L&LR staff blog

I’m pleased to announce that we have appointed John Chen as the new Library Assistant (Holbeach Campus). We will welcome John to the Holbeach LRC on the 7th of September.

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.

Documentary evidence that L&LR staff really did attend the official opening of the National Centre for Food Manufacturing (the “Phase II” building) at Holbeach Campus, on Friday 27th March 2009…

L-R: Julie Smith, Paul Stainthorp, Daniella Nundy. Background: Ishida processing/packaging line

The building was opened by Sir Stuart Rose, chairman-executive of Marks & Spencer, and the event was attended by the Vice-Chancellor, the Dean of Riseholme College, staff, students and graduates of the University, representatives of local food companies and organisations, and the County & District councils.

“The second phase of Holbeach’s development is a £3.5m specialist education, training and research facility build to food factory specification. The building is backed by the employers’ organisation the Process and Packaging Machinery Association (PPMA). The facility is fitted with state-of-the-art food manufacturing equipment, much of it sponsored by PPMA member Ishida Europe and includes automated fresh food weighing and packaging lines with robotic case packing.”

No jokes about the campus facilities, please...

Julie S. and I have also been working to get the level one module reading lists for all the HE Food & Agriculture awards (FdSc/BSc Food Manufacture, FdSc/BSc Agriculture & Environment, FdSc Commercial Horticulture) on to LibraryLink.

Here they are:

1. Communication And Numeracy For Working Learners
2. Environmental Science
3. Food Quality Assurance And Food Safety
4. Food Supply Chain Systems
5. Forecasting And Planning For Businesses
6. Growing Systems
7. Logistics And Environmental Awareness
8. Managing People
9. Plant Science
10. Policies And Markets
11. Principles Of Animal Science
12. Principles Of Crop Science
13. Principles Of Food Factory Design
14. Principles Of Food Science and Microbiology
15. Principles Of Food Technology
16. Quality, Hygiene And Environmental Systems
17. Raw Materials Control And Supplier Management
18. Project Management

This is more of a departmental guideline than a tip… and it applies when writing for the Portal, Blackboard, etc., as well as for the blogs.

Try and remember the other 3 campuses! If you’re writing for a Brayford audience about something which only applies to Lincoln, then make it clear in the story (and by using tags) that it’s a GCW-specific story.

It’s equally a good idea to clearly signpost when it’s a Hull-, Riseholme- or Holbeach-specific blog posting – and, conversely, to explicitly say when a story applies across all campuses and L&LR centres.

This allows users to filter our blogs’ RSS feeds, if they want, so that they’re not getting stories which only relate to centres they don’t use. And it helps avoid any “misunderstandings”!

There’s more on this in the [still draft!] bloggers’ guidelines.

Paul

This is the induction presentation I’m using with my technology students (Computing, Games Computing, Audio/Media Technology etc.) this year. Feel free to copy/re-use any bits of it.

And here’s Julie’s and my one that we use with new groups of Holbeach students:

I embedded these presentations using slideshare.net

Paul

Welcome to issue eleven of the Library and Learning Resources newsletter “The Buzz”. Many thanks to all the
contributors and keep your ideas rolling in!

• Read on…