ETIG

OK, this is cool.  As blogged on Catalogablog yesterday.  Go to this sample record at the American University of Rome Library and double-click any word you see on the display there, e.g. Arlington.  Up pops a little info on the person, word or whatever.  Powered by Answer Tips.

The Emerging Technology Interest Group (aka the Emerging Technology & Innovation Group) held a demonstration of LibX today over the lunch break. This was the first of a planned series of demonstration/discussion sessions that will in future be held on the Tuesday following Library Forum.

Tim moderated the session and ran through the installation and configuration of the York University edition of the LibX toolbar and some of its main features. A lively discussion followed and Bill and Stacy shared some of their LibX experiences and introduced the group to another useful Firefox extension the OpenURL Referrer. This is an excellent and recommended companion to LibX. John mentioned that LibX uses DOIs (Document Object Identifiers) and Bill showed us how LibX also uses COinS (Context Objext in Spans) to create active links in web pages.

If you were unable to attend the session you can review the handout that was distributed.

I’ve been playing with Yahoo Pipes for a while now. It’s a fairly straight forward and customizable RSS aggregator. One thing I really like about it is that you can collect a bunch of blog feeds and then display them chronologically. This sets them free from their respective blogs which sets me free from having to click on each blog to see what’s up.

One Pipe I’ve created is dedicated to Library & Technology blogs. It collects posts from 38 blogs and serves them up chronologically. But I’m not terribly happy with the Yahoo display. I could grab the RSS and get at it through my browser, but I have to remember to check that. I tried one of those RSS to HTML sites to try and set my various subject collections up in an HTML table, but the display was unpredictable, and well, just not all that great to look at.

Then I discovered the Wizz RSS News Reader extension for Firefox and I think this does the trick. Now I can see all of my subject collections freed from their original blogs all from the comfort of my browser (see the screen shot below). I sense this might be ‘the hard way’ but it’s working for me.

CNN Brings Us Closer to Minority Report swallows a YouTube clip of a reporter using an amazing touch-screen system from Perceptive Pixel to move and resize a number of video feeds on a big screen. Wild stuff.

How can I create an indexing system for the collection of scholarly journal articles that I’m quickly amassing? a psychology grad student asked on MetaFilter.

Here we’d recommend RefWorks on ScholarsPortal. It’s interesting to see what the MeFi people recommend. Someone mentions Zotero, and when the next version of it is out (with support for saving information remotely, so it can be shared across different machines) it could pick up lots more users. It’s impressive now, but the isolated nature of it keeps me from using it.