Posted in General Thoughts on Apr 14th, 2005 No Comments »
I’d heard that EBSCO was acquiring SPORTDiscus(tm) earlier this spring when the EBSCO representative visited and we were discussing changing some of our subcription. I’m really excited about the possibility that a fulltext version of this database be created and the interface further enhanced. This is probably one of the most difficult databases for our [...]
Posted in General Thoughts on Apr 9th, 2005 No Comments »
Carol Cooke has a good post about how to change what your default browser is on the Mac. It really isn’t where you think it should be. You literally have to go into Safari to change it. I would have never thought of this. Ever since I made the switch about 6 weeks ago I’ve [...]
Posted in General Thoughts on Apr 9th, 2005 No Comments »
I found this post over at Search Engine Watch about Google launching a Q&A Service interesting and nerve-racking at the same time. The fact that search engines are developing answer engines is interesting because it means that is some ways they are yet again more in tune with library users than libraries are. As Roy [...]
Posted in General Thoughts on Apr 9th, 2005 1 Comment »
Amanda familiarized me with a new thing today: Amazon SIPs. Amazon has this thing called Statistically Improbable Phrases, or “SIPs”. SIPs are unlikely phrases that occur in the text of books in Search Inside the Book. Basically Amazon looks to see how many times a phrase occurs in a book relative to other books. Phrases [...]
Posted in General Thoughts on Apr 8th, 2005 No Comments »
I recently had the opportunity to play with a Nokia 9300 at a conference and was really fascinated with the product. This week’s issue of PC Magazine has a first look at the 9300 as well. The Nokia 9300 is a phone PDA combo, which opens up to reveal a 640-by-200 screen a small [...]
Posted in General Thoughts on Apr 7th, 2005 No Comments »
As the Librarian in Black point out PCMag.comhas a great article about the resources which libraries make freely available to their users. This article is a great marketing piece for libraries in general. However, it also makes the important point
Libraries spend your tax dollars to provide the best information available. In these troubled budgetary [...]
Posted in General Thoughts on Apr 7th, 2005 No Comments »
If you haven’t seen Jon Udell’s screencast “Content, services, and the yin-yang of intermediation” you need to go check it out. Jon shows some really nifty tools and raises issues that libraries need to think about. Some tools he demos are AutoLink, LibraryLookup, Greasemonkey, Google Maps, and OpenSearch. The biggest thing that I took away [...]
Posted in General Thoughts on Apr 7th, 2005 2 Comments »
I haven’t posted anything about my projects lately and thought I would talk a little bit about what I’ve been working on. Of late my time has been devoted to trying to balance our electronic resource budget for next year. Electronic Resources became a part of my job last summer and since that time I’ve [...]
Posted in General Thoughts on Apr 7th, 2005 No Comments »
Okay playing around with screencasting has been pretty fun thus far. I have a Quicktime movie created of my Powerpoint but I’m looking to make it smaller. So I tried running it through my old Windows copy of Sorenson Squeeze but it didn’t work. I got the audio back out but the video part went [...]
Posted in General Thoughts on Apr 5th, 2005 No Comments »
I missed Gary Price and Tara Calishain presentation of Cool Search Tools at Computers in Libraries this year because I needed a little me time at the end of the conference. However, I just found their presentation on the web and am very excited. Lots of new stuff that I had to go visit and [...]
