Librarian X

From the GSU Library Learning Commons Theatre comes the spine-tingling (get it? get it?) … Ghost Book!

Happy Halloween.

 

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George Mason U has released a brief official statement about the Reuters/Zotero lawsuit.  I take particular note of this part: “the creators of the Zotero project strive to serve the scholarly community and to respond to its needs in an age of digital research … it should be as easy as possible for Zotero users to move to and from the software as they wish, without friction” (emphasis mine).

This seems pretty fundamental to me — researchers, and users in general, want and need technological tools that interoperate with one another smoothly.  It’s something I emphasize in my Zotero workshops, that it’s easy to use alongside EndNote in various ways, or in collaboration with EndNote users.  In broader terms, that’s also why I’m such a fan of RSS as an example of portable content that can be easily used outside of its original context.

Anyway.  In better news: Blackboard Announces Free Tool to Interconnect Its Software With Moodle, an Open-Source Competitor.  Blackboard seems to be taking the opposite approach from Reuters by allowing instructors to embed Moodle content within the Blackboard interface.  See, this is how you keep academic customers happy: make your tool play nicely with the other stuff they use, so they have a motivation to remain your customers.

As a long-time user (and admittedly not a fan) of Blackboard, I was impressed and surprised by this move.  Props to Blackboard.

In a stroke of excellent timing (as I’m beginning to put together training materials), Springshare has added a beta image upload feature to Libguides.

Users can upload images (in any web-recognizable format, i.e. gif, jpg, png) from their computer into the LibGuides boxes via the Rich Text Editor, and the images will be stored on LibGuides servers.

I really love using Libguides, but the lack of integrated image uploading has been the one inconvenient feature for most of the librarians I’ve worked with.  At my previous library we had to find awkward workarounds like creating unpublished web pages containing their images since there wasn’t easy ftp access to the web server for most people.  This is going to be a welcome addition to an excellent product.

My article Open-Source Software in Museums is now available (via free open access) at Library Student Journal.  My thanks to Amy Buckland for all her work as LSJ publisher!

Google has announced that they’ll soon be offering RSS feeds for search results as a new feature of Google Alerts, which currently works only via e-mail.  Google has not yet given a date for the new feature.  I wonder if it’ll work with Google Scholar as well.

I wish I’d known this at my RSS presentation a couple of weeks ago!

Update: Chris Lang points out in the comments that Google already offers this feature for blog searches!

(via Search Engine Land)

Graham over at The Inspired Library School Student has posted a good review of EndNote versus Zotero.  I like Graham’s approach: he took a typical user task, writing a sample essay and using both programs to build identical bibliographies.  Among his conclusions:

The two programs are similar enough that anyone already comfortable using EndNote should not switch, unless they are paying to use EndNote, in which case they should certainly consider Zotero as a free alternative.

Personally, I disagree  — though I’ve been using and teaching EndNote for several years, I found Zotero so much easier to use that I switched.  Its ability to grab citations from non-database/OPAC sources like the New York Times and Amazon, and its consistent saving interface across multiple sources, makes it worth the switch to me.  And of course you can always grab citations using Zotero and export to EndNote if you must.