This morning I attended two terrific webinars sponsored by the Georgia Library Association and Georgia Public Libraries: The Social Library by Cliff Landis, and Library on the Radio by Charlie Bennett and Ameet Doshi. If you weren’t in the chat room with us, check out the archive.

Both presentations are really worth seeing. Cliff did an amazingly concise job of presenting his take on social media for library outreach, and Charlie and Ameet talked about the genesis of their library radio show “Lost in the Stacks” (on which I made a guest appearance earlier this summer). Cliff is the first hour of the archived presentation and Charlie and Ameet start at 1 hour 15 minutes.

Since I’m seemingly on a roll with the Youtube posts, let me share this great quick-and-awesome Zotero demo from Eric Sizemore:

This is more or less how I start my Zotero workshops — I’ve found that it pays to show the finished product at the beginning to get their attention — but I think Eric does a better job than I do!

The Library Society of the World’s own Abigail Goben produced this video of LSW members singing Jonathan Coulton‘s Code Monkey. It features me on plastic Rock Band guitar. Enjoy.

Today (Friday May 28) at noon Eastern time, I’ll be on the Georgia Tech library radio show “Lost in the Stacks.” Host Charlie Bennett interviewed me about — you guessed it — Adventures in Library Instruction and Zotero!

My friends and GSU Library colleagues Sarah Steiner and Christian Sager will be appearing on the show live — my segment had to be taped since I have a conflict during the broadcast time.

You can listen to the live stream at WREK.org, or on 91.1FM if you’re in Atlanta and still own a radio. It’ll be archived temporarily at WREK’s Friday Shows page under “Lost in the Stacks.”

Atlanta’s weather turned stunningly beautiful last week after a long ugly winter, so I took the opportunity to eat lunch outside today with a colleague in Woodruff Park downtown near GSU.

We sat down next to this outdoor “reading room” — a cart of library books in the middle of the outdoor plaza. They had call number labels on them, so we  guessed that they were withdrawn books from nearby Fulton County Public Library. There was no evidence of a mobile circulation desk so apparently they were free for the taking!

What a cool idea.

This is the “handout” for my March 23 webcast “Superpower your Browser: Open Source Research Tools” for ACRL. I’ve included printable URLs.

My article about LibX and Zotero is available in the February 2010 issue of C&RL News and online at http://crln.acrl.org/content/71/2/70.full

“LibX and Zotero: Firefox extensions for librarians and library patrons” by Jacob Glenn. Zotero in particular has introduced many new features since this was written, but it’s a good introduction to both programs. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jkglenn/firefox/

LibX

LibX project home page, including edition builder and documentation: http://libx.org

My LibX guide: http://research.library.gsu.edu/libx

Creative Commons licensed. You may copy and alter it for your library as long as you credit me.

Great LibX guides from

Eastern Kentucky U: http://libguides.eku.edu/libx

and Murdoch U: http://wwwlib.murdoch.edu.au/mylibrary/LibX/

Zotero

Zotero home page, including documentation, forums, and more: http://www.zotero.org

My Zotero guide: http://research.library.gsu.edu/zotero

Creative Commons licensed. You may copy and alter it for your library as long as you credit me.

“7 Things You Need to Know about Zotero: A white paper from Teaching and Learning with Technology at Penn State” (pdf link): http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/wp-content/uploads/zotero_hot_team.pdf

Zotero guide from the U of Michigan: http://guides.lib.umich.edu/zotero

Other browser tools for researchers

In no particular order.

• Top Twenty Firefox Add-ons that Make Firefox the Researcher’s Browser of Choice: http://resipsablog.com/2008/08/23/become-an-efficient-researcher-top-twenty-firefox-add-ons-that-make-firefox-the-researchers-browser-of-choice/
• How to customise your browser for effective online research: http://helpmeinvestigate.com/ColinMeek/posts/41-how-to-customise-your-browser-for-effective-online-research
• 50+ Useful Firefox Extensions for College Students: http://www.collegedegrees.com/blog/2008/05/21/50-useful-firefox-extensions-for-college-students/
• Academic Power Research: Add-ons for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collection/academic
• 100 Essential Firefox Add-Ons for Librarians: http://oedb.org/library/features/100_firefox_addons_for_librarians

Audio Books by Playful Librarian via Flickr

I wrote a short article about free audio books for Georgia Library Quarterly‘s Winter 2010 issue. It’s for a regular column called “My own private library,” in which librarians write about the books in their home libraries.

GLQ isn’t online yet, but they’ve given me permission to post the article here:

My library — at least this part of it — occupies a space the size of a credit card, replenishes itself automatically with new fiction, surprises me constantly, and costs nothing.

I’m a huge fan of podcast fiction. I rarely leave the house without my portable media player in my pocket, and at any given time I usually have several different podcasts loaded onto it. In case you’re not familiar, podcasting uses RSS, the web mechanism that powers blogging, to automatically deliver audio files to listeners as they’re published. Many authors, aspiring and famous and in between, are using podcasting as a tool to publish free audio versions of their work.

I subscribe using a free “podcatcher” program, and every time a new chapter is published it turns up in a folder on my computer. Authors like Scott Sigler, Seth Harwood and Cory Doctorow simply use their own blogs to self-publish, and podiobooks.com has hundreds of titles available.  I’m an enthusiastic fan of science fiction and fantasy, and I’m happy that authors in these genres seem particularly willing to experiment with this new form of self-publishing.

The fiction magazine, dying out in print, is undergoing a renaissance in podcast form. I’m always happy to see a new episode of Escape Pod (SF, at escapepod.org), Podcastle (fantasy, podcastle.org) or Pseudopod (horror, pseudopod.org) appear in my podcast feed. These three are the cream of the crop for podcast genre fiction. They publish fiction by authors ranging from the unknown to the legendary. Escape Pod is the world’s second-largest market for short science fiction.

If these podcast magazines are the Beatles and Rolling Stones (or at least Pearl Jam or Coldplay) of podcast fiction, then Drabblecast (drabblecast.org) is perhaps the equivalent of King Missile: brilliant but confusing and sometimes disturbing. Their tagline is “strange stories by strange authors for strange listeners,” and they deliver. Some of my personal favorites have centered around pie hunters, clown eggs and demon oranges. Some of my real favorites I’d have trouble summarizing in this space, and a few of them are too rude for this venue.

Cory Doctorow, one of my favorite authors of both science fiction and non-fiction (as I hope all librarians know, he writes brilliant commentary on technology, copyright, information access — and libraries, among other things) has been podcasting his own fiction for years via his blog at craphound.com/podcast.php. I first discovered this fact, to my delight, just before a long solo car trip.

Mur Lafferty (murverse.com) publishes a startling number of podcasts. Her fiction is fantasy of all kinds; I’m a fan of her recently completed epic series Heaven, which starts with the death of the protagonists and ends with a war among the gods. Playing for Keeps is a fun superhero novel about a group of friends with superpowers that aren’t useful enough to make them heroes. In addition to Lafferty’s fiction, I also sometimes listen to her I Should Be Writing podcast for fiction writers (the motivational and technical advice is sometimes useful even for aspiring writers of non-fiction, and I’ve discovered authors I like from her interviews).

Seth Harwood’s (sethharwood.com) crime novel Jack Wakes Up is a pulp noir loser-in-over-his-head thrill ride that I enjoyed start to finish. It reminded me of Elmore Leonard, or maybe a San Franciscan James Lee Burke. His semi-autobiographical A Long Way From Disney surprised me by showing Harwood’s range; it’s a short story collection that follows his fictional alter ego as he grows up in Boston.

These are a sampling of some of my favorite indie artists of the podcast fiction world. Podiobooks (podiobooks.com) is a great repository of these and other works; it’s organized by genre and includes staff recommendations. One of the nicest features of Podiobooks is its custom RSS feeds, allowing you to set up auto-delivery of chapters at regular intervals or on demand.

Librivox (librivox.org) does offer a fiction podcast, but is really more useful as an online library of audio books. Their collection is all in the public domain so it’s freely shareable, and their goal is to record audio editions of all available public domain works. Earlier this year, a group of friends and I all agreed to read Moby Dick together (a book I’d never managed to finish before), and I participated by listening to the Librivox audio version on the train and at the gym.

My public library offers free downloadable audio books, but I have to admit I don’t use them much. We — “we” being libraries in general — are stuck dealing with vendors that provide audiobooks in proprietary formats that only work with particular devices, which makes them harder to use and far less useful. I’m a lot happier just following the indie artists.

I’m emerging from holiday break just long enough to link to my picture on the Geeky Tattoos blog, whose author calls me a “hardcore librarian.” Word.

Zotero just announced a new free storage feature for attachments. I blogged about it over on the library’s site, so I won’t repeat it here.

The first 100 megs of storage is free. I’ve got a fair-sized library, and I’m only using half that. I probably won’t need to upgrade to paid storage until well into next year, but you can get a gigabyte for twenty bucks a year. That strikes me as quite reasonable. I’d pay twenty dollars for another gig in my Dropbox in a heartbeat.

Maybe I’m the last one to discover this feature, but at some point Zotero 2.0 (beta, but I’ve been using it for months with no problems) added a really neat trick.

Click the magic wand button, “Add by identifier.” You’ll get a dialog box prompting you to enter an ISBN, DOI or PMID number. Zotero will grab the citation info online and save it to your library.

Handy shortcut if you’ve got a physical book in front of you and want to save a trip to Worldcat. I just added instructions to my Zotero guide.