L&LR staff blog

I spotted this on Twitter and thought it was worth sharing.

Google were worried that 10% of people (using small browser windows) were missing content on the right-hand edge of one of their web pages, so they did some analysis of several weeks of visitors’ browser sizes, and created this:

• http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/

It’s a huge generalisation, but interesting to note that for (e.g.) L&LR’s public home page on the Lincoln corporate website…

• 99% of visitors can see our opening paragraph without scrolling
• 98% can search the catalogue and see links to opening hours & contact details without scrolling
• 90%-95% can watch our YouTube video and see our news-blog headlines without scrolling

Try it yourself on any web page.

Yesterday, I spotted (thanks @calire) that Google books have created a page that lets you browse their available magazine titles.

I can’t resist a free journal.

So I copied-&-pasted the entire page into MS Excel, used a handy function to extract the underlying URLs from the hyperlinked titles, did a bit of search-&-replace to make the list fit EBSCO’s data structure, and hey presto!

87 magazines from Google books on the E-journals A-to-Z

Image: a Google magazine, yesterday.

I also did a bit of bodging with EBSCO’s custom notes to pull in the journal cover images (c.f. what I did with ScienceDirect).

The whole thing will need re-creating every so often, but it’s only a 10-minute job.

Thank you, Google.

I’ve shown a couple of people this idea that Julie and I have been developing for Holbeach – that of using RefWorks to manage a new-books list for the relatively small number of new titles that we receive each year at the campus LRC – and that can be embedded into Blackboard or a subject web page.

The advantage of using RefWorks (apart from the fact that many L&LR staff are reasonably familiar with it) is that the RefWorks shared folders do most of the work for you.

If people like it, there’s no reason you can’t start using it straight away. I’ve already a trip planned to Hull next month to see if it’ll work for colleagues there.

First, here’s the end result: http://feeds.feedburner.com/HolbeachLRC

Now, here’s how it’s done:

• Every time Julie gets a PO slip back for an order she placed, she logs into her RefWorks account, searches our catalogue for the book, and imports it.
• Julie has created a RefWorks folder called ‘Holbeach new books‘, and shared it publicly. All newly-arrived titles are added to this folder on import.
• This is the clever bit – RefWorks allows you [PDF, p.4] to make the contents of a shared folder available as an RSS feed. Here’s the feed for the Holbeach new books folder. You can treat this like any other RSS feed – follow it in Google Reader / wherever, embed it into a web page using Feed2JS, etc.
• But… it’s not very pretty.
• So, in comes Yahoo! Pipes. I’ve created a pipe which takes any RefWorks shared-folder RSS feed with books in it (not designed to work with journal articles or other items – perhaps that’s phase II). This pipe, which you can find at – http://pipes.yahoo.com/lincoln/newbooks - does the following:
  1. Looks for, and extracts a valid(ish) ISBN from each RefWorks item;
  2. Creates a new link to our catalogue which looks up this ISBN for each item;
  3. Displays a book-cover image from Amazon.co.uk matching that ISBN (with a link back to Amazon through our affiliate scheme), next to a description of the book (manually added to RefWorks), and an extra link back to the original item record in RefWorks (marked by the RefWorks icon: ) – I’ve just added that last element, today, because I think it’ll be useful to give students & staff the option to take each item and export it to their own RefWorks account. Also to give credit where credit’s due, and recognise that RefWorks is the source of the information!
• The ‘prettified’ RSS feed from Yahoo! Pipes is then fed through Google Feedburner, in order to give it a stable, sensible URL, collect stats on subscriptions and hits, and to allow email subscriptions.

Couple of slight problems / areas for development: we’re finding it necessary sometimes to ‘tweak’ the ISBN before it can find an Amazon cover image. Maybe with a better use of regex in my pipe, that wouldn’t be necessary? Also, at the moment Julie is manually adding the paragraph description to each item after import. I’m sure that somewhere out there exists a source of book descriptions / reviews that I could pull in automatically (hello, library mashup fans?!) – that would streamline the process a bit.

Edit (8th July) – slideshare.net does not seem to like displaying these slides on-screen, so here they are to download in MS PowerPoint format.

Here are the slides (on slideshare.net) of the 5-minute lightning talk I just gave at Mashed Library 2009, on using ticTOCs data to display e-journal ToC feeds, and on creating a new-titles feed with Yahoo Pipes, etc.

I’ve just spent an extremely useful morning in the Friary Learning Centre at Lincoln College, talking to learning centre staff about “Practical Library 2.0“.

I was very pleased to have been invited to talk to colleagues there, and to give a demo (entitled “Library 2.0h no, not again…“) of how library workers can use [mostly] free tools and technologies to create useful, practical enhancements to their catalogues, web pages, and services.

As an aside, I gave a similar talk/demo last week as a guest at the meeting of LiSN (the Lincolnshire Information Services Network), a knowledge-sharing group of library workers representing most of the university, college, public, and specialist libraries in Lincolnshire.

Below is a list of some of the tools I used in my demo: this is my fundamental Library 2.0 toolkit as it stands… what else would you add?

1. RSS

Surely RSS is the one web standard / technology (and the one Web 2.0 acronym – whatever it’s been decided that ‘RSS’ actually stands for this week) that all library workers should be encouraged to get to grips with as early as possible? It underpins just about everything else in this list, and yet it still seems to be a tool that’s only partially appreciated at best.

Anyway, here’s a video introduction to RSS (from TeacherTube) which is as good as any other I’ve found…

2. Google Reader (reader.google.com)

What can I say? It’s the first thing I check when I log on: before my email, before MyFaceTwitSpaceBook / whatever, and it’s usually the last thing I look at before I go home. I was sceptical about it before I signed up (in my ignorance), but it’s fundamentally changed the way I use the Web, very much for the better.

I didn’t even have time this morning to talk about Google Alerts, or about using Google Reader as a feed ‘blender’. Or the fact that there are plenty of other feed readers out there, and – who knows? – there may be one even better than Google Reader.

3. WordPress (wordpress.org)

We use the WordPress  μ (mu = multi-user) free, open-source blogging and web publishing platform at the University of Lincoln (see: blogs.library.lincoln.ac.uk for a selection of our Library blogs).

4. Feed2JS (www.feed2js.org)

A great tool for turning any valid RSS feed into a bit of code that can be embedded in any web page (as long as you have the keys to edit the page!). You can use the centrally-hosted service at feed2js.org, or you can install it as a service on your own site (which can help to make it faster).

5. Delicious (delicious.com, although I prefer their ‘old’ URL of del.icio.us)

Social bookmarking plus tagging = exploiting the “wisdom of the crowd” to find the gems in an increasingly sprawling, confused World Wide Web. And a delicious list can be exported as an RSS feed and embedded into a page (using feed2js, above): I think it’s probably the easiest way of maintaining a list of useful web links for a subject, requiring close to zero web design expertise or effort.

6. CiteULike (www.citeulike.org)

This is a relatively new site to me; probably because I’ve been concentrating on developing and promoting RefWorks at the University I haven’t had a lot of time to explore free alternative reference managers. CiteULike doesn’t seem to be as fully-featured as RefWorks, but the interface is a lot cleaner, and it’s got RSS feeds in one click. Verdict: bears further investigation.

Bibliographic / reference management + RSS = the future of libraries, no?

7. LibraryThing (www.librarything.com)

I don’t know why all librarians aren’t on here. I like this and this and this and this and this and this and this.

And this (books from my personal wishlist):

8. University of Huddersfield Library Catalogue (webcat.hud.ac.uk)

The birth of the 2.0PAC, going on in the Wild West (Riding) as you sleep.

9. Mashed Library (mashedlibrary.ning.com)

I’m very much looking forward to next Tuesday…

You can now subscribe to my RSS feed of new e-journal titles via email, should you so wish.

• Here’s a link to the email sign-up form.

I prefer to keep up-to-date with RSS feeds using Google Reader (I don’t want or need anything more in my Outlook inbox!), but if email’s your bag and/or you prefer to have all your information in one place, then at least there’s now the option to add these to your inbox.

I have a feeling that there’s just too much in this feed (c.90 new titles added over the Bank Holiday weekend) to be useful as a public i.e. library-user-focused service. Too many titles, no subject filtering (yet…), too much (for want of a better word) noise in the form of low-academic-interest titles added to packages such as Factiva.

But I do think this could be a really useful current-awareness tool for Academic Subject Librarians.

In February, I wrote about  how I’d added more than 5,000 ticTOCs RSS feeds to the A-to-Z, so that researchers can easily find and subscribe to Table-of-Contents (ToC) updates from journals in their field. I think this is an indispensable current awareness service, and I’m pleased it’s being promoted at the ‘Working Smarter With the Web‘ workshops.

(An aside: that ticTOCs data is overdue to be re-generated and reloaded onto the A-to-Z. This is next on the long list of e-journal packages for the “e team” to review.)

That’s all well and good, but there’s a clear need for a current awareness service ‘one level above’ the individual ToCs. That is, we could (and should) be providing an RSS feed of new e-journal titles.

At the moment, the EBSCO A-to-Z platform doesn’t provide this feature (I really do hope it’s something that EBSCO are considering developing themselves), and so in the past we’ve had to resort to emails, spreadsheets, etc.—all with varying degrees of success—just to keep people up to date with what new e-journals have become available.

~~~

So, I’ve created a rough-and-ready working demo of a ‘New e-journals at Lincoln‘ RSS feed for the A-to-Z. It’s not supported by EBSCO, so it’ll require a bit of manual intervention to keep it running (it’ll be a nice five-minute daily task for the “e team” to take on!), but has the potential to be a really important enhancement to the e-journals service.

Next time you go to the A-to-Z site, you’ll see a new tab – next to the existing ‘Titles’ tab – which I’ve labelled ‘New Titles (RSS)‘. This new tab links to a page containing information about the RSS feed, with a prominent link to the feed itself, plus a display of the 10 most-recently-added titles in the feed.

The links in the ‘ten most recent…’ list should go directly to the A-to-Z record for that title. The feed link itself you can paste into your favourite feed reader (I use Google Reader). I’m working on enabling email subscription to the feed. We should also be able to take this feed and filter/manipulate it to create (for example) subject-specific lists in Blackboard.

I’ve also made the feed autodiscoverable (c.f. my earlier post), so it should display in the browser toolbar (this will vary between browsers).

This is how the feed is auto-discovered by Firefox browser.

I still need to do some work on creating better documentation for users of the feed, and for the process of adding new titles within L&LR.

I’ll also need to do a bit of testing to make sure everything’s working as it should be, and iron out my feed-validation bugs.

When the time is right, I’ll launch the service more publicly.

Paul

~~~

P.S. Here’s how I did it:

1. The first stage is the most clunky – it involves getting information about the newly-added titles out of the closed box that is the Electronic Journals A-to-Z. EBSCO provide a daily report (available only to administrators) of “Titles added to Packages in my Collection“. This data can be exported on a daily basis in tab-delimited format.
   
2. Next, I created a spreadsheet using Google Docs and published it to the Web. The tabbed data from the A-to-Z admin report is pasted in to the spreadsheet, so it becomes openly accessible. Using Google Docs also means that I can invite other people to act as editors of the spreadsheet, and create public web forms to add titles that don’t appear in EBSCO’s daily report (not all of our e-journal packages are managed by EBSCO, so the data will need supplementing when we add custom titles).
3. The data output of the Google spreadsheet is then fed into Yahoo! Pipes, an excellent application for ‘mashing up’ and processing data. You can inspect the Yahoo! pipe for yourself, at: http://pipes.yahoo.com/lincoln/newejournals. If you create an account on Yahoo!, you can clone this (or any) pipe and modify it to create your own data mashup.
   
4. The Yahoo! pipe takes the raw Google spreadsheet data, filters it according to various rules, and exports a valid * RSS feed of new items, in reverse order by date.
5. * Well, it’s nearly valid. I need to do a bit of cleaning up of the pipe (I did say this was a working demo), mainly so I can pass the feed through Feedburner, which will allow email subscriptions. But it works well enough!
6. Finally, I created the new tab on the A-to-Z public site, and added the details to the page (the ‘ten most recent’ list was created using feed2js). The code for the autodiscoverable feed was pasted into the top of our customised A-to-Z template.

~~~

Organised by the East Midlands Section of University College and Research Group on the 28^th April and held at the Kimberlin Library, De Montfort University, Leicester, Focus on your teaching was primarily an event for librarians teaching in HE institutions but held relevance for many other staff.

It struck me that many of the things that were presented and discussed at the event, Lincoln already carried out. Lincoln could present a similar event, perhaps based around the mid-point strategy review action plan, along with contributions from library staff from other HEIs.

For me, the main theme of the event was about teaching information skills to students without the traditional ‘talk-demo-do’ method of introducing a database then demonstrating its various search functions, before letting students perform keyword searches themselves.  Although technology probably holds the answer, I felt that  no single answer existed. Students often find databases themselves are the problem because they are so hard to find, hence the reliance on Google.  Derby University’s Emma Butler and Catherine Varney demonstrated how the software Captivate offered a possible alternative; recording what the demonstrator performed on screen (i.e. a demonstration on how to retrieve articles from a database) and the ability to record a voiceover. Allegedly it’s as easy to use as PowerPoint. The presenters recognised that the software is a supplement to inductions and workshops but could not become a replacement. Emma and Catherine suggested that the short online tutorials work fine as a refresher and could be placed in an area on a VLE, like Blackboard.

Chris Powis from Northampton University discussed the dilemma of the strategic learner within HEIs who only want information they need to complete an assignment or course of study.  Librarians, he said, were ‘tool/search focused’ and students are ‘result/content focused’. Bridging the gap was key to maintaining relevance of the profession, otherwise there’s a risk of disengagement.

Richard Hall from De Montfort University also spoke about technology responding to the transitional phase of universities moving away from the traditional method of teaching students information skills.  Richard said that Blackboard is used as a safe environment and more challenging methods of reaching students needed to be deployed to enhance student progression, improve retention and the learner experience, like utilising Facebook or other Web 2.0. The audience discussed afterwards that they needed to achieve relevance not try to be perceived as trendy.

I have some handouts from the event if you would like copies.

Daren Mansfield (Academic Subject Librarian)

I’m pleased to be able to announce the existence of a new, temporary virtual team within L&LR, made up of people lucky enough to be working with me on various e-resource-related projects over the coming months.

First, Jayne, whom many of you will already know from her work in reader services, is back to support digitisation work, for c.15 hours a week.

Elif and Phil from the Brayford reader services team will be dedicating several hours a week each to “e” projects including the constant battle to improve the quality of data on the Electronic Journals A-to-Z, the drive toward online reading lists, and work addressing the changing role of the Core Collection.

And finally, cataloguers Bev and Jill are working with me, one day a week apiece, as ‘Cataloguer – Institutional Repository‘. As the job title suggests, they will be working to improve item records on the University’s Institutional Repository, checking publishers’ licence terms, and generally optimising the University’s intellectual outputs for discovery by Google, etc.

I ♥ Google Analytics.

(Word cloud created using www.wordle.net)