The Distant Librarian

Category: Linking

  • Federated Search Symposium wrap-up

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    Paul R. Pival
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    Warning: long post! I’ve just spent the last day and a half at a federated search symposium sponsored by The Alberta Library.  I went in with some preconceived ideas about the state of federated search, and while they weren’t totally assuaged, I think I feel a little more confident about the future of this idea. …

  • Finding libraries near you

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    Paul R. Pival
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    Libraries411 grabs your location and draws a Google or Yahoo map of the immediate area with pushpins for all the Public Libraries in the vicinity.  This would be a really useful tool for distance students if it also included Academic Libraries.  And what if we (librarians) could interact with it so we could also display…

  • Persistent URLs in CSA Illumina

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    Paul R. Pival
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    Ahh, lovely customer service.  I emailed the support desk at CSA Illumina to see if there was any way to create a persistent URL to an article in their product (no mention in the help files that I could find) and they responded a couple hours later with what amounted to a "nope, sorry".  In…

  • A Risky Gamble with Google

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    Paul R. Pival
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    Siva Vaidhyanathan, friend to librarians, has a lengthy piece in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education called A Risky Gamble with Google (the link goes to his blog where the full text of the article is reproduced).  The piece is mostly a discussion about the copyright implications of the Google Book Search project (this post describes…

  • Roy Tennant and Cathy Gordon (Google Scholar) are coming to my house

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    Paul R. Pival
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    Well ok, not my house, but my campus.  The Alberta Library (TAL), our Provincial consortium, is sponsoring a two-day symposium on federated searching.  Here’s a 4-page PDF flyer outlining the symposium.  You’re definately invited, but I’m afraid you’re not going to feel very welcome as 1) it’s the beginning of February in Calgary, and 2)…

  • Google Scholar Terms of Service

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    Paul R. Pival
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    The Digital Librarian weblog was down for quite a while – I was waiting for it to come back up before linking to this interesting tidbit.  The blog came back earlier this month but I missed it – here’s the new RSS 2.0 feed. Google Scholar Terms of Service So, I started reading Google Scholar’s…

  • eContent: Creating Your Own eBooks with Google Print

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    Paul R. Pival
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    Rich over at eContent has a nice Breeze tutorial on how to get to the searchable TOC of a Google Print ebook: eContent: Creating Your Own eBooks with Google Print.

  • Ingenta Introduces New Service for Libraries

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    Paul R. Pival
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    This is a nice enhancement – "Ingenta library customers can now upgrade their new issue and search alerts to include OpenURL links back to their own holdings, enabling users to link directly from an alert to the "appropriate copy" of the article’s full text wherever it may reside."  Too few databases allow for some way…

  • Dilettante’s Ball: WAG the Monkey

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    Paul R. Pival
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    Ross Singer – digital alchemist. OK admittedly it will be a loooong time before all our distance students will be using Firefox, but wow is this cool!  This is the sort of thing that when shown in a training session would likely entice someone to switch to Firefox.  To summarize, once you’ve (painlessly) installed Greasemonkey…

  • ProQuest RSS Feeds

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    Paul R. Pival
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    There’s not a whole lot there just yet, but the mockups look pretty 🙂  ProQuest is working towards making content from their databases available as RSS feeds.  They do have some feeds going, but what caught my eye were the mockups for a library page, a faculty page, and a course syllabus. Link:  ProQuest RSS…