Category: Web/Tech
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Use embedr for video/screencast playlists
A couple of months ago my colleague Carmen pointed me to Embedr, “a free service that lets anyone create a custom playlist of videos from the top video sites on the web.” Finally had a chance to take a look at it and quite like it. Basically you can feed it the URLs of videos…
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Download Your YouTube Videos Legally
Amit at Digital Inspiration points out that you can now download your YouTube videos legally. But the emphasis is on YOUR videos. The best tool I know for being able to download all YouTube videos, and in the format of your choice, is KickYouTube.
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Metrics on mobile web usage
The Making mobile web sites with Drupal blog points to a report showing some surprising statistics on mobile usage. The report comes from a company (AdMob) that serves ads on mobile websites, and shows, among other things, that "The iPhone OS had 8% market share of handset sales in 2008, but generated 43% share of…
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First Impressions
I finally got around to reading a couple of posts I'd squirreled away, and they turn out to be somewhat related. Brian Mathews posts about 5 next-gen library catalogs and 5 students: their initial impressions. Important to us here at the UofC as we continue to beta test Summon. While admittedly not scientific, there are…
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OCLC takes the OPAC to the cloud
Damn, this is shaping up to be an interesting year in libraryland. OCLC has announced that they're going to offer a fully online ILS (Integrated Library System). As in, no desktop client for acquisitions or circulation, and Worldcat.org as the public interface. The official press release is here, Andrew Pace has a short piece, and…
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Federated or Broadcast or what do we call this stuff?
There's an interesting discussion happening right now on the Web4Lib Code4Lib mailing list – you can access it via the April archives; scroll down and look for the first post entitled Serials Solutions Summon. Basically it started as a discussion about whether Summon is a revolutionary or evolutionary product, and quickly turned into a discussion…
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WASSAIL InfoLit assessment tool released as open source
The Augustana Campus Library of the University of Alberta has released its Information Literacy assessment and survey software called WASSAIL as an open source application. WASSAIL enables users to: Track assessment data by course, by instructor and by academic year Collect and manage institution-specific questions (including Likert-style, open-ended, subjective or qualitative questions, or pre-defined multiple-choice-style…