The latest issue of Nodalities (.pdf), a publication of the library automation vendor Talis, has an interesting article talking about the way that RDF is baked in to the standard Drupal setup, making it easy for noobs like me to create websites that are semantically rich.
“Amiable post and this mail helped me alot in my college assignement. Thanks you for your information.” Yeah, those gruff posts of mine really don’t seem to get the same kind of traffic.
After doing some tinkering with the pages in our library’s reference blog and our “idea lab” blog that display headlines from a handful of LIS blogs, I thought I’d take a moment to sing the praises for a old chestnut of a service, Feed2js, which makes the display of posts so easy to set up and republish on our blogs.
I’ve been fooling around today with the Hunch service and am liking the way that each section of the site’s terms of service is presented in legalese and in plain English. I’m intrigued by this consumer-oriented expert system and have wondered if it could be baked into a library FAQ or knowledgebase (the inspiration for this idea comes Jay Datema’s blog post last year about Hunch).
This one just came in for my Digital Reference blog: my sister is very good in installing VOIP equipments and i really admire her for that.:,’ This comment came in on a post about VoIP for reference services. I’m amused when folks take the time to handcraft spam that tries to match up with the content of a post. Excellent work, you surreptitious seller of goods that I won’t link to!
Watching this video from Gale about the redesign of their Resource Center products reminded me of the philosophy our library is trying to develop as we roll out LibGuides at Baruch College. The new Resource Center platform will have a much more contemporary look to it. Blocks of text are deprecated somewhat to make more room for video, photos, and other graphics. What I really like is the way a spotlight is shone on the curated aspected of the content: an “Editor’s Picks” box is one of the most prominent element on the page. In our LibGuides pages, I’m hoping that we are moving away from a kitchen sink approach to providing subject guides and more of approach that shows the expert advice of a unique individual librarian. I suspect that what can make our content connect with students is if our students sense that the resources presented are the best things to start with and represent carefully edited choices made by experts.
Because the college where I work uses Microsoft’s Hotmail system for student email accounts, I thought I’d take a look at the just released service that allows you to put your Microsoft Office documents in the cloud via the SkyDrive service (check out the Windows Blog for an official announcement). Logged in to live.com in Firefox, I created a Word document in my browser with the intent of sharing it with some team members. Here are some quick problems I ran into:
I noticed today that an article record in ProQuest database offered me a stable URL for the item that included the prefix URL for our library’s proxy server. I wonder what other database vendors have been savvy enough to let libraries set this up in their admin options?
Just when I think that I’m in pretty good shape for being conversant with the main citation styles (Chicago A, Chicago B, MLA, APA), I find that I’m forced to learn a new one. This time, it’s the style from the MHRA (Modern Humanities Research Association). I hope I can figure out how to use MHRA for all the complicated citations to archival materials I’m using for my article on McCarthyism and the NYPL.
Personal Projects
Projects for My Co-workers and Me