Wednesday, 24 June 2009

Elsevier scandal for 24/6/09 and other links of interest

Not content with publishing fake journals, Elsevier's marketing division recently decided to "offer $25 Amazon gift cards to anyone who would give a new textbook five stars in a review posted on Amazon or Barnes and Noble." Upon exposure, it's now recanted the scheme.

More New Zealand libraries on the social web: Photos of libraries to drool over: A report from Cambridge University about what students are interested in doing on mobile phones: primarily opening hours, location maps, contact info, and access to the library catalogue.

A hilarious and very true rant on attending vendor training sessions; and a more serious post in response on how this applies to the kind of training sessions we give students.

National Library of the Netherlands is to secure long-term preservation of the content of the Directory of Open Access Journals.

Friday, 19 June 2009

Links of interest 19/6/09

A bit of humour: "Dispatches from a Public Librarian", told Twitter-style (so may make most sense if you scroll to the bottom and read upwards).

Springshare have launched new LibGuides features, including co-owners for guides (will display both co-owners' profiles on the guide) and moderation of user-submitted links.

Newly-discovered-by-me Twitter users include Lincoln University and Humanities NZ. Increasing numbers of NZ public libraries have accounts.

Someone's created a "search engine taste test" where you type in your keywords and it searchs Bing, Google, and Yahoo simultaneously. You can then vote for the best set of results and it will reveal which search engine it's from.

A Swedish university library has created a simple javascript bookmarklet people can add to their browser so that if they're browsing the web (via google or links recommended by friends) and find themselves on a subscription-only page, they can click the bookmarklet to reload the page via ezproxy instead of having to navigate back to the library website and find it again. A librarian from there suggests other libraries should "Steal the JavaScript from this page or write your own."

Thursday, 11 June 2009

Links of interest 11/6/09

University of California Berkeley Library have redesigned their animated tutorials page to be "more visual, navigable, and less, ahem, u-g-l-y, while giving users a means of providing a bit of feedback on the tutorials to help us evaluate and prioritize them."

LexisNexis NZ has a new Twitter account. (And have I mentioned Springshare's account where they post about updates to LibGuides?) Ooh, and the COSC department, another new Twitter account, have just plugged the library's online exam papers.

The User is Not Broken manifesto has its third birthday.

The National Library of Wales is Flickr's 26th Commons partner. "The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world's public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer." See how users can add information in comments and notes (hover your mouse over the image).

Wednesday, 3 June 2009

Links of interest 3/6/09

Resources
Gateway to Scientific Data from the Canadian government.

Emerald Management Reviews Citations of Excellence Top 50 papers

The first time Europeana (a digital library funded by the European Commission) launched so many people visited that it promptly crashed. This time it seems to be stable and is very nice to browse.

Musopen "is an online music library of copyright free (public domain) music." (Project Gutenberg and Mutopia also have sheet music; Gutenberg also has music recordings, moving pictures, etc.)

Tools
Have you ever used Tinyurl to make a short link for a long url? Now Krunchd gives you a short link for a collection of urls.

Ideas
David Lee King writes about embedding a link to their virtual reference in their HIP catalogue (including on their Search Results page).

Stephen Abram writes about how phrasing on signage can increase compliance.
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