Hi Everyone,
We now have a blog for Scholarly Communications issues. I have added several items that may be of interest. I will be populating it with more items in the weeks ahead.
Please feel free to send me items that you think would fall in this category and I'll add them.
A website for Scholarly Communications will be coming in the near future.
BLOG URL: http://blogs.library.uvic.ca/index.php/sc/
Hi Everyone,
I've updated the Book Review guide and added a few more;
Multidisciplinary - the original one
Social Sciences
Sciences
Humanities
As you will notice I've collapsed some of the other faculties in the latter 3 headings.
Let me know if you have any other resources to add to these categories.
Andrew Clark in New York
Wednesday September 19, 2007
The Guardian
Rupert Murdoch again raised the prospect of ditching subscriptions for the Wall Street Journal online yesterday, hours after the New York Times dropped charges for premium sections of its website.
For full article see: http://media.guardian.co.uk/presspublishing/story/0,,2172288,00.html
http://gateway.uvic.ca/blogs/history/index.html
I've just updated the History Librarian's blog with lots of new resources and cool stuff - including the handouts I created for the faculty instruction session: New Historical Abstracts features, Royal Historical Society bibliography, and Google Scholar for Historians.. check it out!
Tina
From the Librarian in Black blog: http://librarianinblack.typepad.com/librarianinblack
The QuestionPoint Blog, the place all participating librarians are supposed to look for information, but didn't because the darn thing was password-protected and couldn't be fed into an RSS reader, is now finally open for all to read and password-free. Here's the blog and here's the feed. If your library uses QuestionPoint, especially if you're monitoring the service, it's a good idea to subscribe.
found via Stephen Francoeur at Digital Reference
Tim Bray, an employee at Sun, wrote this about why blogs are good for your career, and why Sun has instituted a blogging policy for its employees - one of the first, I understand - and actively encourages and supports blogging activities as well.
10 reasons why Blogging is good for your career:
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/03/08/BloggingIsGood
1. Just found out that we now have a filter for the Voyager catalogue in RefWorks.
So try it out and let me know if it doesn't work properly.
2. Also found out that in most cases it is better to use the IE browser when working with RefWorks. Ophelia and I found out that the RLG - Eureka database filter doesn't work with Firefox, Netscape or Mozilla browsers.
3. For those of you who have faculty that use the AGRICOLA database. There are 2 parts to this interface: one to the catalogue and another to the citation database. The filter in RefWorks ONLY works for the catalogue at the moment. RefWorks had no idea that a citation database had been included at the website.
Cheers
Inba
Entlich, Richard. "[15]Blog Today, Gone Tomorrow? Preservation of
Weblogs" [16]RLG DigiNews 8(4) (15 August 2004)
(http://www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=19481#article3). - Should
blogs be archived? If so, how can this best be accomplished? First,
we need to know what constitutes a blog. The writer provides a
working definition: "(P)ostings (at varying intervals), usually by
a single individual, in the form of text, images, and other data
forms, arranged in reverse chronological order and accessible with
a Web browser." Most sources estimate the number of active blogs at
somewhere around two million. The number of blogs created, of
course, is much higher, but so many are abandoned, often almost
immediately. The author refers to last October's [17]Perseus Blog
Survey, which reported that "about 2/3 of over 4 million blogs
found on eight popular blog hosting services may have been
abandoned, i.e., not updated within the past two months. Over a
million consisted of just an initial post. The average active blog
was updated about every two weeks." The simple fact is that most
bloggers have a day job and/or other responsibilities, and keeping
up a weblog is akin to feeding an always-hungry beast. It's not
uncommon for a blog to develop a following and foster a sense of
community. When the blogger decides, for whatever reason, to shut
the blog down, its readers are often quite distressed. And then
there's the question of what should happen to the content? Consider
that there's always a possibility that a free blog hosting service
may shut down suddenly, rendering all the users' content
inaccessible. As blogging has gotten more sophisticated and been
adopted by mainstream media and other entities, the blogosphere has
become an increasingly important part of the web, and shares the
same general archiving issues, identified by the author as
"copyright, robot exclusion, dynamic content, password protection,
exotic file formats, and miscoded material." But weblogs present
some unique archving challenges as well, because of features like
reader commentary, extensive linking to other sources, and
different/non-compatible technologies underlying various blogging
tools. Also, notes the writer, "Most librarians and archivists have
not yet identified blogs as online resources particularly meriting
collection and preservation." At this stage, it seems, the onus
falls mostly on individual bloggers to maintain copies of their own
content. - [18]SK
Staff on the Reference Desk should direct potential donors to the Loan Desk. Access Services has procedures for referring donors and donations from the Main Loan Desk to the Collections office. As well, they have designated storage space and donation and policy forms.
Access Services donation procedures are posted at:
Go to "Tell me more about Blogs" on left to find out about:
4. How do I make a live link in my posting?
5. Can I send a notification email to netref-l when I post to the blog?
Have a look at the Reference Desk Blog at University of Winnipeg called UWinnipeg Infoshare. Posted by Karen Hunt on the COPPUL Public Services Blog.
1. Type the URL enclosed with double quotes ("http://gateway.uvic.ca">
2. Before the http type the "less than sign", < , and then type a href=
3. After the url type the "greater than sign", >, followed by the name of the link (ie UVic Libraries Gateway)
4. Finish up with an a enclosed with <> preceded by a / within the brackets
Example : UVic Libraries Gateway
Lyceum: A Blogsphere for Library Reference" by Jeffrey Pomerantz & Frederic Stutzman online at: http://www.ils.unc.edu/~jpom/conf/JCDL2004.pdf
“A blog is, by definition, a community exercise, encompassing a community of readers and posters. If one individual posts a question, a community of librarians and other patrons may read that post and respond to it. In this way, the blogsphere may be utilized to create a "reference sphere," in which an information-seeking transaction may be conducted as community exercise”.
Pomerantz and Stutzman suggest using blogs to provide another virtual reference service point. I am intrigued by the potential for collaborative work by librarians as “more and more individuals make contributions to the conversation initiated by the [patron's] original question, a thread grows”.
Have a look at Ohio University Libraries News Blog.
Good explanation about Why
"Why the new look and design? There are quite a few reasons.
1.The software and the web interface will allow more library staff to add content to the news page. Currently, all news updates are passed on to the library webmasters, so there is often a time lag. With this interface, library staff (with the appropriate login account) will be able to post library news and have it appear on the page immediately. In this way, library users will have immediate access to necessary information.
2. The news will be organized automatically by date and category, making it easier to find information.
3. Many blogs allow readers to comment on stories, thereby creating a type of online community. The library news blog also has this feature, so feel free to leave an appropriate comment. Comments are moderated, so it may take a little time for a comment to appear on the page. Because this is a public site, the library reserves the right to edit comments for public consumption.
4. Blog is that users can subscribe to information as it is posted. This is done through a format called RSS, or Rich Site Syndication, which allows users to subscribe to news feeds using an RSS aggregator. This is explained in detail here.
Weblogs are only a part of the story. There is another "tool" that is built in to most blogging software that many think will change the way we receive and process all of the information we get from the Internet. This is what's known as RSS.
"RSS stands for Rich Site Summary or Real Simple Syndication. RSS is a real important technology that information specialists and educators would be well advised to harness sooner rather than later. In simple terms, Weblogs (and an ever-growing number of other sites) generate a behind-the-scenes code in a language similar to HTML called XML. This code, usually referred to as a "feed" (as in "news feed"), makes it possible for readers to "subscribe" to the content that is created on a particular Weblog so they no longer have to visit the blog itself to get it. As is true with traditional syndication, the content comes to you instead of you going to it. "
How do I "subscribe" to a weblog?
RSS allows you to subscribe by using what's called an "aggregator" or news-feed collector. The aggregator checks the sites you subscribe to, usually every hour, and it collects all the new content into a folder that is just waiting for you to come and read it.
There are many aggregators but the one that I use for now is Bloglines which is a free Web-based aggregator that you can access from any Internet connection.
To sum up:
1. Read a blog ie Loomware - Crafting New Libraries
2. Look for an orange XML button or something that says "syndicate this site"
3. Copy the url that is generated.
4. Paste into Bloglines.
5. Next time your go to Bloglines, you will see if there have been any changes to Loomware.
Finding RSS feeds for Newspapers/Journals
1. Complete RSS Here you will find feeds from such major newspapers as Christian Science Monitor, New York Times Homepage. New York Times Book Reviews etc. Click on the orange XML button and paste the url generated into Bloglines.
2. NewsisFree by Category offers popular sources under each category. There I was able to find newsfeeds from such journals as New Scientist and Scientific American.
This looks good. Check it out.
University of Alberta Library News Blog
Scholars Who Blog
Called the "The soapbox of the digital age draws a crowd of academics." An interesting read in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Build an Amazon RSS feed Find out the latest books at Amazon by category, author, keyword etc. and put it into your newsaggregator such as Bloglines. Be alerted only when new items are added.
From Tina
Amazon.com now has RSS feeds for many categories of new books - I'm
told there's even customization available (to only get academic books?)
but I haven't played with it yet.
(It's a blog thing. You can now get new book notices from Amazon sent
to your blog, on categories that you select.)
I have added this blog to my personal Bloglines Bloglines