The Distant Librarian

Author: Paul R. Pival

  • UPenn Online Books Page

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    Paul R. Pival
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    The Centered Librarian points to The Online Books Page at the University of Pennsylvania, a listing of over 25,000 free books on the Web.  While the site does appear to be indexed in Google, it might still be worth a personal visit if you’re searching for something.  Probably because it only appeared on the site…

  • BookSwim – NetFlix for Books

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    Paul R. Pival
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    Michael Stephens at Tame the Web points to an upcoming service called BookSwim that will launch the 1st quarter of 2007.  Basically they’re going to do the NetFlix thing for books – for a subscription fee (amount unknown), you can enter your name in a queue for one of their 80,000 titles and they’ll ship…

  • Ultimate Guide to the Invisible Web

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    Paul R. Pival
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    Continuing on the vein of their Research Beyond Google page, the Online Education Database has recently posted The Ultimate Guide to the Invisible Web, which looks like a really good resource.  There you will find background on the concept of the invisible web, 9 reasons a web page is invisible, 10 ways to make invisible…

  • Speeling in Higher Ed

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    Paul R. Pival
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    Speeling.jpg Originally uploaded by ppival. Happened to be walking past the vending machines in the library this AM and snapped this loverly picture with my laptop’s camera.

  • 5 things

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    Paul R. Pival
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    Well it’s been a while since I played, and I think I ignored his last tag, so I daren’t do it again.  D’Arcy has tagged me with the 5 things you probably don’t know about me meme.  Now I could cop out, since pretty much none of you really know anything personal about me, but…

  • Google offers to digitize journal back runs!

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    Paul R. Pival
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    Well this is interesting, and if you’re not a journal aggregator, good news. According to Peter Suber, Google is offering to digitize and provide OA to the back runs of scholarly journals!  Peter’s got all the details on his site, but I’ll jump right to one of his comments towards the bottom that says, "I…

  • Embedding Flash in a wiki

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    Paul R. Pival
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    Chad at Library Voice posts about an extension for MediaWiki that allows Flash to be embedded.  He was originally looking for a way to embed a MeeboMe widget, but after I asked he determined that it could just as easily be used to embed a screencast.  Cool, thanks Chad! Technorati Tags: Flash, MediaWiki, Screencasts

  • ebooks vs pbooks

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    Paul R. Pival
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    In a meeting this AM one of my colleagues wondered aloud how close we were to having a majority of books available online.  The consensus was not very close yet, and Walt Crawford happened to offer some statistics today to corroborate that.  And in a segue that would only happen in my mind, BoingBoing also…

  • CFP: Journal of Access Services

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    Paul R. Pival
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    I’m on the board of editors for the Journal of Access Services, and one of my roles is of course to drum up business.  There’s a special issue coming up you might want to consider: Best Practices in Access Services.  Laurie the Librarian has all the details.  Deadline is Feb 1, 2007. Technorati Tags: JAS

  • Synchronous Learning Expert Online Program

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    Paul R. Pival
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    Even though it’s steeply discounted, this one’s too expensive for me, but if you’ve got no other way to get up to speed on teaching in an online environment, this is probably a really good way to go.  Synchronous Learning Expert Online ProgramDescription: WebJunction and Insync Training Present a professional development program in e-learning for…