L&LR staff blog

I’m about to launch (along with Joss Winn and David Young) into a series of training sessions for University of Lincoln staff, entitled: Understanding Google Apps Straightforward online collaborative tools for researchers 90 mins (+ optional 30 min ‘surgery’) This training workshop will introduce you to some of Google’s collaborative applications that may be useful [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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] [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Organised by the East Midlands Section of University College and Research Group on the 28th 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 [...]

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 [...]