Audiobooks from NetLibrary

NetLibrary now offers audiobooks. (This might not be very new, but I just found out.)

Have GPC Libraries considered offering audiobooks? Or, is that too public library?

Update one hour later: I mean downloadable audiobooks, rather than CDs or cassettes.

Yahoo MyWeb

Has any one seen this yet? And, if so, have you considered the possibilities for its use in the library environment, in conjunction with virtual reference or not? It's still in Beta, so we probably have a bit of time to mull it over, but I'd think that it would be a good way to get even more mileage out of our well-selected Internet resource lists and play to the younger generation's unconditional love of All Web Things Social. Am I nuts, or is it so crazy it just might work?

In case you're visiting Clarkston soon...

Beginning July 5, parking lot #2 at Clarkston (the one next to the library) will be closed due to construction of the new student center. Try the lots off Memorial College or lot #1 next to A and B buildings. Here's the campus map if you need a reminder.

BIG Call For Proposals

It's kinda short notice but there's a call for presentations out for the next meeting of the Atlanta Bibliographic Instruction Group (BIG). The meeting will be held on Wednesday, July 27th at the Univ of West Georgia in Carrollton.

We are looking for presenters to give 40-45 minute presentations/discussions on the current state of instruction. Let others know what you are doing, what's working and what's not, and what we have to look forward to in the future.
Possible topics include:
Online tutorials
Assessment of instruction
ACRL standards
Information Literacy credit courses
Faculty collaboration
If you would like to present, or if you would like to suggest a presenter,
please contact Michael Aldrich, president of BIG, at maldrich@westga.edu or
678.839.6357, or Christy Stevens, Program Chair, at cstevens@westga.edu or
678.839.6355.

The Distant Librarian: Switching Between Applications Within Microsoft PowerPoint

From The Distant Librarian, a post on something we've all run up against. Any other presentation transition tricks??

OCLC Research Software Contest

We have a winner.

Dazhi (David) Jiao has won the OCLC Research Software Contest with a submission consisting of an OPAC that includes a ranked list of harvested citations when a detailed bibliographic record is displayed.

This is a really cool use of OAI, but I'm also very intrigued by the runner-up's submission, (who just happens to be from Georgia Tech. Go Yellow Jackets!)

Ross Singer of Georgia Tech is the runner-up, with a WAG the Dog implementation featuring Open WorldCat and xISBN functionality.

Related links:
Dazhi Jiao's CAT OAI; an OPAC System with OAI Integration
WAG the Dog
OCLC Research Software Contest

Friday Fun from Tech Services

On average, a new record is added to the WorldCat database every 10 seconds. No matter what time, day or night, a cataloger somewhere in the world is contributing a MARC record to the world's largest bibliographic database, and you can watch it all happen live.

Keep an eye on the "Contributed by" line at the bottom. If you see "GCD", that's me!

Chat Reference Stuff

Here are some links related to yesterday's discussion of IM reference.

DL Get Help page (There's only one status indicator now. Nice work Jennifer!)
Trillian (Multiplatform chat program we'll be using. Free download.)
IM Powerpoint (Relive the magic in the comfort of your office or home!)
Text Message Abbreviations and Smilies (Very good list of commonly used chat shorthand and emoticons. Thanks Jennifer!) - Updated 6/23/05

If you're interested in participating in the pilot please let me know. Also let me know if you feel comfortable chatting right away or would like to do some training first. Jennifer and I will be glad to assist anyone. We can add people to the rotation at any time.

If You Have A Minute...

...we have minutes! The minutes from yesterday's Reference Committee meeting and the approved minutes from the previous meeting are now available on the committee web page. Or use these handy links:

Reference Committee 6/21 Minutes Draft
Reference Committee 5/10 Approved Minutes

Send any corrections for 6/21 to Lora Mirza by 6/28. Thanks for coming yesterday. It was great to see everyone.

Beyond the convenience of chat ref

Here's a quote from "Chat's Positive Side" (Carol Tenopir, LJ, 12/04) that I think is especially interesting since we serve such an international student population:

Chat users are not always remote; many students at the University of Tennessee (UT) and [University of California-Irvine] access the service from inside the library. No one wants to give up their computer, but anonymity is probably the most important factor. Students intimidated by the reference desk may appreciate asking a question anonymously. UC-I is culturally diverse, and "patrons may choose chat reference instead of approaching a desk where they might have more difficulty expressing themselves verbally. For them, typing a question may be easier than finding the right words and grammar in English," said Tunender.

(Link to full text)

Reference Committee Tomorrow!

Happy Monday! Lora asked me to post a reminder about the Reference Committee meeting tomorrow. It will be held from 10am-noon in the Decatur Campus Library Instruction room.

Revised Agenda

Come out and see our new public access computers and even newer Sympodium too!!

The State of the Union (List)

I’ve been working on periodical changes this month, so I thought that I’d give everybody a little overview of the sometimes awkward, always entertaining dance that is periodical holdings. Stop me if you’ve heard this all before.

You can check our periodical holdings in three places: our catalog, the college-wide periodical list, or the union list, otherwise known as the Georgia Libraries Journal List (GOLD) (access through GALILEO). My first choice is always our catalog and, no, that isn’t biased (not entirely, anyway). The catalog, beyond a shadow of a doubt, contains the most current information of these three sources. Here’s why.

When I am sent periodical change reports, I enter those changes into the catalog and GOLD simultaneously. The GOLD database that I can access through a software program called Passport is constantly updated. The GOLD database that the public can access is only updated twice a year, at the end of June and December. Any changes received after those dates will be in GOLD limbo until the next update. Now, I’m not knocking GOLD. We’re good pals. We hang out. I went to his kid’s graduation. For ILL, he’s the bee’s knees; but if you want to know if we have volume 90 of Field & Stream, the catalog is your man. GOLD’s cool with that. He isn’t the jealous type.

And what of the college-wide list, you say? Well, that is generated, by an automated report, after each GOLD update, meaning in early July and January. So, any changes received after one GOLD update and before the next, are not on the college-wide list. (Also, we’ve recently discovered that the report used to generate the college-wide list has some eccentricities of it own, sometimes resulting in a confusing display, but that’s a whole different nest of wiener dogs.)

On a related note, everyone has sent me their changes, or promised me that they would, or told me that they can’t before the end of June; and I’m almost finished processing the ones I have, so John will be updating the college-wide list soon. Drop me a line if you have any questions, suggestions, etc.

Nice JavaScript Quiz Creator

If you want to add another element to library instruction classes, here's a very easy-to-edit, multiple-choice JavaScript quiz creator. There are tons of free quizzes available on the Web, but I like this one because there's no question limit and it's self-scoring.

(If you want to use it but feel queasy about editing it, I'll be happy to help.)

What Can't You Track With RSS?

In a related post to David's recent PubMed RSS Feeds!, I recommend reading a Popular Science sidebar by 43 Folders's Merlin Mann, 5 Things You Didn't Know You Could Track with RSS. (I actually only knew about one of these things, package tracking. Paints me as an unrepentant consumer, doesn't it?)

Don't get too excited about #2 though. I've looked into it and it only works with the Dynix ILS right now, other systems are in beta. I've heard buzzing that Sirsi will be offering native RSS feeds in an upcoming release, but I haven't heard any similar gossip about Voyager.

Reference Committee Agenda

A preliminary agenda for the June 21st Reference Committee meeting is now available on the committee webpage. Or follow this handy link:

June Reference Committee Agenda

The meeting will be held from 10am - 12pm in the Decatur Campus library instruction room. Hope to see you there.

PubMed RSS Feeds!

There's a post on Library Stuff today about new RSS feeds in PubMed. This is awesome! You can go in, do a search and save your search string as a feed so you'll be updated on new articles in your feed reader. There are screen shots in the post on how to do it. Hopefully more databases will get on board and start providing a similiar service!

Let's have a contest to see who can put the most links in one sentence!

"Book-Like Objects"

There was a very interesting story on Morning Edition yesterday about self and print on demand publishing. This is definitely a growing area of the book industry, especially for fiction. We had several authors at your Writer's Festival here earlier this year who started in POD and later signed contracts with major publishing houses. There are some funny snide comments from a publishing house rep in there too.

Open WorldCat Deep Linking Functional for GPC and GUC

For the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to suss out why some Georgia institution’s links in Open WorldCat search results went right to their catalog record for the title in question, but Georgia Perimeter College’s link just went to the main page of the OPAC and poor Gwinnett University Center had no link at all. Figuring out that the process is actually called “deep linking” was quite a break through. After that revelation and the discovery of a form on OCLC’s Web site that one has fill out to establish these deep links, I am proud to announce that we are up and running as of today! Click on the links below to see some examples of GPC and GUC deep linking in action.

find in a library:me talk pretty one day

find in a library:dorothy parker in her own words

find in a library:women filmmakers refocusing

I’ve tested all these searches in Google and the Open WorldCat record should be the first result or pretty near to it. (Remember, this program is active in other databases too. I’m just using Google as an example.) Just click on the search result, enter the zip code 30084 (which will bring up results for GPC and GUC) and click on our links to be taken directly to the corresponding catalog record. Pretty neat, huh? Unfortunately, Open WorldCat records don’t always make the first page of hits, sometimes even with pretty specific search strings. I’m guessing that this has something to do with the Google search algorithm; but further pondering will get me started on a discussion of the beauty of a catalog with a controlled vocabulary, and nobody wants that.

Needless to say, if we actually want to search our holdings or even holdings all over Georgia, our local catalogs and universal catalogs are more efficient tools than this. I see PR as being the biggest advantage to Open WorldCat. The more exposure libraries have in cyberspace, the better, and I’m very pleased with OCLC for starting this program. (I’m also very pleased with the service I received from OCLC while trying to establish these links. A big shout out to Joanna in Dublin, Ohio!)

Googling By Top-Level Domain

[Here'’s a nifty little tidbit that I picked up on Lifehacker, during my lunchtime blog reading. This may be old news to most of you, but it is new to me and seems like it would have great applications in reference work, so I thought I'd share.]

I was already aware of the fact that you can limit your Google search to one specific Web site, à la:

"bird flu"”site:www.cdc.gov

pandemic influenza 1918 site:www.cdc.gov

However, I did not know that you can use the same structure to restrict your searches to a particular top-level domain, à la:

"bird flu"”site:.gov

pandemic influenza 1918 site:.gov

I wasn'’t able to find any documentation about this on the Google help pages, but the buzz is that this trick works with top-level domains (.gov, .org, .edu, .mil, .com, and .net) and with country domains like .uk (United Kingdom) or .va (Vatican City State).

Call me easy to please, but I think that this little feature is mighty cool.

Searching Open WorldCat

I was just perusing David Bigwood's always-informative Catalogablog and came across a post discussing three Open WorldCat-enabled search tools: Yahoo toolbar, Google toolbar, and Firefox extensions. It's always nice to have options, but if you don't want to fuss with extra downloads, there are still plenty of Web sites that offer Open WorldCat records in their search results. The drawback to this approach is that the Open WorldCat records are mixed in with all the other search results and finding them can take some patience, a very refined search string, or both. With the toolbars and extensions you can limit your search results to just Open WorldCat records.

If you haven't had a chance to give Open WorldCat a whirl, go to Google or Yahoo and paste in the following search string.

find in a library da vinci code decoded

An Open WorldCat record should be the first result in either list.

Information Literacy In The Disciplines

Some of y'all may have already seen this on ILI-L but the ACRL Instruction Section has created a website called Information Literacy In The Disciplines that collects presentations, articles and curriculum materials along with standards on providing user education in a wide variety of discipline areas. Looks like a great resource. So great in fact that I added it to Additional Links on the side menu.

June Reference Committee Meeting

The next Reference Committee meeting will be held on Tuesday, June 21 from 10am -12pm in the Decatur Campus Library Instruction Room. Everyone is welcome to attend. Please contact Lora Mirza with any potential agenda items.

Pew Internet & American Life Project Report: Health Information Online - May 2005

Pew Internet & American Life Project Report: Health Information Online - May 2005 is an interesting look at how people use to Internet to access health information. Any implications for how we steer our users to consumer health info?

GA Conference On Info Lit Program

The program for the 2005 GA Conference on Info Lit, featuring our own Sherry Durren, is now online. A lot of interesting looking presentations! I would definitely recommend going unless you're presenting at another conference the same weekend. The conference will be held from September 30 - October 1 at GA Southern in Statesboro and will mark the first anniversary of the original format of this blog. Woohoo.