Category: Ideas
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Can a country digitize everything it has ever written?
Michael Geist writes a weekly column for the Toronto Star called Bytes that often touches upon technology or ideas that would be of interest to distance librarians. Unfortunately the Star requires you to register to view content, and while it’s free it’s still a pain. Fortunately Michael also posts some of his columns to the…
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The Future of Books
I think Technology Review might be my new favorite publication. Just finished a short article called The Future of Books, by Jason Epstein, who "…worked in book publishing for more than 4o years. He was editorial director of Random House and founded Anchor Books, the New York Review of Books, the Library of America, and…
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Online Assessment Tools
Sherri just posted about something called PHP Surveyor, which looks nice and nifty, but I don’t know anything about PHP and SQL, and I’ll be most of you don’t either. Just the other day, a colleague pointed me towards a free hosted assessment tool called FAST, which stands for (are you ready?) Free Assessment Summary…
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Jackson Library IE Toolbar
A great idea for the distance student: a browser toolbar that provides links and access to library-specific resources. All these nifty Google Scholar tools we’ve been playing with could be incorporated into something like this. This version only works for IE 🙁 Link: Stanford Graduate School of Business: Jackson Library: Jackson IE Toolbar. Originally found…
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Google Scholar – half way there?
OK, here’s where we stand on making Google Scholar (aka Schoogle) work much better for distance students. Ross Singer from Georgia Tech has modified a bookmarklet for Google Scholar that works in Firefox 1.0, Mozilla 1.73 (according to my testing), and IE 6.0. His bookmarklet furthers the work of Peter Binkley (U of Alberta) and…
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update – Google Scholar OpenURLs – Firefox Extension
Well Peter posted some better instructions on how to edit the extension, and I’m happy to report that if I can do it, pretty much anyone who has the desire to try will be able to do it . I don’t want to post the U of Calgary extension that points to our resolver until…
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Google Scholar OpenURLs – Firefox Extension
Ahh, the Alberta Advantage! 🙂 Peter Binkley up the road at the University of Alberta has taken my original idea and run long and far with it. Programming his first Firefox extension, Peter has built a proof-of-concept OpenURL extension for Google Scholar. Basically if you have this extension installed in your version of Firefox, anytime…
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Late Night Thoughts on Google Scholar
Art Rhyno at the U of Windsor has also been thinking about how to make Schoogle work for the distance students. You’ll find a screenshot of his preferences idea down in the comments section. I like it, but think asking students to fill in the proxy info themselves is asking too much. I’m sticking to…
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Google Scholar and EZProxy
Yesterday I mentioned that we were going to introduce Google Scholar (aka Schoogle) to our EZProxy authentication server to see if our distance students could then gain access to resources we’ve licensed, and I’m happy to report that it works like a charm! I logged in from home and was able to gain access to…
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How to make Google Scholar work for the distance students
OK, I haven’t had a chance to try it from off campus, but we’re introducing Google Scholar to our EZProxy server in the hopes that if we authenticate our students first, they will be able to access the content we have licensed when using Google Scholar. Of course this would mean the student would have…