In my first year of library school, I worked as a library assistant. A plum job, to be sure, but I never looked forward to shelf-reading time. Imagine if I could have just done this (I stole this video from Jessamyn West’s blog):
Amazing, right?!?! mShelf Reading: The way of the future. It sets my heart aflutter.
The eBooks landscape is, in one word, con-FOOS-ing. It’s a crazy, mixed up place, and how it’s going to look five years from now is hard for the average lie-berrian to say.
There’s lots being discussed in the world of eReaders and eBooks particularly with Google’s recent launch of Google eBooks. Slate has a nice critical overview of the launch, noting,
Google’s e-books are “open” in the same way that politicians are “bipartisan” and oil companies are “green”—the claim makes for good marketing, even if it lacks substance. Buying from Google rather than Amazon will give you no greater control over your books… In fact, Amazon’s “closed” books will soon work on more devices than Google’s “open” books.
… [Google ebooks] are protected by a digital rights management copy-protection scheme. As a result, the copyrighted books in Google’s bookstore can’t be shared, resold, or read on any device that doesn’t play nice with Google’s DRM.
Ouch. My beloved Digital Campus podcast weighs in on this same issue in episode 63, around the 5 minute mark (they are a bit more forgiving of Google’s efforts than Slate). Also from the realm of academia, there is an article in the Chronicles of Higher Education by Jennifer Howard that’s worth a read.
I blogged over at Re:Generations again — this one a review of QR Codes. I posted about QR Codes here awhile back, but thought it might be a good Re:Gen topic too. In doing research for the blog post (a.k.a. Googling — librarians get to be lazy when they’re on vacation, okay?) I found an interesting article from College and Research Libraries News that is a Continue reading
This is Halifax, looking QUITE dapper.
Just so ya know I work with the bestest CLA committee eva, and we have TWO count ‘em TWOOOO sessions accepted at the CLA Conference in Halifax in May, 2011. Yay, us!
Here are the blurbs:
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Posted in Professional Associations
Tagged CACUL, conferences, professional associations, Re:Generations, technology
I’ve been trying for oh, the last TWO WEEKS to write a post about all the fun and glorious things I did at the OLA Superconference 2010, but I have some writer’s block or something.
So instead, I’ll discuss all the fun and glorious things I presented on, at the conference”s poster session.
Me and my buddy Angela Hamilton (Science Librarian at York), presented our lovely poster on the topic, “Why screencasting? The benefits of interactive online tutorials”. I say it’s lovely because Angela designed it and she made it look far, far prettier than anything I’d have been able to churn out. Bravo to her. 
The poster focused on our combined work creating Adobe Captivate videos, with a lit-review we did of existing articles on the topic of screencasting video use in librarians. In fact, there is a lot of interesting coverage of this topic and it informed not only the contents of our poster, but the way I approach my own video-making.
We wanted it to be interactive, so we had a laptop set up with Captivate installed, to show attendees just how easy the whole thing is. It was fun to demonstrate in about one minute how you can capture your activities on screen, and turn it into a published video. We also had another laptop set up with our finished videos running on it — videos like “How to use CINAHL” or “How to cite properly”. That was cool too, because it shows off the bell’s and whistle’s of the software, and makes us look like competent, tech-savvy lie-berrians. Which we are, of course.
If you are going to be participating in a poster session: Bring lots and lots and lots of handouts. Why do people love the handouts so much? They were like, stealing them right off the table. We ran out. Lesson learned: More handouts. We had about 40 and that wasn’t enough.
Sometimes people put videos on YouTube that are so divine, and so delightfully brilliant, that they merit some honourable mention. No, I’m not talking about that video of the kid who just got back from the dentist. Or the ninja cat.
I’m talking about videos created by academic educators — librarians among them — that explain really complex scholarly concepts in clear and succinct 5 minute (or so) videos. They’re from a variety of places, and have a variety of approaches, but the common thread is that they are amazing teaching tools. Watching them has actually made me a better instructional librarian, and I even played one in a class I taught because I though the creators did such a fantastic job of relaying key information literacy concepts.
Posted in Library Issues, Technologies
Tagged academic experience, information literacy, technology, videos, web 2.0
I just got an upgrade from my HTC Dream, to an HTC Hero. The new phone has been sitting on my desk for the last few days, because configuring a cell phone and transferring data is not exactly numero uno on my list of weekend activities.
But then I watched this video of the Hero’s capabilities, and I got really excited.The thing weighs less than my keys (100 grams to be specific) and is faster than my Dream.
Also, if you don’t find the guys giving the presentation totally adorable, you have a cold heart.
I know material items are not the path to happiness, but I think this phone might be an exception. It makes me REALLY and TRULY HAPPY.
Scan me!
Do you have a smart phone? If you do, go download a barcode reader app. I have one for my Android phone, and it’s simply called Barcode Scanner. I guess if wanted to, you could also carry around an actual barcode scanner, but that’s… weird.
Bill the Web Librarian at York University Libraries, and the author of the esteemed Miskatonic University Press wrote this post, in which he offers up his great idea for a Code4Lib 2010 t-shirt design. Just hover your barcode reader over the image to see what comes up. Tons and TONS of interesting applications for this technology, and many thanks to Bill for bringing the tool to my attention.
My Code4Lib 2010 t-shirt
My Code4Lib 2010 t-shirt
