SPARC

Twittering at Computers in Libraries

I had a remarkable experience using the now-very-popular online social networking tool Twitter at the Computers in Libraries (CIL) conference in Crystal City, March 30 to April 1.  Lugging my trusty Macbook laptop, my intention was to efficiently write entries on what I saw and heard to share with others.  At last year’s conference, I posted to the SPARC blog, and I found it was rather labor-intensive and exhausting to copy my notes and write a coherent blog entry by day’s end. This year with Twitter, I just wrote quick lines within the brief 140 character line limit, and sent the “tweets” online (90% of the time when the wi-fi was working).  There was no need to re-edit and post notes, and interested people could see them nearly in real time if they searched Twitter for the “hashtag” silcil.

The very cool thing was that by using the free Twitter client, TweetDeck, I could have my entries in one column while following other conference attendees’ tweets at the same time.  During talks, it was almost like passing notes in the back of the classroom.  This proved very helpful at the 2nd day’s keynote.  I was sitting at a place in the cavernous conference hall where the acoustics were terrible and the speaker had a Dutch accent.  With my hearing loss, it was especially difficult to understand what was said.  By following other CIL conference tweets, it functioned almost as closed-captioning for me, and everything was understood.

So, folks, I don’t think Twitter is yet “… another ephemeral, noninformative tech plaything” (per an article by conference speaker Greg Notess).   At least in the context of a conference, this librarian found it to be extremely useful.

A log of CIL Twitter entries by SIL attendees.

Gil Taylor

@giltay

Digital Curation Curriculum Symposium Notes

The DigCCurr (Digital Curation Curriculum) Symposium held in Chapel Hill, NC provides a place for the exchange of ideas and methods in collection and preservation of digital content. An increasing volume of publications are released both online and (sometimes in place of) print but little has been done to ensure that the publications are usable in the long term. Because libraries have preserved paper content for centuries and many feel that they must also contribute to the evolving field of digital curation/preservation. However, the meeting drew archivists, and IT specialists as well as librarians.

At the 2^nd annual event (April 1-3, 2009), several presentations focused on training programs for digital curators sponsored by organizations in the U.S. and abroad. In 2006, the IMLS provided funding to three library schools (UNC, Univ. of Illinois and U. of Arizona) to begin programs in the management of digital content. Representatives from each were at the DigCCurr symposium and presented preliminary results from this still-experimental field of study. Representatives from Australia, Germany, the Netherlands and the U.K. were also on hand to discuss courses, workshops and other programs in their home countries.

There were also presentations regarding personal digital assets and their explosive growth. Many people (not just scholars) create documents, web content, photos and other electronic artifacts that are largely ignored after creation. Of course it may be that most of this material can be discarded, but inevitably there will be one or two items that deserve long-term preservation. Additionally, archivists who have to manage a burgeoning amount of electronic records, emails and other administrative data were there in force talking about the challenges—often legally mandated—which they face.

Because the SIL is not only collecting but creating digital material, we will need to make some effort at maintaining these online resources for the future.  SIL’s Digital Services Division is currently considering hosting an intern from the pool of students at the University of Illinois to provide some guidance on the issues we will need to address.

 

More information about the presentations at the latest DigCCurr are at: http://www.ils.unc.edu/digccurr2009/abstracts

Washington Post Discovers Smithsonian 2.0

The Washington Post did a story on the Smithsonian 2.0 event.

Condensing the two plus days of activity into a traditional print journalism article with limitations of space, coming out two days after the event, etc., was a difficult task. Already, readers have been providing some feedback on the WPost website, so that will help expand the coverage. So, for those of you who were at the event, particularly our invited guests, please do take a look at the piece and add some first hand impressions to supplement the story!

Search Tips

Search Tips for the visible web (Google, Yahoo, ASK, etc):

Do you ever need to search for documents by type (for example a .pdf, excel document, word document, rss feed, etc. Try adding these search functions in front of your search term in Google, Yahoo, and most other search engines. If you want to find out what sites are linked to your website, blog, wiki, etc. then just put link: with your website address in the Google search box and hit search. For example type link:http://www.sil.si.edu/research/ and hit search and you will get a list of all the sites that link to http://www.sil.si.edu/research/  For all of these examples you can use a –  dash or a : colon. For example, you can type link:http://www.sil.si.edu/research/ or you can type link-http://www.sil.si.edu/research/  Just make sure you do not leave any spaces in the search or it will not work. Try some of these but put in your own websites, terms, .pdf, .ppt, etc to search. Just remember no spaces and use either a colon or a dash.  For .htm-, .pdf-, .xls-, .ppt-, .doc-, .xml-, .rdf-, .rss-, and .txt- make sure you put a dot or period in front of it as well as the dash or colon after it. For site:, hostname, link, etc. do not put a period or dot in front of the search.  One of my favorites is to find databases on topics I am interested in searching. For this I just put database:math or database:art in the Google or Yahoo or other search engines.

.htm, .html—Standard HTML Example (htm-science or htm:science)

.pdf—Adobe PDF (pdf-botany)

.xls—Microsoft Excel (xls-horticulture)

.ppt—Microsoft PowerPoint (ppt-anthropology)

.doc—Microsoft Word (doc-science)

.xml- .rdf- .rss—RSS or XML feeds (xml-geology)

.txt—Plain Text Format (txt-genetics)

site: This allows you to find all documents within a particular domain and all its subdomains. Example:

site:yahoo.com

hostname: This allows you to find all documents from a particular host only.  Example:  

hostname:science.yahoo.com

link: This allows you to find documents that link to a particular URL. Example: link:http://science.yahoo.com/

url: This allows you to find a specific document in the index.  Example:

url:http://edit.science.yahoo.com/research/tree/0.html

inurl: This allows you to find a specific keyword as part of indexed URLs. Example: inurl:horticulture

intitle: This allows you to find a specific keyword as part of the indexed titles.  Example: intitle:botany

Database: Find databases. Example: Database math

 

When you are searching the full text of web pages. Use specific terms.

Example: avian influenza causes, not just avian influenza.

Use quotes to require an exact phrase.  Example: "one small duck for man"

Use capitalized OR to get either word. Example: (avian influenza OR avian flu) ducks

Use - (dash) to exclude a word. Example: proliferation -nuclear

Use "site:" to specify a particular website or Internet domain.  Example:global warming site:whitehouse.gov

 

 

Deep Web Search and Social Bookmarking

 

Tired of Google and Yahoo and all the same old stuff, then try…

 

For a search of the visible web (visible web includes Google and Yahoo for a total of 15/20% of the web) try:

 

http://demo.carrot2.org/demo-stable/main  Carrot2 a Clustering search engine. Do your search and the results are clustered into similar topics or themes.

http://www.etools.ch/  Etools a multi or metasearch  engine.  Etools searches Altavista, ASK, Bluewin, Entireweb, Google, Live, Lycos, Search, Seekport, Webofant, Wikia, and Yahoo with each search that you perform.   

For a search of the invisible web (the other 80/85% of the Web) try…

 

completeplanet.com A comprehensive listing of over 80,000 dynamic searchable databases. Find databases with highly relevant documents that cannot be crawled or indexed by the surface or visible web search engines.

 

http://alltheinternet.com/ All the internet, what more can you say.

 

http://bubl.ac.uk/  Selected Internet resources covering all academic subject areas and arranged in Dewey order.

 

Access your documents anywhere, anytime…

 

Want to create all your documents on the web and share them with colleagues and have access to them at home, work, on the road, anywhere? Adobe Buzzword  is a new online word processor, perfect for writing reports, proposals, and anything else you need to access online or work on with others. It looks and behaves like your normal desktop word processor, but it operates inside a web browser, so there's no installation required. It's free, try it http://www.adobe.com/acom/buzzword/  You can also do this with Google Documents.

 

Access your bookmarks anywhere, anytime….

 

Delicious (http://delicious.com) is social bookmarking that allows you to save your bookmarks online so that you can access them from any computer with an internet connection. Delicious is an extension or addon to Firefox. Delicious also supports importing bookmarks from most web browsers, so if you already have a collection of bookmarks on your computer you don’t have to start from scratch when you set up a Delicious account. Once you have added bookmarks to your Delicious account (either by posting or by importing), you can use tags and bundles to organize them into categories. Delicious also makes it easy to share your bookmarks.

 

You can also do the same with MyYahoo bookmarks or when you sign into your Google Accounts.

Google, If Built by Librarians

For those of you who attended (or even those who couldn't make it) R. David Lankes lecture, "Not Done Yet: Charting a new Course for Librarianship" one of the SIL's 40th anniversary series of speakers...   you might be interested to know that he is the project partner of Reference Extract. 

Though Reference Extract has been fondly referred to "what Google would look like, if it were build by librarians,"  Lankes points out that the engine isn't really trying to compete directly with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo or even Wikipedia as an everyday search tool.

The project's goal is building a web search engine where the weight of the search results aren't determined by any sort of algorithm like PageRank but rather by the expertise and creditability judgments from librarians around the world.

The Reference Extract project is being developed by OCLC and the information schools of Syracuse University and the University of Washington through a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

An Easier Way to Schedule Meetings

Have you spent more time trying to arrange a meeting than actually attending that meeting?

If you are willing to try something else, there are a number of web based services you can use to find a time that works for everyone.Whenisgood, Doodle, Presdo, and Diarised are a few of the ways you can set up a meeting, send out possible available times, and have your fellow meeters reply with when they are available. 

Outlook also has an option for Scheduling, which compares the availability of the list of attendees you enter based on their Outlook Calendars.  Ctrl+Shift+A will open a new appointment.   There is a Scheduling tab where you can add your attendees and see when everyone is available. (Of course that assumes everyone enters their information into their own Calendar consistently.) Alternately, you can try this.

Finally, if these don't float your boat, you can also try an oldie but goodie approach of passing around an actual piece of paper with dates and times, and have everyone block out when they are not available.  Something like this:

Download schedule.doc

I must give credit to Lifehacker, where I first came across whenisgood.net 

Like this post? Leave a comment and let us know!

Smithsonian Library staff assist with Flickr project

On June 16, 2008, the Smithsonian joined the Flickr Commons. The Flickr Commons is a place where cultural institutions can share their photographic collections with the world. An important part of Flickr is the ability of the Flickr "community" to interact with the photos through adding comments, "tagging" the photos with subject terms, and providing feedback on the photos themselves.

Smithsonian Libraries is sharing 144 images from the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology.

Libraries staff played an important role in the Flickr project, not only in providing technical work for the SIL photographs, but also in behind the scenes for for all 800+ Smithsonian images.

From Technical Services, Jody Mussoff (pictured above with her "Smithsonian Team Flickr" shirt) and Ninette Dean organized the photos into "sets" and edited the descriptions for each photo; Suzanne Pilsk did editorial work on the SIL collections. From the New Media Office, Erin Rushing retrieved all the SIL images and worked with Smithsonian Photographic Initiatives to get them to Flickr.

Thanks to all for making this project a great success!

- Martin Kalfatovic

FLICC Seminar on Wikis - "Not all wikis are encyclopedias"

NOT ALL WIKIS ARE ENCYCLOPEDIAS

I recently attend a FLICC seminar at the Library of Congress entitled “Not all wikis are encyclopedias: other types of wikis and how your library could use one”. Leslie O’Flahavan, an E-WRITE partner, hosted the seminar. Here are some notes that Leslie provided on the following topics:

• What is a wiki and how they work
• How to identify different types of wikis
• Why wikis are such a popular way to publish content online
• How a wiki could help your organization
• How to recognize potential liabilities for wiki publishers

What is a wiki?

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

“A wiki is a website that allows visitors to add, remove, edit and change content, typically without the need for registration. It also allows for linking among any number of pages. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring. The term wiki can also refer to the collaborative software itself (wiki engine) that facilitates the operation of such a site, or to certain specific wiki sites, including the computer science site (the original wiki) WikiWikiWeb and online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia.”

What types of wikis are available?

• Federal, state, and local
• Content classification wikis and content creation wikis
• Encyclopedia wikis vs. project or task wikis, which can be used for:
  • Project communication
  • Application support
  • Research
  • Product planning
  • Customer service

Why are wikis so popular?

• Anyone can write or edit one
• They’re outside the normal permission and approval process for web content
• They encourage interaction
• They’re easy to learn
• They have a user-defined lifespan

Wikis vs. websites

Wikis - Shared traits - Websites –
Authored collaboratively relevant require permission to publish
Little or no graphic design useful mediated by experts
Foster communication correct transactional
Socially mediated alive governed by workflow
Content author in charge of updated regularly graphic design conveys content
read organization staffed by designers, developers and content types

Edit-before-publish vs. Edit-after-publish –

Wikis, unlike webpages, are intended to be “quick and dirty” communications. They can be edited after publication if necessary. However, writing guidelines are useful.

“Something that’s 80% accurate, on time, and shareable is better than something that is too much, perfectly formatted, too late, and over-classified.” – Chris Rasmussen, Knowledge Management Officer, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, Department of Defense.

Why are wiki writing guidelines needed?

• Organic growth of content can cause communication problems
• Producing valuable content of any type requires reviewing and editing
• Wiki users search vs. navigate, thus putting extra pressure on words

What should wiki writing guidelines cover?

• How to organize content
• How to make content easy to read
• How to write as a wiki citizen

Guidelines on writing to organize:

• Use concrete descriptive words, use the most commonly searched terms
• Strive for names and terms that can be used in a sentence, following natural word order
• Provide guidance on caps, numbers, special characters
• Find a name that will last over time
• Avoid initial articles
• Develop naming guidelines for different types of pages and articles

Guidelines on writing readable wiki content:

• Use headings
• Use vertical lists
• Use links (no click here)
• Use conciseness
• Use an appropriate tone for the intended audience
• Use mechanical correctness
  • Spelling
  • Punctuation
  • Grammar
  • Abbreviations
  • Dates

Guidelines on writing as a responsible wiki citizen:

• Use your real name
• Write objectively
• Comment considerately
• Contribute original content
• Avoid slang
• Explain edits in “Comments” section

Wiki software options:

• MediaWiki – www.mediawiki.org
• Tikiwiki – www.tikiwiki.org
• PBwiki – http://pbwiki.com/
• Wikipedia’s article “Comparison of wiki software” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software

Wiki writing guidelines:

• ColabWiki: Wiki Style Guide
• IBM’s Redwiki Writing Guidelines and Etiquette
• wikiHow’s Writer’s Guide
• BattleMaster wiki: Style Guide
• LinuxQuestions.org’s LQWiki: Manual of Style
• MuppetWiki: Building a successful wiki community

Wiki resources:

• Wiki homepage at COLAB: “Hosted by GSA Intergovernmental Solutions”
• “Which wiki is right for you?” in School Library Journal, May 1, 2007.

Contact information:

Leslie O'Flahavan, E-Write

Leslie@ewriteonline.com

Tel: 301-989-9853

www.ewriteonline.com

 

Tech Tools for Effectively Managing Information

This session could have been renamed, "Around the Web in 30 Minutes." It was a very fast-paced look at handy web and downloadable tools that can make a librarian’s life much easier. There were two moderators who switched back and forth in rapid-fire fashion, each taking about 2-3 minutes to talk about the next website or application that might come in handy.

These tools are all listed on the CIL Wiki and can also be found at: http://del.icio.us/tag/CIL2008-techtools

I won’t review all of them but just mention a few that may be applicable to SIL’s work.

One of them, Glance, appears to be a tool for creating online screencasts for training users and/or staff. There is a monthly fee but it may be worth it if someone can take the time to explore the application and use it. I’m sure (as with most of these) there is a trial version for download.

 

I should also mention that I once downloaded and tried out a free package, Wink, which allows creation of screencast videos, although they all use Flash which some people may not have on their computer.

 

Ponyfish allows you to monitor a website for updates. If the site does not have an RSS feed which pushes out updated information, this tool may be helpful. I am thinking of using it to monitor publisher websites to see any publications by Smithsonian affiliates that appear there—especially in the humanities publications.

 
One thing that may be handy for the Galaxy pages is addthis.com which is a button which allows users to add the site to one of several popular bookmarking sites. The best thing is that it will also provide statistics for the webmaster on how many people have bookmarked the site and what system (del.icio.us, digg, etc.) they used.

 
PDFHammer allows one to edit a PDF document. It’s free.

They also mentioned Zotero, which I can discuss with any SIL staff who are interested.