Newman Library Idea Lab

Kaltura

We looked under the hood of Kaltura to see how tags and categories are set up and what analytics are available.

Draft of Wall Street Journal LibGuide

To make it easier to see all the print and online options for the Wall Street Journal, a new LibGuide is in the works. We previewed the new guide, which also features instructions with annotated screenshots of how to get to the News Pages feature in Factiva. We also discussed whether it would be worthwhile to do a similar page for the New York Times.

Screen Capture Software

We discussed the strengths and weaknesses of Captivate and Camtasia for video screen captures and SnagIt for image capture.

Guide on the Side

The library website for the University of Arizona features tutorials that appear to the left of selected databases. The libraries at the university developed their own open-source software (available for download) that others can use to design their own tutorials. Examples of some tutorials:

• library catalog
• Academic Search Complete
• LexisNexis Academic

Factiva

We looked at examples in Factiva where the content found in search results actually links you out of the database and onto other parts of the web; some of those sites you are directed to are open, others are paywalled!

Google Sets

If you are creating a spreadsheet in Google Docs and want to create a list of similar items in a column, you can type two sample items in separate cells (such as pigeons and ducks) then easily have Google Sets supply in cells in the column additional items that are similar in nature. While the example on this page just shows days of the week as items you might want to auto-fill in a spreadsheet, it works with lots of other things as well (cities, colors, kinds of dogs, etc.) More details can be found on this post on the Google Operating System blog.

I did the same thing with Yahoo! Pipes here that I did today for the Reference at Newman Library blog so you can subscribe to a feed that gives you all new posts and comments. If you’d like to see how I did it, I created a screencast and wrote step-by-step instructions on this post from my other personal blog, Stephen Francoeur’s Stuff.

Here’s the URL you can add to your feed reader for the new combined feed:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=19704accb2e2d2d8f97de2ac204b75c6&_render=rss

Attendees
Arthur Downing, Robert Drzewicki, Stephen Francoeur, Ryan Phillips

Mobile Phones
We looked at a report from Gartner that predicted sales of mobile phones with touchscreens are expected to rise 97 percent in 2010. We also wondered if we were able to track how many visitors to the library’s website came there on mobile devices. There is some data to that effect in our library’s website statistics if you look at what browsers and operating systems were used by site visitors, but the data isn’t as complete as we’d hoped it might be. We also talked about how much we know about the extent to which Baruch students have adopted the latest cell phone technology.

Ebooks and Ebook Readers
After looking at a graphic from the New York Times comparing the “economics of producing a book” in print vs. electronic, we had a discussion of our school’s Kindle experiment and what we might do with the Kindles after the semester is over. One idea that was floated was what it might mean were we to load public domain editions of books that are required reading in undergraduate courses (especially ones that are part of the general education curriculum).

We watched a video from Flat World Knowledge about their “open textbooks” that can be freely read online as well as purchased as a file download or a print-on-demand book.

Video Collections
We looked at the way that the Z. Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University has created a “Toolkit” site where screencasts are collected. Each video offers an embed code, making it easy for instructors and librarians to deploy the videos on course websites, course blogs, etc. The embed codes are for the hosted webservice where the video file actually resides (YouTube, etc.). It doesn’t appear that the videos are locally hosted on the Toolkit site.

We also browsed the collection of screencasts that have been uploaded to our library’s YouTube account.