From the How-To Geek blog comes this helpful and thorough guide to troubleshooting Internet Explorer 7. The focus is on IE 7 running on a Vista machine, but a lot of the tips will work on Windows XP too, as they are about IE 7 itself. Good stuff!
Today is the 38th annual Earth Day, so in honor of the big event, I offer up some "green" links:
Courtesy of Boing Boing, I ran across this nifty web page that gives you a snapshot view of the rules regarding driving and talking on cell phones worldwide. The US by state is towards the bottom of the page. Looks like Europe has been a lot more aggressive than we have about banning their use while driving.
For anyone interested in outcomes based planning and evaluation, be sure to check out Shaping Outcomes, an IMLS-funded and supported program developed by Indiana University-Purdue University. The five-module instructor-mediated online course prepares students to plan internal projects and to produce robust design and evaluation plans for grant proposals.
The cost per person (or working group) is $150, with IMLS-provided scholarships for students in organizations serving economically disadvantaged populations. The course uses Moodle as its online learning software.
LEGO is 50 years old today! (Wow, that's depressing - I'm older than legos...) Anyway, in honor of this big event, a completely-unrelated-to-libraries link to the history of LEGOS. Thanks to Neatorama for the link (an awesomely interesting blog that I just discovered).
If you've ever thought about screencasting, but the cost of the software was prohibitive, here's a thought: try Jing!
I was at MacWorld last week, channeling my inner Apple fan girl, and Tech Smith, the makers of SnagIt and Camtasia, were there talking about the coming-soon Mac version of Camtasia. As an aside they were also showing off Jing, a free, cross-platform screencasting tool. The only limit is length: each Jing screencast can be no longer than five minutes.
As an example of how easy it is to use, here's a little screencast I made about Google Docs. It took me about (surprise!) five minutes to make, total.
My voter pamphlet arrived in the mail a few days ago, followed by my sample ballot. Yep, it's election time! Carole Leita shared GlassBooth with us all last week, so I thought I'd toss in a few sites that I have found to be useful for helping users (and yourselves!) find information about candidates and initiatives.
My favorite site is the California Voter Foundation. It offers an online voter guide, a list of all candidates, and it also offers analyses of the propositions. A Follow the Money section on each proposition page tells you what PACs have given money to support or oppose it. They have archived information on elections back to 1994.
The 2008 Technology Voter's Guide from News.com focuses on presidential candidates' stands on all things technology. If you need to find out a candidate's views on Net Neutrality, this is a good place to go. The downside: they don't have info on all of the candidates.
The New York Times Election Guide 2008 is another great place to go to get info on who's funding campaigns. Select a candidate from the Finances page and you can see how much money each candidate has raised. You can also search for donors by name or zip code. They have no info on state initiatives.
Project Vote Smart is another nonpartisan, non-profit voter information/education site. They get their campaign financing information from opensecrets.org, which supplies copious details about campaign financing from presidential to congressional races. They too have no info on state initiatives.
Remember, be sure to vote on February 5!
A couple of my favorite places for checking out the candidates' views on looming issues are Glassbooth: Election 2008 and YouTube's You Choose '08. Take Glassbooth's quiz to get a sense of where your views on the issues match with the candidates' (you might be surprised), and take a look at their new section with videos of the candidates speaking on the issues. The folks at YouTube (owned by Google) are also doing a great public service by indexing information on the issues concerning voters and videos of the words of the candidates on those issues. Good sites to help you be an informed citizen -- in an efficient and entertaining way.
I ran across a neat site today (it's not new, but was new to me) while perusing LifeHacker. it's called howjsay.com, and all you have to do is type in the word you'd like to hear, and it pronounces it for you. pronunciation is in standard British English, so "aluminum" comes back with the American and the British pronunciation (the Brits say "al-u-mi'-neum). I couldn't come up with a word that stumped it. According to the site:
"The lexical corpus includes all of the General Service List (Bauman and Culligan 1995 version). This is a collection of 2,284 commonly used English words."
It's also available as a search plug-in for Firefox. Oh, and in case you were wondering, it contains no profanities, so is kid-friendly.
Thanksgiving is behind us now, and that means it's time to start decorating for the December holidays! If you are putting your tree up now, and don't plan on taking it down until after New Year's, keeping the tree fresh and alive may be a challenge (unless, like me, you have an artificial tree, which clears up the problem nicely). So as a public service, today's post provides a recipe for keeping your tree (hopefully) alive through the holiday season. It comes courtesy of KOST 103.5's Mark Wallengren.
1. At the tree lot have them make a fresh cut of 2 inches or more to the trunk of your Christmas tree. This will allow water to move up the trunk of the tree. Even if they say it’s a fresh cut have them cut it again in front of you!
2. At home quickly bring a gallon of water to boil. Add ¼ cup of Karo syrup and 1 teaspoon of bleach.
3. Immediately pour the hot mixture into the tree stand. Keep the kids away and be careful not to burn yourself.
Wait several hours (or overnight) to see if the tree is drinking the mixture. If the tree does not drink the tree is already dead. Return it and get a new one. If the tree takes the mixture it’s alive. Check the water level at least every other day. If water is low repeat step # 2 and #3 and your tree should stay fresh the entire month.
GovTrack.us is a site to add to your reference website list and share with your users. It's been around for three years but as more and more features are added it's become a must for folks tracking what's happening at the federal level in government. The most useful feature to know about is the ability to monitor bills, committees, and members via customized email alerts and/or RSS feeds. You can track specific bills or those on a particular topic. In addition, they've developed a widget to add to your browser (Firefox 2.0 or Internet Explorer 7) that lets you search bills right from the browser. Found via LLRX.com.
Four Infopeople staff, fondly referred to as "peeps," (Eileen, Gail, Gini and Linda) have been using a FREE, easy-to-use and very practical Web 2.0 online "to do" shared list service, Ta-da Lists.
You can use the website to:
• make one list to keep track of things you personally need to get done
• make multiple lists you can share with other people (co-workers, friends, family)
• subscribe to your lists in RSS
If you're doing the Infopeople 23 Things Challenge, don't forget to blog about trying this idea!
I've been reading about a couple of neat new things (well, they're new to me, anyway) and thought I'd share.
I'm a big fan of Tiny URL, a service that takes really long URLs and turns them into much shorter URLs - a handy service for things like Google Maps. Well, there's anew kid on the block called dwarfURL. It takes the short URL idea and adds a nifty additional feature: it tracks click stats! You add a password to your URL to get this working.
Want to see how it works? Here's a dwarfURL to a Google map of Sacarmento: http://dwarfurl.com/210d5. I made the password "sacramento" (I know, creative, huh?) and you can monitor the stats here.
A useful tool when you want to track how often people click on links on your website and don't have a stats package to rely on.
Library 2.0 Ning is my favorite social network because it promotes serendipitous searching among people who have the same profession as well as an interest in web 2.0 in common.
I invite you to join this group of intriguing people from all over the world and add me to your friends list; see my profile.
Also, if you are a fan of serendipitous searching, check out Steve Nelson's BananaSlug, which was designed to promote serendipitous surfing.
"Directed Google searches return pages most relevant to your search term, based on the pages' popularity on the Web. You may never see some of the pages way down the list that are relevant or interesting, but off the beaten path."
Here's an example using BananaSlug. I tried "learning 2.0" and chose the Great Ideas category. The random word was time. While I found a number of the library programs with which I was familiar, the search brought me others I wouldn't have ever found by using typical search terms...e.g. a blog entry from Training Day.
If you need to perk up your Powerpoint presentations, check out Slideshare, "a place to share & discover presentations and slideshows."
You can even search by tags, e.g. library2.0 and collaboration.
If you think you have a dynamite presentation, you can enter it in the World's Best Presentation Contest and win a prize. Contest judges are presentation gurus including Guy Kawasaki, who wrote The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint in his blog.
Here are a few of my Slideshare favorites:
10 Ways to a Killer Blog: Getting noticed in the new word-of-mouth network.
iPod Nation: a fresh new look at marketing/advertising
The Social Web: Wikis, RSS, Blogs, Flickr, and MORE!
Value Creation in Enterprise 2.0
Also don't forget that Infopeople has a fantastic archive of presentation materials from past workshops.
I signed up for a StumbleUpon account a while ago, and haven't really utilized it all that well. It's a toolbar that works with the Firefox, Mozilla, and Sea Monkey web browsers and basically enhances your ability to do, as Gail McGovern likes to call it, "serendipitous searching." Pretty cool idea!
Well now there's a new tool in town: Stumble Video. Stumble Video allows you to locate web videos from all sorts of websites, based on your topic preferences. The player is embedded, so there's nothing to download. If you already have a Stumble account, it will work with Stumble Video, or you can quickly set up and account (for free) here. you can either click the Stumble button and see what comes up, or you can locate videos by topic, or "channel," as Stumble calls it. For instance, I found this video by clicking on the Stumble button. Kinda makes me want to go to las Vegas and see it for myself! I found this one by going to the Cats channel. Warning: you think YouTube is a timesink - this may be worse.
There's an interesting new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project out on wireless Internet access. A synopsis:
"Some 34% of internet users have logged onto the internet using a wireless connection either around the house, at their workplace, or some place else. In other words, one-third of internet users, either with a laptop computer, a handheld personal digital assistant (PDA), or cell phone, have surfed the internet or checked email using means such as WiFi broadband or cell phone networks...Users of wireless access show deeper engagement with cyberspace – at least when focusing on two basic online activities, email and news."
Read the full report here (in PDF).
Well known travel store, Magellan's, offers an online travel article on dealing with airline aggravations; it is worth bookmarking and sharing with library users.
If you and your library users want lots of helpful information in blog format, add the Sacramento-based Holloway Travel Outfitters blog to your RSS feeds.
As President's Day is around the corner, I thought I'd share this link. Audible.com poses this question: if President Washington had an iPod, what audio books would he be listening to? They propose their answer here, and offer playlists for several other past presidents as well. Nice recommended reading lists!
Be sure to let your customers know that Nolo Press has podcasts online. You can listen at the site, download a file using iTunes or subscribe via RSS. As of February 1, there were 52 topics available in the following categories
• Legal News
• Business and Human Resources
• Patents, Copyright and Art
• Wills and Estate Planning
• Property and Money
• Family Law and Immigration
• Rights and Disputes
Then, be sure you are up to date by taking advantage of upcoming Infopeople free hour-long webcasts on legal issues.
Youth Access for Information and Age-Based Policies with Mary Minow and Janis O'Driscoll on March 1 from 12-1
Privacy Issues: RFID, Patron Holds, RSS Feeds, Personalized Reading Lists, Etc. with Mary Minow and Lori Bowen Ayre on April 5 from 12-1
Religious Issues in Libraries with Mary Minow on May 3 from 12-1
No matter how you feel about YouTube, you will find lots to ponder regarding the impact of user-generated content by reading a recent article in the Sacramento Bee titled "Media Savvy: Liberal viewer is watching." The article describes the endeavors of "Allen Asch, 41, a stay-at-home dad and a former public defender in Placer County and Missouri" posting as LiberalViewer.
Not only have LiberalViewer's videos been viewed over 800,000 times since July 2006, but also his subscribers already number over 1,500. In addition, his user-comment section "is packed with passionate opinions for and against his points of view."
Why not explore YouTube for additional topical links to recommend to library users—and then even study Asch's approach as one your library might customize for providing information as well.
Google Librarian debuted almost a year ago at ALA Midwinter in San Antonio. They've been putting out a semi-regular newsletter and other handouts since then, and now they've launched a blog, where they have consolidated all of their Google Librarian information.
They'll be at ALA Midwinter in Seattle this week, for those heading that way, in the exhibit hall at booth #1907.
The Machine-Assisted Reference Section (MARS) of the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) of the American Library Association has just released Best of Free Reference Web Sites, an index of the web sites included in its 1999-2006 annual lists.
Effective January 23, 2007, some new travel rules are going into effect. The U.S. State Dept. has created an FAQ that answers questions you or your patrons may have.
Here's the skinny: if you are traveling by air to Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean, or Bermuda youi will be required to present a valid U.S. passport. This change is for air travel only. Land or sea passengers may be required to present passports as well, but not until after January 1, 2008.
If you aren't yet familiar with online productivity tools that rival Microsoft Office, first read an overview article to see a comparison of features.
Then at least take a look at the one getting the most buzz, ThinkFree.
To compare with the others, check out Zoho and Google Docs & Spreadsheets.
No matter what type of library with which you are affiliated, you will find the Library 2.0: An Academic's Perspective blog, maintained by Laura B. Cohen, Web Support Librarian, University at Albany, SUNY of interest.
Get a feel for the blog from these entries:
A Librarian's 2.0 Manifesto which is also online as a YouTube video
Book Burro is a Web 2.0 extension for Firefox and Flock. When it senses you are looking at a page that contains a book, it will overlay a small panel you can open to see prices at online bookstores AND whether the book is available at a library close to your home.
By entering your zip code, Book Burro uses Open WorldCat's web service to display local availability. For more information on how it works, see the blog.
I read on the CNN website that the Census Bureau expects the population of the United States to cross the 300 million mark at approximately 7:46am ET tomorrow. Wow! We hit 200 million in 1967, and we hit 100 million in 1915. The Census Bureau has an interesting Facts for Features detailing statistical changes over the years.
Most interesting numbers (IMHO): Cost for a gallon of regular gas
2006: $3.04 (as of Aug. 7)
1967: 33 cents ($2.00 in 2006 dollars)
1915: 25 cents ($5.01 in 2006 dollars)
Watch the changes live with the US POPClock.
Just when I think I'm current, Google releases a new tool. This is really more of a merging of tools: they now have something called Google Docs & Spreadsheets, where you can log in and find both their web word processing app and their spreadsheet app. And once you've created a user login, you'll find all of your files saved there, too. I posted about Writely a while back: Writely is now Google Docs.
Come on Google, let's just get it over with: release the presentation software already! You know you want to!
For the longest time we Mac users have felt like the poor stepchildren of Google. They developed Google Earth - for the PC. They developed Google Desktop - for the PC. They developed Google Toolbar - for the PC. You get the gist.
Well, it looks like the fine folks at Google have finally seen the light! They have a new section of their website called Google Software Downloads for the Mac (wow! who thought that great name up?!?). And they also have started the Google Mac Blog so all of us hardcore blog trackers can keep up with their latest offerings. Yay!
And here's some more Google news that's been a long time coming: Picassa finally works with Macs (sort of - well, the Picassa Web Albums anyway, using iPhoto)! But now that we have Flickr do we really care?
Apparently Google is attempting to replace Microsoft Office one app at a time. First it was Writely, a word processing app that runs on the web and can be used as a shared app. Now there's Google Spreadsheet (wow, catchy name!), that is - surprise! - a spreadsheet app that runs on the web and can be used as a shared app.You have to have a gmail account to use it, and you have to use one of the following browsers: IE 6.0+, Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7+, Mozilla 1.7.12+, or Netscape 7.2, 8.0. I bet you're thinking that pretty much covers the bases, huh? I tried it the first time out with Safari for the Mac and bottomed out. But once I switched to Firefox it was all good. Here's a screen shot:
It's another handy tool for libraries that don't want to or can't offer Microsoft Office to their users.
Another way to go is a service like ThinkFree, that offers online word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software. Los Angeles Public Library has opted for this route. You don't have to be a library to sign up for ThinkFree; an individual can sign up in just a minute or two (they'll need an active email address for verification purposes), and once they're signed in they have instant access to the three apps and a gigabyte of online storage (Google Spreasheet storage is part of your two gigabyte Google account's storage limit). Only downside: it runs on Java, which can be a problem for some libraries' public use machines.
Update on Google Spreadsheets: if you decide to share a spreadsheet with someone else, keep in mind that only one of you can edit the spreadsheet at a time (a pretty good safety measure, if you think about it!).
An interesting question to ask anyone, and now thanks to World66, you and your patrons or anyone else can create a visual map to answer it! World66 is sort of a real world Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with people submitting information about the places they travel. To submit content you have to login, but you can browse to your heart's content anonymously. The My World 66 section is where you can create the cool map of countries you've visited (or countries you'd LIKE to visit). Creating maps also requires no login.
Here's my map. I seem to have completely overlooked the southern half of the world. *sigh*
Check out the cool Firefox browser extension, Blue Organizer, from Adaptive Blue. It was launched at the September 2006 DEMO conference.
A TechCrunch blog entry provides an indepth look at products introduced at DEMO. Of Blue Organizer, it says "combines its own ontology with your tags, lets you perform a very long list of functions with each item you’ve saved and does a lot of smart little things like gleaning tags from topical databases and bookmarking pages automatically once you’ve visited them three times. Social bookmarking is a crowded space, but for people who seek a well constructed tool that balances an intuitive user experience with features to please the power user, Blue Organizer may be a very good option. The beauty is in the details in this one."
I agree about the details. Even if it doesn't appeal to you, check out the interactive tutorials for good online learning examples.
If you just have time for a quick peek at new social networking offerings, see this PC Magazine article.
In a testament to the power of the Internet, and the ability of one person to make a difference, Jared Benedict has undertaken the digitizing of the USGS's topo map series. The ultimate plan is to make tehm available for free via the Internet Archive. Read more about the project here.
Well, it's a cool tool for any day. From Google, it's Writely, an online word processor. You can upload existing Word docs, create new ones online, email them to your Writely account, then share the file with other folks for collaborative editing (or just keep it to yourself). Documents can be downloaded to your desktop in Word, OpenOffice, RTF, PDF*, HTML or zip formats, and you can also publish straight to your blog.
This could be a great alternative for libraries that don't offer Word on public machines. Sign up is free; they plan on integrating this into a Google account sign in, but currently you'll need a separate Writely account. After you sign up, they'll send you an email confirmation that you will need to confirm to activate your account, then you're good to go!
The editing screen looks a lot like a simple version of Word; the only problem I had came when trying to export my file - it took me a minute to realize I had to select the doc by checking its box before I could access the Actions commands (where the export options live). Their online help is a little slim, but there is a Writely Help Group that seems pretty lively.
Check out the article, Teaching Social Software with Social Software by Ulises Mejias from Innovate, the Journal of Online Education if you are interested in how blogs, wikis, tagging and RSS feeds can be used to develop your research skills.
Wow, what a day! First Steve Jobs announces the MacPro (sorry, my Mac-loving heart just can't contain that news), and now OCLC takes worldcat.org live (okay, it actually went live yesterday, but I was bike riding most of the day so just heard the news this morning). We're talking 1.3 billion items in 10,000 libraries worldwide! Now THAT's an online catalog!
They are also offering a really simple way to add a worldcat.org search box on your web page or blog (check out our sidebar for a sample). You'll need to create an account to get the search box, but it's free and simple.
The American Textile History Museum just announced the launch of The Chace Catalogue online project.
This pilot phase offers 500 of the 15,000 items from the Museum’s collections. The museum is located in Lowell, MA (35 miles northwest of Boston).
Here's a nifty thing I first read about in Web4Lib: portable apps! These are downscaled versions of common applications like the Firefox web browser or Thunderbird email client that are small enough to store (and take with you as you travel) on USB flash drives, iPods, or other portable hard drives. What's extra great is that NOTHING has to be installed on the computer you plug your USB flash drive into - it all lives on the portable drive! Here is a list of some of the software currently available. All portable app software is open source, so there's is no cost to download and use it.
If you are as big and long-term a geek as me, you'll remember the debut in the mid/late 90's of babelfish.altavista.com - the world's first Internet translation service. I had hours of fun translating random chunks of English into French, Spanish, Italian, and German. Sometimes I even used it at the library to help people!
Over the years, AltaVista changed hands a couple of times, but BabelFish stayed free and even added languages. Fastforward to today, and say hello to Yahoo! Babel Fish, still free and now offering Simplified Chinese into Traditional Chinese, and Traditional Chinese into Simplified Chinese. You can even add Babel Fish to your Yahoo! Toolbar now.
Pretty neat! Read all about it on the Yahoo! Search blog.
After all the trial and error I've gone through getting started with podcasting, I decided it would make sense to share this information, and maybe build a resource that others could use (why reinvent the wheel if you don't have to?). So, I have started a wiki on podcasting. Right now it's pretty minimal, just quick links to some handy stuff that I have found and use(d). Check it out here, and help it grow! Oh, and while I currently have mostly podcasting content, info on vodcasting will also be added/useful.
And I mean that literally. A staple of library book selectors everywhere, Booklist has been around for 100 years, providing book reviews and reading recommendations. From their FAQ:
Q: What is Booklist Online?
A: Booklist Online is both a free Web site and a subscription database. The free site offers a generous selection of Booklist content—plus some Web-only features—and is updated daily or weekly, depending on the portion of the site. The subscription database contains archived reviews and feature that are dynamically linked.
Q: What is in the Booklist Online Database?
A: The database contains over 100,000 reviews and thousands of features dating back to 1992. Much of the older material is searchable but not linked in the way newer content is. Please bear with us while we improve the quality of our content.
So don't cancel your subscription to the print version just yet, but do check out this new and valuable online resource. Subscription prices vary based on the type of library subscribing. Check out the rates here.
There's a new kid on the search engine block: Zillow. Well, it's sort of a search engine, anyway. It's a database of 65,00,000+ homes and their current market values. Plug an address, street, or neighborhood and the city or zip in and presto! through the magic of Google maps and a proprietary formula (iff they told us they'd have to kill us, I guess) you get instant "zestimates" for a home. It's pretty cool, and loads of fun. Is it accurate? They clain it is, within a 10% margin of error. I plugged our address in, and I'd have to agree with them. They were definitely in the ballpark! What's extra nice is that you don't have to provide any personal information to get these estimates, and it's all free. it's also beta, so we can't guarantee that it will stay free forever, but while it is, it's worth a gander or two!
Now if they'd just get over "z'ing" everything....
This resources has been available since last November, but I just stumbled across it today and had to share. When you have some time to devote to browsing, check out the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project from the Department of Special Collections at the University of California, Santa Barbara. From their website:
Cylinder recordings, the first commercially produced sound recordings, are a snapshot of musical and popular culture in the decades around the turn of the 20th century. They have long held the fascination of collectors and have presented challenges for playback and preservation by archives and collectors alike.
With funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the UCSB Libraries have created a digital collection of over 6,000 cylinder recordings held by the Department of Special Collections. In an effort to bring these recordings to a wider audience, they can be freely downloaded or streamed online.
You can search the collection by keyword, or browse by performer (the sort is on FIRST name), title, isue, or year of release then play or download the files in MP3, Quicktime, or WAV formats. Pretty fun stuff! I searched for "roosevelt" and found three recordings of Theodore Roosevelt's voice! How cool is that? Check out this page for information on the history of cylinder recordings.
I needed to talk with a human at United Airlines today. I called their 800 number, listening carefully to discover all my options. The only one open to me was the instruction that if one had a rotary dial phone they could wait until the end of the message for a human. I tried this but was disconnected (I assume because the system detected I was cheating and wasn't calling from a rotary dial phone). Luckily I knew that folks reachable via the Web kept information pages on how to get through to the human behind the 800 number. I checked one written up recently in the NYT called gethuman database and found I needed to proceed until I got to the part where the voice mail robot said "let's get started" and said the instructed word "agent" -- at once the robot asked "Did you say agent?" I said "yes" and was soon talking with a human who was able to answer my questions.
If you're looking to expand your list of free online heatlh resources, check out UCLA's Folkmed Database, a searchable database with over 200,000 folk medicine remedies, some stranger than others.
Have you discovered the unusual offerings from Make Magazine and blog yet?
MAKE Magazine bills itself as "the first magazine devoted entirely to DIY technology projects." The audience MAKE aims at is "a growing community of resourceful people who undertake amazing projects in their backyards, basements and garages."
Phillip Torrone, Make Blog Dude and Natalie Zee, Crafts Chica, provide "the most up to date happenings in the Maker and Crafts world" at the blog.
The 40" X 80" cross-stitch recreation of the Sistine Chapel fascinated me. It took 10 years for Joanna Lopianowski-Roberts to create. She used 1,809 different color combinations with a total of about 628,296 stitches! Her process is described in her self-published book Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel Ceiling in Cross-stitch.
I wrote about Los Angeles PL's California Fiction Index for lii.org a few years ago. Today I ran across another great index they've got going -- the Serials and Sequels Index.
"A listing of fiction books for adults which are part of a series, or are sequels to earlier novels. Can be searched by author, title and series name or characters."
This joins the teen (Bettendorf, IA) and children's (Mid-Continennt, MO) series and sequels indexes maintained as library information services available not only to their communities but to anyone, from the web. I like to think of these as 21st century library services.
CalCat is a new database from the California State Library that shows the holdings of books, videos, audio, maps, and other materials held by libraries in California.
Some background:
The libraries of California have been sharing cataloging records, books and other library materials through interlibrary loan for many years. Using central storage and software available through OCLC, libraries have been able to copy catalog cards and share digital records. This central storage of data has become the basis of WorldCat, a "union list" or database showing the holding of many libraries throughout the world.
In 2005, the California State Library announced a new project that provides every California public library access to WorldCat, and gathers the data from the libraries of all California libraries into a sub-group known as the "California Libraries Catalog". A federal grant allows every public library access to both of these databases and provides each library the ability to update their holdings with OCLC.
Google Groups is a newish offering from Google. Groups aren't a particularly new thing: Yahoo Groups have been around for a long time. What's worth mentioning about Google Groups is Google Librarian, a google Group for, and written in part by, librarians. The main product of Google Librarians is an accoasional newsletter. The current issue has an article by Karen Schneider of lii.org and another article discussing how Google determines which websites are most trusted.
You can subscribe to the email newseltter, or grab the RSS feed. Check it out!
SBC Yellow Pages is now a database with data from 12 states. Not a big deal as it's still in development -- but a big deal for Californians who want easy lookup for Bakersfield, Fresno-Clovis, Los Angeles, Oakland, Orange County, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose. A good ready reference bookmark.
It's New Year's Day 2006! And the Rose Parade isn't on TV! Wonder why? Well, it turns out it's due to a very old tradition that dates back to the early days of the parade, which started in 1890. In 1893, the parade fell on a Sunday and officials decided to move it to Monday January 2 so as not to startle the horses tethered outside local Pasadena churches. You can read all about the history of the Rose Parade here.
New Year's Day and New Year's Eve abound with traditions, it turns out. Here's a biggy: New Year's resolutions! They date back to ancient Babylon. Back in those days it was celebrated not on January 1 but on the first New Moon after the Vernal Equinox, the first day of spring. Here's one that I hadn't heard of before: Hogmanay. A lot of our more common New Year's Eve traditions seem to stem from this ancient celebration, such as the lighting of fireworks and the singing of Robert Burns' tune Auld Lang Syne. Another tradition is the dropping of the crystal ball in Times Square, which has been happening in some fashion since 1907. Other cities have joined in the tradition of dropping something at midnight on New Year's Eve.
However you celebrate, have a happy and safe New Year!
The Government Domain column in LLRX.com "The Cream of the Federal Web Site Crop" by Peggy Garvin discusses the best of them and why usability is so important to having a good website. She ends the column with a site recommendation "that may restore your faith in government websites."
Usability.gov from the Department of Health and Human Services is a "resource for designing usable, useful, and accessible web sites and user interfaces." The site began as a project of the National Cancer Institute to find evidence-based usability guidelines so that they could make cancer information easily available to the public. The product, Usability.gov, is available to the public as well as federal web developers. Several of the World Usability Day panelists remarked that a plus to working in government is that they can "steal," or adapt, the work of their federal colleagues for their own projects, and agencies actively share their solutions within the federal community.
We here at Infoblog have been busily investigating the art of podcasting: how to record the little devils and then how to get them posted. It's more challenging than you'd think. Currently we like to use the interal microphone in our Macs and record directly into a nifty application called Audio Hijack Pro that saves the resulting audio files as MP3. This works quite nicely (see Holly Hinman's November 14 podcast as an example of this method).
Today I was reading wilwheaton dot net, and he mentioned a way to record podcasts using Garage Band. Neat! As a musical doofus who can play no musical instruments (with the exception of the kazoo), I had written Garage Band off as an application that I would never use. Now I can't wait to give it a shot! This page also offers some excellent tips on creating podcasts, so if you're thinking of trying podcasting for your library but you don't have a Mac, you'll still find some useful information. Here's my number one tip: have a script or at least talking points about what you want to say before you start talking!
If you're a blogger like me, it can sometimes be hard to come up with an interesting topic for a posting - you get a case of blogger's block, if you will. This handy page lists ten ideas that might help get your creative juices flowing again. We're very big into #1 (How to) and #5 (Review) here at Infoblog, but they are all good ideas. Check it out!
Fans of Sherlock Holmes wil be delighted to learn of Stanford University's Discovering Sherlock Holmes project. The plan is to rerelease all of the issues of The Strand magazine (the journal that originally published the Holmes stories in the 1890's) just as they were originally printed and illustrated. This being 2005, you can subscribe now to receive a paper OR online version. The first issue will be released January 9, 2006.
As someone whose main goal on first going to London was to visit 221B Baker Street (well, that and Covent Garden, where Eliza Doolittle met Henry Higgins), you can bet I have already signed up!
A tip o' the deerstalker cap (and I know, I know - in the original stories deerstalkers are never mentioned) to the LiB for the tipoff!
Everyone is talking about Wikipedia, including librarians (okay, especially librarians). Take a listen to NPR's show "Wikipedia, Open Source, and the Future of the Web." Some top leaders in the area (Chris Anderson of Wired magazine), Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, and author Nicholas Carr discuss the effect of Wikipedia and similar collaborative projects. A lot of time is devoted to discussing accuracy vs. broadness of opinion. Worth a listen!
I found Insect and Mite Pests in the Home, Garden, and Landscape when I was researching a recommended treatment for the powderpost beetles I found in my cottage foundation a few weeks ago. Their introduction says it well.
Accurate, up-to-date and unbiased information for solving common insect and mite problems around your home, business and landscape using least-toxic methods. Specialties are aphids, bamboo spider mite, boxelder bugs, carpenter ants, dust mites, fleas, head lice, mosquitoes, powderpost beetles, root weevils, slugs, spider mites, spiders and ticks, termites, yellowjackets, and others. This site is about urban entomology, the study of insects and mites that impact people and their property. We emphasize education because the better informed you are, the better decisions you'll make.
Just read about this in LifeHacker: TalkDigger. It's a meta meta search engine - you type in a URL and it will tell you who links to it. It mines nine major search engines for its results. These include Google, Bloglines, Feedster, MSN Search, and PubSub.
The Oppenheim Toy Portfolio was founded in 1989 as the only independent consumer review of children's media. Joanne and Stephanie Oppenheim are monthly contributors on NBC's Today Show; they recommend books, toys, CDs and videos.
About 130 billion emails are sent a day. The average employee spends a quarter of their day on email. Whew! Given those numbers, it would serve us all well to be up to speed on email security, archiving, and organizing. That's where Inc.com's Complete Guide to Email comes in handy. From how to spot and avoid email scams, to the best email software applications, this guide is full of useful tips to help you keep yourself afloat in a world of information overload.
Is there a word for fear of glass? Who is Big Bird's friend on Sesame Street? What's the word for the urge to travel? OneLook Reverse Dictionary can help you with the answer to these and other words when you know the concept but not the term for it. And, for crossword puzzle fans, you can use their wildcard characters to solve the word when you have a couple of blanks filled in but just can't figure out the rest.
Songtitle.Info is a regularly updated list of music used in television commercials (U.S. broadcasts). Around 1,000 songs from commercials going back to 1996. Most recent update -- Spring/Summer 2005. Most of the songs are linked to a clip at Amazon so you can check if it's the song you're looking for.
And, if you want to look for song lyrics, check out the tips at How to Find Song Lyrics Online.
OCLC is offering a new feature in their OpenWorldCat project. Readers can now write their own reviews of books! This is done by means of a wiki backend - you have to sign up for an account to write a review (quick and free). After you look up a title, just click on the Review tab and you're off! Here are their guidelines:
The recommended length is 75 to 300 words. Your comments should focus on the item. The best reviews include not only whether you liked or disliked something, but also why. Feel free to mention other items that you consider similar and how this item rates in comparison to them. Please limit yourself to one review per item....Avoid bias, added content should be factual and written from a neutral point of view. Cite sources: list authoritative references when possible. Ensure information cited is verifiable. Don't infringe on copyrights.
Here's an example. Note: reviews are held for approval, so you won't see your stuff go up right away. Also, if you already are registered with WebJunction, you do