Interested in a one-hour Princeton lecture by Steven Levitt, author of Freakonomics? Here you go! (you may want to save the .asx file to your desktop, then play it from there).
from ResourceShelf
Google has opened up their gadget library of over 1200 gadgets to the general web. Gadgets are user made code that were originally designed to customize people’s Google Personalized Homepages, but they are now available for anyone who wants to add the functionality to their own websites.
from Monkey Bites
WorldCat.org has added an Advanced Search page, allowing the user to search by Title, Author, ISBN, OCLC, Language, Format or Publication Date. This ought to be helpful when searching for items with commonly used words.
… but it most certainly is! SearchMash.com is a new search engine that looks only a little like Google, but don’t let that fool you. It is a testbed for new innovations from the popular search engine company.
Try it out… play with the features, such as re-arranging the results list (doesn’t really do anything but re-arrange them, but can’t you see possiblities for user’s validating results placement?), having more options for the url links, and try out the “more results” bar to see the page act in an interesting manner.
This seems to be a place where Google can test out new interface innovations without changing the user experience on their flagship site. Neat idea… we can play with the Google of tomorrow, or just the Google idea of today.
from ResourceShelf
Zotero, the software project I am waiting for, won’t keep us waiting much longer: the Public Release Date has been set for Thursday, October 5th.
One slight hitch: it requires Firefox 2.0 (I have been staying on 1.5.0.7 for the extension functionality). No problem… I will test it on Firefox Portable 2.0
from One Big Library
The Songbird project has gone to version 0.2! This means that many, many features still do not work, but many, many features do work, and they work great!
This is to be a full-fledged media player built on the same platform as the Mozilla projects, meaning that it will be cross-platform and stable in ways that other built-from-scratch software cannot match.
Give it a try, noting that the only problems you are likely to encounter are features that aren’t turned on yet.
from Monkey Bites
Cornell’s Macaulay Library has put together a fantastic search tool for locating audio and video of animals. Kids will find this especially neat, and the Advanced Search Page is a great learning tool for naming and locating animals througout the world.
from ResourceShelf
While at Reaching Forward South last week, I met someone from the Lincoln Trail Library System who is involved in a project called PolyTalk.
PolyTalk is a volunteer group from Illinois libraries that provide translation services between patrons and library staff. They set up schedules so that when you have someone in your library who doesn’t speak English, and you don’t have someone who speaks their language, you can call them and have your conversation translated.
Also, their list of vendors that specialize in foreign-language materials is worth a look (scroll down the page).
When I listen to the audio of Neil Armstrong’s words during the first moon landing, I have heard the “a” ever since I found out that it was what he meant to say. Whether that was wishful thinking, or if I was hearing what the software detected recently (follow the links if you don’t know what I am referring to).
Print version of the news story
NPR’s All Things Considered audio version (includes several playings of the recording).
One additional note: I think that every newspaper that ran the original quote back in 1969 ought to run a correction tomorrow, just for kicks. 🙂
NASA recently made 1100 Apollo-era documents, including Mission Reports (I have read several, and they are truly fascinating to those interested in manned spaceflight), Evaluation Reports, Scientific Studies, and Interviews, available on a DVD-ROM, calling it the Lunar e-Library. Fantastic! All are government documents, and putting them all together like this is a boon for researchers, enthusiasts, historians, librarians, and such.
However, they contracted for software that limits distribution of the software itself to employees of NASA. That’s it. Game over. Nobody else can use this wonderful DVD. There are several good options in the open source software world for this project, and the only restriction would be that the software license would need to remain open. No big deal.
Why keep all this wonderful information closed off? This would have been one of the great DVD-ROM offerings, except it cannot be offered to the public because of a restrictive software license, and for no good reason. Arrrghh!
from Catalogablog
The current issue (November/December 2006) of Innovate – Journal of Online Education is focused on Open Source and Open Access in higher education. There are several articles of interest in to those looking to add or expand offerings in online education.
from Open Access News
There is a relatively new site for online learning called Open Of Course, which offers a variety of tutorials and such for no cost (except your time and effort). Included among their offerings are tutorials on administering and using Linux (including Ubuntu), OpenOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird.
Additionally, they have offerings on Web Design from Scratch and PHP, both of which could be beneficial for those tasked with designing websites.
from Open Access News
A group at Middlebury College is working on open-source search tools that, rather than rely on keywords, attempt to deal with the query semantically. The Semantic Indexing Project goes beyond the “Ask Jeeves” (don’t you kind of miss him?) experience, attempting to automatically recognize synonyms and groupings related to the words in the query.
They are releasing a desktop search appliance in the near future, which may shed light on how far they have been able to progress. Combine this with good speech recognition, and we may see the Enterprise’s computer (the Next Generation version) not to far down the road.
from NewsForge
Librarians’ Internet Index has installed the Siderian faceted search appliance, and it is a fantastic experience. Think “results clustering”, but more librarian-friendly. Don’t take my word for it, go there and try out a search or two.
An excellent way to narrow your search, as well as understand what other avenues are available.
from ResourceShelf
Daniel Chudnov, aka One Big Library has a review of the private beta version of Zotero, and man, does he like it!
I am very eager to see what this piece of software can do! Watch for the public beta of Zotero, it may change the way you do research!
The next generation Firefox browser is one step closer to general release. Release candidates mean that they still expect to find a few bugs, but that they will be fewer and less obtrusive. In other words, if you want to see what the future of Firefox is going to be, now is the time to try it out!
from Mozilla Dot Org
The Free Dictionary is much, much more than just a word lookup. Do you know how a word ends, but not the beginning? Look it up here! Computer terms? Medicine? Acronyms? All in one place! Need to cite your results for a paper? The Free Dictionary will do that as well.
from BiblioTech Web
p.s. this is my 100th post! Not too shabby for a start!
OpenOffice.org, the open source office suite that gives Microsoft Office a run for it’s money (no pun intended), will soon be able to have its features expanded by the use of Extensions.
Extensions are small, add-on programs created by developers to add functionality to a particular program. The best known use of this is in the Firefox browser, of which I am a regular user.
The extensions I use with that program are the Groowe toolbar (think Google toolbar, then add a dozen or more additional sites to search) and the HTML Validator toolbar, which has been extremely valuable in my web design projects. There are hundreds more.
No word as to what types of extensions might become available, but I am sure that it will change the way people approach the program.
from OSDir
From the Pew Internet & American Life Project comes a report titled The Future of the Internet II, a look at what people think might happen between now and 2020 (a little over 13 years — think about trying to predict today’s technology and communications from the vantage point of 1993).
Look through the report, note how it reflects a lot of the hopes and fears of today. There are sections on terrorism (by Luddites), debates over privacy issues, and the issue of language dominance. Think also between the lines… what big things are we likely to not predict easily. What trends might exist that we as a society don’t see clearly? Here lies the next generation of successful tech startups.
After that, check out Imagining the Internet, an interactive site that contains the database of responses that form the report, as well as areas to add your own predictions and comments.
from ResourceShelf
The Encyclopedia of Earth is a web-based, well there you went and guessed it, encyclopedia of articles relating to Earth science.
Their primary purpose is to have a collaborative resource (think Wikipedia) that is also authoritative. To ensure the latter, they screen their contributors, allowing only those judged qualified by their panel.
For additional information on the same range of topics, check out another project by the same group: Earth Portal.
from Open Access News
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Libology Blog
Established July 2006
ISSN: 1946-1852
by Rick Mason
