Beautiful interface for this new search engine--an photo image takes up most of the screen, with little fact mouse-overs and links related to the image. The exploring metaphor has been taken many ways.
It can be added to your search bar in Firefox--very happy about that. I will have to play with it some more.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Wolfram Alpha
I briefly looked at Wolfram Alpha. It is a search engine which focuses on computing and what is computable--even decifering family relationships (look under the Genealogy section for examples).
Elegant to look at, and with my search of San Francisco, I have a very nice page of results. I will have to look at it some more.
Has anyone tried it in depth?
Elegant to look at, and with my search of San Francisco, I have a very nice page of results. I will have to look at it some more.
Has anyone tried it in depth?
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Top Tech Trends at ALA 2009
So I went to ALA this year in Chicago--great town, great conference. I went to the Top Tech Trends Panel. It is by far easier to read the sum up from Library Journal. Nothing that surprising but I imagine it is hard to be up there and make predictions. A bit of talk about trending toward mobile devices and to open source/access. It is clear that the debate about the economics of information won't end here however.
Friday, July 10, 2009
Mobile Fever
Two folks at Pacifica (including yours truly) are concocting a hair-brained scheme to create mobile campus apps. We are initially looking at this company for the coding behind our ideas (we're not entirely sure what's possible yet or how much it will cost...). So far, we have:
We're not sure if any of this will fly, but we're plotting! Anybody else thinking of doing this kind of thing?
- Campus Maps with GPS
- Campus Alerts
- Mobile Records/Billing
- Campus Events
- Video: Pacifica's YouTube Channel streamed directly
- ...and, jokingly, a suggestion/complaint app called iNeed...haha
Monday, July 6, 2009
addenda from Geek Nirvana meeting 6/2009 - RefShare
RefWorks has added the option to share accounts, via their RefShare app. There are many options for setting this up; including:
- only one person creates records but multiple people can see records in the database (and copy them to their own personal RefWorks accounts); or
- multiple people can create records, and all can modify records; or
- multiple people can post records but one person acts as a gatekeeper to 'approve' records for posting;
and variations in between. We will be setting up the last-mentioned version of this for one of our faculty who wants a structure for students to contribute to an annotated bibliography project.
Access is via a durable URL, and there's similar flexibility (you can have its URL reside behind a proxy authenticator, for example, or simply post a link to that URL).
If you would like to see what this looks like, I've put records for many of the readings used or under consideration for my information literacy course up in a RefShare database. (Most of these came from my personal RefWorks account, so I didn't need to enter much data directly.) The durable URL is a pain to type out, so I used TinyURL to get a manageable one - use http://tinyurl.com/refclass .
- only one person creates records but multiple people can see records in the database (and copy them to their own personal RefWorks accounts); or
- multiple people can create records, and all can modify records; or
- multiple people can post records but one person acts as a gatekeeper to 'approve' records for posting;
and variations in between. We will be setting up the last-mentioned version of this for one of our faculty who wants a structure for students to contribute to an annotated bibliography project.
Access is via a durable URL, and there's similar flexibility (you can have its URL reside behind a proxy authenticator, for example, or simply post a link to that URL).
If you would like to see what this looks like, I've put records for many of the readings used or under consideration for my information literacy course up in a RefShare database. (Most of these came from my personal RefWorks account, so I didn't need to enter much data directly.) The durable URL is a pain to type out, so I used TinyURL to get a manageable one - use http://tinyurl.com/refclass .
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