Author Archives: Stephen Francoeur

Figuring Out Ebook Downloads in Ebrary

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I’m slowly trying to learn all the possible ways that you can download ebooks from ebrary. As I’ve been documenting steps for various devices, I’ve been building a mind map so that I’ll have an interactive way to present options (this may be more useful to library staff in public services positions than library users). The attached PDF is a work in progress. I’m putting it up here just so I can think out loud. When it is closer to done, I’ll try publishing it as a flash file, which is a nice “save as” option that the MindManager offers when you’re working on mind maps.

how_to_download_an_ebook_in_ebrary_(2).pdf
Download this file

 

Bottlenose Helps Filter Your Social Network Streams

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I’m trying out Bottlenose, a new service in beta that billing itself as a “social media dashboard” promises to help you filter your incoming and outgoing social networking streams. So far, the service only lets you feed in Twitter and Facebook. I’m hoping that they soon add Google Reader, Google+, and FriendFeed.

As you can see from this screenshot, the service automatically analyzes content and tries to assign meaningful tags to categorize them; in this screenshot, I clicked on the Q&A tag  and was shown all my tweets where I asked a question.

 

bottlenose.png on Aviarybottlenose.png on Aviary.

I can imagine this might be a useful way to sift through conversations I’ve had in various places. Bottlenose also offers a graphical way to view the cluster of topical tags, hashtags, and people in your outgoing streams or in the streams of others. This video demos this feature, called, Sonar, better than I can describe it here:

If you’d like an invite, leave a comment here on this post. I’ve got 10 to give away.

Using a Hacked URL to Set Google Scholar Preferences

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Does your library offer a link to Google Scholar on its website? Wouldn’t it be great if your users didn’t have to be told how to set up “Scholar Preferences” in Google Scholar in a way that connects them to your library’s link resolver? I just learned a nice trick that will allow your library to create a link to Google Scholar that will set preferences so that your link resolver is selected in the preferences for Google Scholar.

A comment on a post at Bibliographic Wilderness taught me how to find the unique identifier number that Google Scholar assigns to each institution that participates in Google Scholar’s “library links” program. Here’s my version of those instructions:

  1. Go into Google Scholar’s “Scholar Proferences” page
  2. If you haven’t already searched for your instituition’s link resolver in the “Library Links” portion of the page and then selected it, do so.
  3. View the page source for this preferences page.
  4. You’ll see a mess of code. Use the find on page feature to search for your institution’s name among all that code. In front of your institution’s name should be a long number (my library’s number was 19-digits long). Copy that number to your clipboard.
  5. Append that number to this URL: http://scholar.google.com/schhp?hl=en&inst=

That new URL you’ve made should now take you to Google Scholar AND set your preferences for your institution.

Here’s the identifier number for Baruch College, where I work:

3106406845282183404

Here’s the Google Scholar URL for my school:

http://scholar.google.com/schhp?hl=en&inst=3106406845282183404

Getting even fancier, I might want to prepend that URL with our proxy server prefix:

http://remote.baruch.cuny.edu/login?url=

The final URL we’ll share with our users is now:

http://remote.baruch.cuny.edu/login?url=http://scholar.google.com/schhp?hl=en&inst=3106406845282183404

Thanks to Mita Williams at the Leddy Library at the University of Windsor, whose blog post about Google Scholar first alerted me to this trick.

The one thing that I still can’t solve, though, is how help those users from my college who are off campus and who go to Google Scholar by direct navigation instead of via my carefully constructed link. I don’t know how we can effectively communicate to those users that they need to set their Google Scholar preferences; a few users might hear or see our instructions, but a much larger number are unlikely to ever be aware that they can set up “library links” for their search results.

 

 

Plug and Play Connections between Your Favorite Web Services

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I’ve been getting a kick out of using the new iftt service that lets you do clever things like have all your tweets automatically get saved to your Evernote account or make a copy of all your photos you attach to Foursquare checkins and save them in Evernote (or Dropbox). The oddly names site is actually an abbreviation of sorts for “If This Then That.” Once you create an account, you can authorize various services you use (Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Pinboard, Instagram, to name a few) to be accessed by ifft. First, you think of some task you’d like to accomplish, let save a copy of any photo in Facebook where you have been tagged. Then you define the trigger by picking what service has got something or doing something that you’d like to do something with. Then you define the action that tells ifft what other service will be doing that something. It sounds more complicated than it really is (the site explains it better on its “wtf” page than I do). If you browse the list of most popular “recipes” (tasks that have been created by users so far), you can get an idea of all the cool things you can do with ifft. So far all of my tasks send stuff to Evernote, as that is becoming my tool of choice for bookmarking sites and keeping notes.

My Experiment with Google Docs in the Classroom

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This fall, I’m teaching a three-credit course again for a roomful of first-year students: Information Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities (the course website and syllabus are online). Inspired by the college’s efforts in the past year to help reduce the amount of printing done by students and faculty, I decided this summer that when I started teaching my class I would try to avoid having students turn in homework assignments on paper. Instead of using paper, we’ll be using Google Docs for in-class activities and homework assignments.

On the first day of classes, I had each student who didn’t already have a Google account set one up. Then, I had them create a test document and share it with me (in Google Docs, you can share a document with someone who also has a Google account). This past week, the students turned in their first assignment (a worksheet I had created in Google Docs that they copied into their own accounts, filled out, and shared wtih me). Once the students had shared the documents with me, I was able to “mark up” the papers using the commenting function in Google Docs. Then I told the students that the homework was graded and they could find their grade and my comments on the marked up version of their documents. So far, this has been working OK.

Getting the students to learn how to use Google Docs is going to have a number of benefits:

  • less wasted paper
  • I can copy and paste text into my comments on their homework when necessary instead of having to laboriously write by hand some of the same things in each students’ homework
  • they can turn in text documents, spreadsheets, drawings, and slide presentations in Google Docs
  • they will learn to use a tool for document creation that will come in handy for the many group projects they’ll wind up doing in other classes (this is a biggie, given that our college is a commuter college that makes it hard for students to meet face to face as often as they might if our school were a residential one)

Finding the Expert

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In a post on the Index Data blog, Sebastian Hammer nicely sums up the value of finding the expert when it comes to information retrieval:

It’s easy to find the Einsteins, the Darwins, the Freuds. Dig a little deeper, and you find the people, themselves giants, who stood on their shoulders. But what if you want to find the person or team who knows the MOST about a very specific type of protein, about building Firefox Plugins, or about adjusting the wheel bearings on a certain kind of vintage motorcycle? This seems to happen to me all the time when I am digging into something for work or play. If you get deep enough, looking for documents doesn’t sate your appetite, and you start to look for the masters of the domain — to see what they’re up to; to get into their heads, to ask them questions, or to hire them.

My New Job as User Experience Librarian

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This month, I ended more than ten years of service in the Information Services Division at the Newman Library at Baruch College and started a new position as a user experience librarian in the Collection Management Division. While I will continue to provide reference services and teach workshops and credit courses, I’ll be working on all sorts of projects in Collection Management that focus on improving access to and integration of the library’s online and on-site resources. The work will consistently be driven by user needs, which means that I’ll be involved in a lot of usability tests, focus groups, surveys, and more, as part of an effort to design a better experience for our students and faculty. So far, I’ve been hip deep in our link resolver (SFX), our ejournals lookup system (Serials Solutions 360 Core) our federated search tool (Serials Solutions 360 Search), and admin options for various databases. My supervisor and amazing colleague, Mike Waldman, and I hope to release a mobile-friendly website that links to mobile-friendly databases, a LibX toolbar, and a project involving QR codes in the stacks linking users to electronic resources and LibGuides.

I expect I’ll still be posting items at my other blog, Digital Reference, but will also be active over here at Beating the Bounds, which is where I go when I want to talk about scholarly communication, open access, fair use, copyright, information literacy, databases, social media, and user experience.

(cross posted at Digital Reference)

Copyright Trumps Creativity

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If you haven’t seen the post on Waxy.org by Andy Baio about how he felt compelled to settle a case in which he was accused of copyright infringement, go read it now. It’s a great, personal tale about how copyright laws have over-reached and block artistic expression. It’s also a nice intro to the indeterminacy of fair use guidelines, especially the issue of what counts as a transformative use.

Thanks to Jessamyn West for her retweet that brought this to my attention.

Where Open Access Can Take Us

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In this highly recommended interview by David Weinberger, open access advocate Peter Suber offers a pithy explanation of how open access means more than simply making scholarly communications freely available online:

Open access is not the end, it’s the means…to enhanced forms of research.

By making vast swaths of publications freely available online, we make it easier for us to design systems for text mining, meaning extraction, and automated classification and abstracting.

Definitely check out the full interview, which can be found in episode #2 (“Free Knowledge”) of the Library Lab podcast.

LexisNexis Academic To Release Interface Optimized for Mobile Web Browsers

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As an update to my last post (“Apps vs. Mobile Web Optimized Interfaces for Search and Discovery”), I just want to make a quick note that LexisNexis has confirmed that their forcoming new mobile interface with LexisNexis Academic will be not be a dowloadable app but instead something that is designed to work in mobile web browsers.

I hope that they’ve designed it so that it automatically detects whether you’re using a browser on a phone and then redirects you to the optimized interface. Some of the database vendors that offer mobile browser interfaces require the library to set up a unique of URLs for the mobile versions, which means the number of links you have to maintain and provide to your user has doubled. As anyone who has tried to maintain electronic resources for a library knows, keeping on top of URL changes for those resources is a major time sink, as the links are usually spread across a wide number of pages on a library website.