Author: Paul R. Pival
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Please support ResearchBuzz on Patreon!
Received this email earlier today, and would like you to read it as well. If you're an information professional of any stripe and somehow not aware of Tara's work with ResearchBuzz, now's a perfect time. I currently subscribe to well over 200 RSS feeds(!) and multiple email lists, and if I had to choose just…
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Recreating Hilary Mason’s Research-quality data sets bitly bundle
I'm about halfway through an excellent Coursera MOOC called Getting and Cleaning Data, part of my plan to learn R. We were just shown a slide listing a bunch of collections where we could find data sets to play with, and the first one on the list had disappeared. Turns out it was originally created…
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13 Tips for Recording Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod
In the most recent TechSmith newsletter was a link to recent post on their site titled, 13 Tips for Recording Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod. In addition to the useful information, it was nice to see the author using screencasts of iOS devices to illustrate what was being discussed 🙂 to wit:
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Static vs. Dynamic Tutorials: Applying Usability Principles to Evaluate Online Point-of-Need Instruction
Turner, B., Fuchs, C., & Todman, A. (2015). Static vs. Dynamic Tutorials: Applying Usability Principles to Evaluate Online Point-of-Need Instruction. Information Technology & Libraries, 34(4), 30-54. doi:10.6017/ital.v34i4.5831 This article finds "that web usability testing was a useful tutorial-testing tool while discovering that participants learned most effectively from text-and-image tutorials, since both rounds of participants completed tasks…
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Article of interest: A Survey of Online Library Tutorials: Guiding Instructional Video Creation to Use in Flipped Classrooms
This article showed up in the most recent issue of JAL: A Survey of Online Library Tutorials: Guiding Instructional Video Creation to Use in Flipped Classrooms, The Journal of Academic Librarianship, Volume 41, Issue 6, November 2015, Pages 751-757. It seems to be a good snapshot of the current use of screencasts in ARL and CARL libraries.…
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Fun with OpenDataSoft – Mapping Calgary City Amenities
Earlier this month I happened across a blog post from a company called OpenDataSoft (ODS) in which they described how they put together and mapped a list of over 1,600 Open Data portals around the world. I thought that was pretty cool, and did a little exploration of their web-based platform and decided to try my…
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How to Extract Data from Tables in PDFs with Tabula and OpenRefine
Rahul Saigal has an excellent step-by-step post on how to extract data from tables in PDFS with Tabula and OpenRefine. I've had great success with Tabula, and am really starting to get excited about OpenRefine as well, having just completed this free online course, which I highly recommend: Introduction to OpenRefine. From the introduction to Rahul's…
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New Zealand comes to its senses
Last month I posted about how Into The River had been banned in New Zealand; it was "illegal to supply the book to anyone or to display the book in or within view of a public place." As of October 14, this ban has been lifted, and the book is once again classified as "unrestricted".…
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Calgary Public Library IdeaLab on Kickstarter
I picked up a bookmark at my local branch the other day, and just now followed the URL to a new Kickstarter project by the Calgary Public Library Foundation for IdeaLab. They're looking for $100,000 to help fund a makerspace-type area in the new Central Library currently being built. Kicktraq thinks they're only going to…