The Distant Librarian

Author: Paul R. Pival

  • Adobe Captivate 3 Trial now available

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    Paul R. Pival
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    I’m not sure where the actual blog post has gone, but Silke Fleischer reports that Adobe Captivate 3 trial is now available for download. I tried to get in as a beta tester for this release, but neither the beta nor this trial version run on Windows 2000, though Silke says the full release version…

  • 2007 Survey of the Biblioblogosphere

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    Paul R. Pival
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    Meredith Farkas is repeating the survey she did a couple of years ago to try and get another snapshot of the Biblioblogosphere.  If you’re involved in the library world and are a blogger, please consider taking her survey. I just finished it and have a couple of suggestions for clarification in the next iteration 🙂 …

  • RSS Updates

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    Paul R. Pival
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    A couple of things to note before the weekend – Roddy MacLeod has a really good overview article on RSS in the most recent issue of the FreePint Newsletter: “RSS Update: It’s RSS, Jim, but Not as We Know It“.  Lots of good links in there, including one to a project he’s working on called…

  • Blogs vs traditional literature

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    Paul R. Pival
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    The opening section in Walt Crawford’s most recent issue (August 2007) of Cites & Insights really resonated with me.  Entitled On the Literature, he begins with, "I believe that gray literature—blogs, this ejournal, a few similar publications and some lists—represents the most compelling and worthwhile literature in the library field today."  He goes on to…

  • Self-destructing email

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    Paul R. Pival
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      BigString    Originally uploaded by ppival Saw this post at Ars Technica describing a service called BigString that allows one to send self-destructing email.  They do it by sending an image of whatever text you type, and then depending on the parameters you set, make that image (still actually hosted at BigString) expire after…

  • Worldcat Meets Wikipedia: Open Library

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    Paul R. Pival
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    I haven’t been paying much attention to the announcement early this week about the new demo of Open Library, but I finally found myself on the site of the Disruptive Library Technology Jester, Peter Murray, and he’s got a 12-minute screencast of how the thing works.  In a nutshell, to me it seems like Worldcat…

  • ARL White Paper on Interlibrary Loan

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    Paul R. Pival
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    Stephen Abram points to a recently-released white paper on interlibrary loan, from ARL.  You won’t find any actual numbers in this 4 (barely)-pager, but you will find some interesting trends.  ILL for returnables (books) is generally up, according to statistics from several sources, but ILL for non-returnables is generally pretty far down.  There are some…

  • More Screencasting News – ViewletBuilder 5 released

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    Paul R. Pival
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    Qarbon’s ViewletBuilder was the first piece of software I seriously used for screencasting, way back before we knew what to call it 🙂  I haven’t used it lately, but see they’ve just released version 5, so I’ll have to give it a quick try. Technorati Tags: Screencasting, ViewletBuilder

  • Technology Readiness

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    Paul R. Pival
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    Stephen Bell at ACRLog posts about data from a survey of technology readiness that may help explain why you feel overwhelmed by all this new stuff there is to play with, but also why your more experienced colleagues are even less likely to want to play with it.  Interesting stuff.

  • Jing – Techsmith’s first screen capture and screencasting product for the Mac

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    Paul R. Pival
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    Interesting that I’m more excited about Jing being Techsmith’s first foray into OSX than I am about the product itself, but there you go!  It’s available for Windows too, but only XP and Vista, not 2K, which is what I run at the office, so I haven’t played with it on the Windows side.  Techsmith…