Edtechkat

Zotero is a Plug-In for Firefox that harvests and stores bibliographic data from many formats of web objects, including online journal articles, web pages, pdfs, images and video clips. It interfaces with a number of other programs including Wordpress and Endnote. It also helps you organize and store electronic documents.

I’ve used it a tiny bit for preparing conference papers, with my Zotero library saved on a thumb drive along with portable FF where I have installed the Zotero plug-in.

The web based collaborative version (Zotero Commons) - which would make it an absolutely killer ap - has been rumoured to go live in June, but it has been a long time coming. It is being developed in collaboration with the Internet Archive using a Andrew W Mellon Foundation grant.

This White Paper from the (rather better funded) equivalent of LTSG at Penn State University is excellent. 7 Things You Need to Know About Zotero: a white paper from Teaching and Learning with Technology at Penn State. http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/wp-content/uploads/zotero_hot_team.pdf

1. What is it?
2. Who’s doing it?<
3. How does it work?
4. Why is it significant ?
5. What are the downsides?
6. Where is it going?
7. What are the implications for Teaching and Learning?

I *love* the iResearch interactive materials produced by the librarians at Uni of Sydney. http://elearning.library.usyd.edu.au/index.php

• See the dinosaurs show you how to “Search Smarter, Search Faster” http://elearning.library.usyd.edu.au/learn/topic/index.php

• Ask the mice for help with citations as you play Find the Cheese! http://elearning.library.usyd.edu.au/learn/readinglist/gamefindthatcheese/index.php

• Win a $60 Campus Coop book voucher for rearranging the books and getting the highest monthly score in the Bookshoot game. http://elearning.library.usyd.edu.au/learn/readinglist/gamefindthatcheese/index.php

What I like about these is that it looks like the content and concepts were designed by their regular liaison librarians, not super-duper wonder-people. I think they work because the librarians have pared down the absolute core concept that the user needs to learn and then built on that, rather than starting with “hey, lets see what we can do with a cool flash interface”. There has obviously been some serious $$ thrown at the project as well.

Here’s how. How to make a Google Gadget in 15 minutes or less

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Here’s google’s hand-holding page:

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Here are the elements we need before publication:

Step 1: Set your gadget preferences.

The Reference lists all of the <ModulePrefs> attributes that you can use to provide “meta” information about your gadget. Here is the information you should include in your gadget spec:

• title
• description. This attribute is important to let people know what your gadget does, particularly if it is not obvious.
• author
• author_email. This is so that Google and users of your gadget can contact you. You can use any email system, but you should not use a personal email address because of spam. One approach is to use an email address of the form helensmith.feedback+coolgadget@gmail.com in your gadget spec. Gmail drops everything after the plus sign (+), so this email address maps to helensmith.feedback@gmail.com. You can create a Gmail account here.
• screenshot. This is a string that gives the URL for a gadget screenshot. This must be a well-formed URL, not a relative URL. This image must be on a public web site that is not blocked by robots.txt. PNG is the preferred format, though GIF and JPG are also acceptable. Gadget screenshots should be 280 pixels wide. The height of the screenshot should be the “natural” height of the gadget when it’s in use. This helps users understand how much space a gadget will consume on their screen before they add it to their page. The screenshot should not have any whitespace above the gadget’s blue header bar. Screenshots should show your full gadget, including its title bar, but nothing else. Alternatively, you can screenshot the gadget with the edit window open. Screenshots should not be resized or cropped. For quality and consistency, Google may take its own screenshots of a given gadget.
• thumbnail. Thumbnails are used in the content directory to give users a preview of a gadget. They should capture the main functionality of your gadget without showing it in its entirety. The value for this attribute is a string that gives the URL for a gadget thumbnail. This must be a well-formed URL, not a relative URL. This image must be on a public web site that is not blocked by robots.txt. PNG is the preferred format, though GIF and JPG are also acceptable. Thumbnails should be 120×60 pixels. They should not include title bars.
• author_location
• author_affiliation
• title_url. You use this attribute to link your gadget title to an external HTML page. For example, if your gadget is a front end for a service, you can link the gadget title to that service’s website.
• directory_title (required if title contains user preference substitution variables).

(from: Publishing to the Content Directory on the Publishing Your Gadget page of the developer’s guide. )

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Polly’s comment on my Flickr image of a google gadget leads to some very useful code:

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Here’s the code for one I made for my blogs by amending someone’s code:

Which is visible under the “work” tab of my igoogle page.

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We will probably want to use an “add to google” button, as seen on this link: How to turn your feed into a google gadget .

• LET Wiki

Timetable for LET 2008

Suggest a topic or reading for a LET session

How do libraries use their websites tell their communities about their online presence outside the library website?

In more conservative institutions, where external online presence is not really seen as part of the library service, often the pages are buried very deep and tagged “experimental”.

I think a better approach is to look at the tool and where it fits with the subject matter of the website, rather than lump them all together. If it is in beta, just mark it as such. BUT can also see that it would be really cool to have a Library Hacks page and lump all the exciting new tools together.

Here’s some approaches:

BETA

MIT Libraries Betas

• Listen to podcasts on scholarly communication
• Search plugin
• Browser bookmarklet
• Federated search (!)
• YouTube clip of how to use the libraries
• Google gadget
• Facebook ap
• MIT Course Catalogue Pickr
• del.icio.us page of “virtual reference” links
• RSS feeds of new books
• Humanities virtual browsery (looks like a blog with short reviews for new books)
• LibX

They have tried to use user friendly language to describe these tools

Johns Hopkins University Library Betas

• LibX
• Search plugin
• Ref GrabIT, Write-N-Cite, Zotero
• FullText Referrer (looks like it uses COins to display FindIt, just like LibX)
• Google Gadget

TOOLS

Bond University - Tools Download

• Google gadget
• Catalogue search plugin
• Library toolbar
• Library lookup

UWA - Library catalogue tools

• Google gadget
• Open search plugin

EXPERIMENTAL

Deakin University Experimental options

• Library RSS news feed
• Facebook ap
• Facebook Page
• Google gadget

(Plus lists JSTOR Facebook ap, PubMed Facebook ap and Worldcat )

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Longwood University has a very nice How to Use LibX page.

University of Michigan has a very detailed page about how to use LibX, but it has a great section on using LibX and Zotero together.

Duke University has a blog called Library Hacks where they give tips on how to use the library and where they announced the LibX toolbar with some nice comments.

1. WHAT IS GARTNER?

Research, consultancy and event in IT products and management, with a focus on strategic impacts. World leader.

2. HOW DO I GET TO RESOURCES ?

1. Without using our subscription: Gartner.com
2. Most direct route to our subscription: https://www.murdoch.edu.au/apps/gartner and enter your Murdoch login and password
3. Through our catalogue: Search for “Gartner” and click through to “Access via publishers site” .

3. THREE USEFUL FEATURES

3.1 HYPE CYCLES

Shows how technologies are moving into acceptance and use in different sectors.

Shows progress through Technology trigger > Peak of Inflated Expectations > Trough of disillusionment > Slope of enlightenment > Plateau of Productivity

Eg. Search for “Hype Cycle for Higher Education 2007″

3.2 MAGIC QUADRANTS

Divides major players in a product area into four quadrants:

Challengers, Leaders, Nicehplayers, Visionaries

Eg. Magic Quadrant for IT Portfolio and Project Management

3.3 MARKETSCOPE

For more mature mrkets. Evaluates and suggest criteria for more mature products

Eg. Marketscope for Instant Messaging 2007

4. OTHER

4.1 Topics

eg: Emerging trends and technologies

5. ACCESS

5.1 Can set up alerts to be emailed to you. Click on “Create alerts” in top right hand corner. Need to double check whether creates an alert for the single profile

5.2 RSS feeds on updates to each topic

Here’s some stats from the web4lib listserv about the success and cost of a FB add campaign:

Message: 1
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2008 11:48:08 -0600
From: “Peter Schoenberg” <PSchoenberg@EPL.CA>
Subject: [Web4lib] Update - Highly targeted Facebook Ad
To: <web4lib@webjunction.org>
Message-ID: <497AD7CB28DA1245BD7D44D5F1ECB5D7055D7132@TRINITY.epl.ca>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=”US-ASCII”

The results of several Facebook ads are now in.

There were two ads, did two versions of the first ad. Ads ran for 7 -
10 days each.

Ad One
The first ad looked for Beyond Blood in the music interests of
Edmontonians. That was about140 people.

The first version of the ad had a headline of Trustkill Streamed (Trustkill being the record label of the thrash/heavy metal bands we had streaming content for via Naxos).

The second version had Beyond Blood Streamed as the headline of the ad.
We wondered how many people actually knew the record label.

Version One - Trustkill
2,285 impressions, 1 click, cost 56 cents Click-through rate of 0.04%

Version Two - Bleeding Through
983 impressions, 1 click, cost 32 cents
Click-through rate of 0.10%

Comment: In both cases the clicks came relatively early in the
“campaign”. In either case having 1 or 2 people out of 140 click is
actually not bad. Relative value is hard to determine, but for a total
cost of 88 cents we got 2 clicks and more than 3,000 impressions.

Ad Two
Promoted our Personalized Book List service. Targeted Edmontonians
who had the words reading, fiction, novels or books in their interests.
This was a target of 23,000.

20,855 impressions, 2 clicks, cost 66 cents
Click through rate of 0.01%

Comment: A much larger audience, the click came relatively early in the
campaign.

Overall comments:

The cost per impression is extremely low. 24,000 impressions for $1.54

How many of those impressions resulted in the ad being read and perhaps Edmonton Public Library being noticed in a tiny way is unknown. There was no noticeable increase in requests for personalized book lists.

The impressions seem to spike after a click and then gradually taper
off. Guessing Facebook is doing some weighting of ads that get clicks
versus ads that don’t.

We did not use an image for any of our ads. That would be something
I would like to try next time.

There is some thought that Facebook is notable for its extremely low
click-through rates. We saw a range of rates in this tiny experiment.

If you want any details, contact me this week.

Peter
__________________________________________________
Peter Schoenberg (780) 496 1855
Director - eServices - Edmonton Public Library
www.epl.ca