Paul R. Pival – Page 13 – The Distant Librarian

Open Data For the Loss, or the Win?

Aug 23, 2016

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Two seemingly-contradictory open data stories crossed my path today. First, The Scholarly Kitchen notes that Scientific Reports On Track To Become Largest Journal In The World, and one of the reasons may be that the PLOS ONE, the current Largest Journal, requires authors to make “all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without…

Two web-based communication tools

Aug 19, 2016

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Paul R. Pival

in Random Tech Tips, Social Networks, Web/Tech

Disclaimer: I haven't actually tried either of these, but have heard the results of the first one, and the second one is such a good review it must be worth a look, right? 🙂 First up, a web-based podcast-recording studio called Cast. Awful name, IMHO, as it's hard to find amongst all the ChromeCast results…

Anatomy of an Information Trap, Part II: Setting Up and Sharing Google Alerts

Jul 28, 2016

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Paul R. Pival

in Scholarship, Service, Social Networks, Tutorials, Web/Tech

Tara Calishain at ResearchBuzz has posted part 2 of her 3 part series on creating and working with information traps, Setting up and sharing Google alerts. In this post I learned how to automatically create and populate columns in a Google Sheet using IFTTT. Off the top of my head I can think of at…

Bookmarklet to convert open.canada.ca JSON to HTML

Jun 24, 2016

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Paul R. Pival

in Discovery, Linking, Web/Tech

Somewhere along the line I subscribed to the JSON feed of the Govt. of Canada Open Data releases, so I get something that looks great in my Feedly list: But when I click through I get the JSON data instead of the actual HTML descriptive page with pretty separate download the CSV etc buttons. Too…

Thoughts on Canada’s Draft New Plan on Open Government

Jun 20, 2016

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Paul R. Pival

in Miscellaneous, Service, Web/Tech

Last week the Government of Canada released the latest draft of the new plan on Open Government, and I thought it was pretty good reading! Here are some of the things I learned, or highlighted as particularly interesting: Canada was recently ranked 4th out of 92 countries by the World Wide Web Foundation’s Open Data Barometer which…

How many US senators follow Edward Snowden on Twitter?

Jun 10, 2016

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Paul R. Pival

in Data, Ideas, Social Networks

TLDR: 0 Last week I was intrigued when this paper came out: Trust, tribalism and tweets: has political polarization made science a “wedge issue”?. In it, "Helmuth and his Northeastern colleagues analyzed the Twitter accounts of U.S. senators to see which legislators followed research-oriented science organizations, including those covering global warming. Democrats, they found, were…

Trends and Innovations in Research Dissemination

May 20, 2016

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Paul R. Pival

in Scholarship

This 17-page PDF was mentioned in the most recent CARL E-lert, but I can't find much else about it. I can tell you it contained links to several resources I hadn't been aware of. Here's the abstract: This document presents some of the major trends and innovations in the area of scholarly communication as of…

Buffer introduces academic pricing

May 18, 2016

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Paul R. Pival

in Social Networks, Web/Tech

A while back I started using Buffer to schedule posts to my social media accounts. I was always kind of annoyed when someone spammed my twitter feed with 20 posts during the 5 minutes they found themselves on twitter, and I didn't want to be that person back. First world problem, I know 😉 Anyhoo, Buffer…

Results of Innovations in Scholarly Communication Survey

May 12, 2016

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Paul R. Pival

in Data, Scholarship

My colleague Christie pointed me to this interesting bit of research, Survey of scholarly communication tool usage. I'm pretty sure I didn't contribute to the original survey, but over 20,000 scholars did! The survey was run by two librarians from Utrecht University Library, Bianca Kramer and Jeroen Bosman. I've only started to poke at the…

12 Screencasting tools that were all new to me

Apr 21, 2016

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Paul R. Pival

in Tutorials, Web/Tech

Admittedly I haven't spent lots of time staying up-to-date on screencasting tools, but I have to admit I was surprised that a recent list on MakeUsOf, Record Your Desktop with These 12 Great Screencasting Apps, contained all new stuff to me. Take a look, maybe you'll find something useful there! (OK, obviously I know about…

Author: Paul R. Pival