New features on ABI Inform and European Newsstand

Proquest are going to be doing some work on their databases at the following times

Sunday, April 20, 2008 at 03:00 for two (2) hours
Sunday, April 27, 2008 at 03:00 for twelve (12) hours

What they're doing is adding the option to create RSS feeds for searches and also adding a new Arabic interface to their language options.

WARC - digital

The World Advertising Research Centre database has added a new 'digital' section looking at things like top viral campaigns, digital consumers, how people use the internet, and impact on agencies.

The library -
exercise for body
and mind




I'm on leave next week - moving house, but Mary and Jane will be in ML107, on floor 1, if you need any help.

Pajamas

I've never been to a conference* in my pajamas before. Virtual pajamas and real pajamas in fact. That's the sort of thing that can happen at an international conference held in Second Life.

I think this unusual style of dress for professional networking can be excused seeing as the latter part of the programme ran from 12 midnight to 5am.

I must admit though, I have been looking for an excuse to wear the rather lovely pjs I found and, in SL, there's really not much chance, as avatars don't sleep (although they have been known to nod off briefly if sufficiently bored.)

I did wear more appropriate clothing for the (relatively) serious part of my day when I - along with a brave colleague - did a presentation in both text chat and voice simultaneously. And we were not too put out to find in a later session that there was a technological gizmo that would have made the process much easier!

There's always more to learn.

If I've done it right there should be some pics of the event here.

*Virtual Worlds: Libraries, Education and Museums

Conference

I'm doing something weird next weekend. I'm going to be presenting a paper on Second Life at a *conference in Second Life. If the technical gremlins will allow, that is.

I say I am going to be presenting it, but am I? Or is it my avatar, Wynne, who will be doing that? Will she claim ownership of the copyright?

*More info here Virtual Worlds: Libraries, Education and Museums and here is a Video

Evangelised!

I saw a presentation the other evening by Metaverse Evangelist Roo Reynolds from IBM. He certainly lived up to the job title!

Key points that I picked up on were...

• Virtual Worlds (VWs) are about people, they're fundamentally social spaces
• The average age of people in Second Life is around 34
• What Second Life has over some other VWs is user generated content
• Its ok to start small - send in a few explorers
• Things in VWs can be ephemeral - its easy to build and to destroy
• Do we want to replicate the real world? Or be creative with the posssibilities of VWs?
• It's not just Second Life, watch out for new worlds
• Watch out for the real metaverse - joined up VWs!

£200 prize up for grabs!

JISC are doing the first ever national survey on the use of and perceptions of e-books.

There is a £200 prize up for grabs for staff and students that enter the survey before February 15th.

To participate in the survey please visit the JISC User Survey 2008. The survey will take around 10 minutes to complete. There is information for faculty staff and students if you want to know more about it.

Literature searching: theory and practice

I'm being painfully reminded lately about the difference between theory and practice.

In the early stages of trying to get a paper written, with a colleague, to submit to a conference, I have to keep reminding myself to keep track of what I've read and might want to quote from or refer to. But after several months of "scan, flick and `power browse’"- as a recent research paper calls it - that is proving to be very much harder to do than it sounds!

JISC Ebooks

We've recently subscribed to 5 new business and management studies e-books through the JISC national ebooks observatory project.

• The Dynamics of Employee Relations - Paul Blyton 3rd ed
• Marketing Strategy & Competitive Positioning - Graham Hooley 3rd ed
• Organisational Behaviour and Analysis: An Integrated Approach - Derek Rollinson, 3rd ed
• Integrated Marketing Communication - David Pickton, 2nd ed
• Management Concepts & Practices - Tim Hannagan, 4th ed

These e-books can be found via the library catalogue and are available on the MyiLibrary platform (using your Athens username and password if off campus.)

Staff and students can copy, print, and paste parts of the e-books and can, for educational purposes, incorporate excerpts of these e-books into teaching materials, essays, course work, presentations and MyCourse units.

Facebook

I am hopelessly word addicted. I realised this when I discovered the (for me) killer app on Facebook: you can play Scrabble on there!

I do realise that not everyone shares my enthusiasm for the written, or indeed tiled, word, or for books and literature and the whole text based world of ideas, and I know that these things can be taken too far (as shown by this cautionary tale) but I think its probably a good thing if your chosen career involves something you are just a tad obsessive about.

Greetings!

...from Wynne and a very Merry Christmas from me.

The library and this blog will re-open on the 2nd Jan 2008.

Not too good to be true?

They say that 'if it looks too good to be true, it probably is!' I've found that to be good advice at times, but it is just a tad cynical. Some rare things look good and actually ARE good!

I've been poking around a site that looked far too good to be true for a while now and can't see a catch. It's associated with reputable organisations, and looks like a simply excellent idea. It's called FreeRice and it claims to develop your vocabulary while simultaneously helping to end world hunger.

Why am I blogging about this here? Well (she says, thinking quickly) increasing your vocabulary has got to be a good thing from a librarianish point of view, and one of the things I try to emphasise in my training sessions is how important it is to evaluate your sources of information rather than placing immediate trust in them.

Proquest downtime on Sunday

The Proquest databases ABI Inform and European Newsstand will be down from the early hours of this Sunday morning until the afternoon. If you were thinking of getting up early on Sunday morning and doing research I can only apologise and suggest a lie in.

The reason for the downtime is so they can add supplementary digital materials - audio, video, spreadsheets, etc - to the dissertations that are on there.

For some reason the idea of digital appendices reminds me of this blog entry I chanced upon recently.

Virtually there

I'm now most of the way through the Intermediate course in Virtual Librarianship I'm doing with the University of Illinois. (Does this mean I'm virtually a virtual librarian?)

It uses Moodle and Second Life for course delivery as well as them being the subject of the course, which makes it an interesting double level of learning. I've found myself behaving in a very 'studentish' way at times. Last week I popped into Moodle at the last possible minute to do a quick stab at the previous week's questions before the next class!

What I found really interesting is the effect of having my avatar present with other avatars in a virtual environment for the two hour weekly classes. There have been some weeks when the subject matter was not of the greatest interest to me personally, but I would have found it surprisingly hard to just wander (or indeed teleport) out of the class once I was 'there'. Almost as hard as it would be to do so in a face to face class. Quite different from logging in briefly to add a few comments to a discussion forum on Moodle.

Hints and bits

Following on from my last blog entry (where did November go???) I find that odd things I throw into training sessions or research workshops, almost as asides, are often greeted with the most enthusiasm and appreciation. For example pressing Crl-F to find a word on a webpage, or alt-tab to move between two open windows, putting quotation marks around the words to find the exact phrase in a search, or using Bloglines to keep track of infrequently updated blogs, creating a concept map in Credo Reference, or the fact that you can set up an alert on Google News. Maybe I need to devise a training session on useful hints and bits?

Stephen Fry on the net

"You’d be amazed... by how often friends of mine say they can’t find something on the net, simply because they haven’t stopped and thought about how to frame or phrase input search terms."

Stephen Fry on his blog (and in the Guardian)

New look for XpertHR

The XpertHR information database for human resource management has got a very nice new interface design.

Sadly the Athens Users link that HE staff and students need to find is still very, very tiny indeed and hardly stands out in it's subtle grey-on-grey colour scheme.

No spark

A while ago I ordered a book called A Spark from Heaven. I've since had a report from our suppliers to say that A Spark from Heaven 'doesn't seem to be available'. Which I found amusing in an ironic sort of way.

New look for Mintel

The Mintel market research database has a new look, now with a what's hot? link to the hottest industry stories and a media homepage link for ad campaigns, agency news and more.

Web 2.0 explained

This is simply excellent. One of my favourite people talking about one of my favourite things! Stephen Fry on Web 2.0.


VideoJug: Stephen Fry: Web 2.0