Links of interest 9/7/09

An essay on the serials review process.

The Global Legal Monitor, published by the Law Library of Congress in Washington, offers an RSS feed for updates for all news stories as well as RSS feeds broken down by topic and/or jurisdiction.

Make it Digital by DigitalNZ has guides, voting for what NZ resources should be digitised (the AJHRs are currently in the lead) and a place to ask and answer questions about digitisation.

Marketing

• Five ways you can save money by marketing by Kathy Dempsey
• A librarian from Maine State Library gives instructions on how to embed or adapt the Library Use Value Calculator - "This calculator was developed in 2007 as a way for libraries to let patrons calculate how much their use of the library means to them".

Added web functionality

• Cornell University describes how they created JAbbr, an online tool where you can type in a journal abbreviation to find possible matches in their catalogue. The source code is available under the MIT License.
• Tom Pasley at UCOL Library writes about adding an APA citation into the records displayed on their (Voyager) catalogue.

Elsevier scandal for 24/6/09 and other links of interest

Not content with publishing fake journals, Elsevier's marketing division recently decided to "offer $25 Amazon gift cards to anyone who would give a new textbook five stars in a review posted on Amazon or Barnes and Noble." Upon exposure, it's now recanted the scheme.

More New Zealand libraries on the social web:

• Lincoln Uni Library on Twitter;
• Otago Uni Library on Twitter and showing their Law Library refurbishments on Flickr;
Christchurch City Library staff on Flickr (with photos of Paul Sutherland's 50th birthday party).

Photos of libraries to drool over:

• Republic Polytechnic Library, Singapore -- lots of space; and
• Hjorring public library, Denmark -- a red ribbon theme flows through the whole building; lots of bright colours and cool spaces; self-checkin.

A report from Cambridge University about what students are interested in doing on mobile phones: primarily opening hours, location maps, contact info, and access to the library catalogue.

A hilarious and very true rant on attending vendor training sessions; and a more serious post in response on how this applies to the kind of training sessions we give students.

National Library of the Netherlands is to secure long-term preservation of the content of the Directory of Open Access Journals.

Links of interest 19/6/09

A bit of humour: "Dispatches from a Public Librarian", told Twitter-style (so may make most sense if you scroll to the bottom and read upwards).

Springshare have launched new LibGuides features, including co-owners for guides (will display both co-owners' profiles on the guide) and moderation of user-submitted links.

Newly-discovered-by-me Twitter users include Lincoln University and Humanities NZ. Increasing numbers of NZ public libraries have accounts.

Someone's created a "search engine taste test" where you type in your keywords and it searchs Bing, Google, and Yahoo simultaneously. You can then vote for the best set of results and it will reveal which search engine it's from.

A Swedish university library has created a simple javascript bookmarklet people can add to their browser so that if they're browsing the web (via google or links recommended by friends) and find themselves on a subscription-only page, they can click the bookmarklet to reload the page via ezproxy instead of having to navigate back to the library website and find it again. A librarian from there suggests other libraries should "Steal the JavaScript from this page or write your own."

Links of interest 11/6/09

University of California Berkeley Library have redesigned their animated tutorials page to be "more visual, navigable, and less, ahem, u-g-l-y, while giving users a means of providing a bit of feedback on the tutorials to help us evaluate and prioritize them."

LexisNexis NZ has a new Twitter account. (And have I mentioned Springshare's account where they post about updates to LibGuides?) Ooh, and the COSC department, another new Twitter account, have just plugged the library's online exam papers.

The User is Not Broken manifesto has its third birthday.

The National Library of Wales is Flickr's 26th Commons partner. "The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world's public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer." See how users can add information in comments and notes (hover your mouse over the image).

Links of interest 3/6/09

Resources
Gateway to Scientific Data from the Canadian government.

Emerald Management Reviews Citations of Excellence Top 50 papers

The first time Europeana (a digital library funded by the European Commission) launched so many people visited that it promptly crashed. This time it seems to be stable and is very nice to browse.

Musopen "is an online music library of copyright free (public domain) music." (Project Gutenberg and Mutopia also have sheet music; Gutenberg also has music recordings, moving pictures, etc.)

Tools
Have you ever used Tinyurl to make a short link for a long url? Now Krunchd gives you a short link for a collection of urls.

Ideas
David Lee King writes about embedding a link to their virtual reference in their HIP catalogue (including on their Search Results page).

Stephen Abram writes about how phrasing on signage can increase compliance.

Non-English blog roundup #12

[Sitting around since last year...]

Bambou (French) writes about Wikimini, a Wikipedia-like project written by kids for kids: 8-13 years old. It was conceived by a teacher as a pedagogical tool.

Penser le futur (French) writes about the ease of amending incorrect data on Amazon - [not quite as immediate as Wikipedia perhaps, but] it only took clicking a button, adding details, and waiting while Amazon verified it - a few days later Amazon even sent an email explaining why some of the changes had been accepted and others left alone.

Frank den Hollander (Dutch) points to the experimental PurpleSearch (English) at the University of Groningen. PurpleSearch is a federated search engine that doesn't require users to select which databases to search - instead it parses the search keywords to guesstimate at which will give the best results.

And if you're interested in non-English blog posts you may be interested in LibWorld - library blogs worldwide, a book version of the essays on InfoBib.

[More recently...]

Vagabondages (French) lists French and francophone library twitter accounts and Biblioroots lists accounts for librarians, bibliobloggers, authors, editors, booksellers and more librarians as well as general information and technology accounts.

Erik Høy on Biblog (Danish), inspired by Google promoting short videos of its employees introducing themselves, suggests that librarians could do the same.

Links of interest 29/5/09 (with added cat)

Mosman Library, NSW, is running a "Mosman Library vs That Search Engine" challenge where the library e-collection is pitted against Google and free e-resources. Each librarian has 45 minutes to research, then 45 minutes to write up their search strategy and answer; then the public can vote on who's given the best answers (and explain why they made that choice). So far they're on day 4 of 5 rounds.

S92A of the Copyright Act is coming back - the government will begin a review to amend the controversial section that was repealed earlier this year thanks to Creative Freedom NZ protests.

Mary Ellen Bates writes about resisting budget cuts:

"the next time the library budget was cut, the first thing I eliminated was the popular daily news digest. I announced to all the readers why it was being "suspended", and asked for their comments on whether this service should be re-funded. Sure enough, it didn't take long before I had the budget restored. It's not a pretty process, but neither is eating into the behind-the-scenes budget and not allowing library clients to see the impact of the lost funding."

Data.gov has been launched in the USA "to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government."

VUW library and student association are holding a joint fundraiser for the library cat, which underwent expensive surgery for diabetes.