP3 players, tablet PCs PDAs are often required in nursing and medical school programs. More and more doctors are starting to use the Blackberry …

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Dartmouth Biomedical Libraries October Conference – Podcasting Panelsocial software

by Meredith Farkas on 10/27/2006 with Comments Off on Dartmouth Biomedical Libraries October Conference – Podcasting Panel

Our Content, Their Device: Three Uses of the iPod – Sarah G. Wenzel, Columbia University The librarians at Columbia University have developed library content that can be used on an iPod. They created a call number guide (visual) that can be downloaded on an iPod. They made downloadable map photos of the stacks available. To …

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Dartmouth Biomedical Libraries October Conference – RSS PanelRSS and Syndication, social software, tech trends

by Meredith Farkas on 10/27/2006 with 2 comments

Using RSS to Promote Scholarly Publications – Ken Varnum, Tufts University RSS stands for real simple syndication. It’s an xml-based data format for syndicating content. Way to send a title, URL and abstract to aggregators, websites, etc. How do you let the world know that your feed is updated? By pinging aggregators or by including …

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IL2006 Day 2: Institutional Repository Basics: From Soup to Nutsfree the information!, open access

by Meredith Farkas on 10/25/2006 with 2 comments

Roy Tennant, University of California While I was very interested in all of the talks in the social computing track today, I really wanted to expand my knowledge of certain topics that I know very little about. I knew that Roy would be likely to give a very practical nuts-and-bolts introduction to developing institutional repositories …

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