K-State Libraries: Digital Initiatives

Docs to Blogs

There's a new, simple way to get documents created by a word processing application (like Microsoft Word) posted to one of our blogs on TypePad, without the usual formatting nightmares or cut and paste headaches.  All you need is a Google account and access to Google Docs, and the steps outlined below.

1. Login to Google Docs
2. If your document is saved elsewhere, upload it using the "Upload" button near the top left of the Docs screen, just under the Google logo.   You can upload documents in .txt, .doc, .html, .rtf, .odt and .sxw formats.  It will open for editing after it is uploaded.
3. If your document is already in Docs, just open it for editing.
4. Find the "Publish" tab in the upper right corner and click it.
5. On this screen, you have two publishing options.  You are interested in the 2nd choice - publishing to a blog. You'll need to set up options the first time you do this, so click the setup link ("set your blog site settings")
6. On this page, you'll pick some non-intuitive things, so follow along (click the tiny thumbnail for a screenshot):
   1. Click the radio button for "My own server/Custom"
   2. Select "Blogger API" from the API dropdown
   3. Copy and paste this URL: http://www.typepad.com/t/api/xmlrpc.php  into the URL box
   4. Enter your TypePad userid and password in the boxes, and the name of the blog to which you're posting your document.  Make sure you enter the full name exactly as it appears on the blog, for example, "K-State Libraries: Talking in the Library", not just "Talking".
      
   5. Click OK.
7. The settings box will disappear, click Post to Blog to post your document.
8. Click OK in the confirmation box that appears.
9. Go look at your blog and see how cool it is!

If you're a multiple-blog author, just edit the settings to change to a different blog before you publish.  Another neat thing you can do is edit a document you've already posted to blog from inside Google Docs. Then, when you go to the Publish tab, one of your options will be to re-publish the previous post with the new document - handy for fixing typos or updating information!  The only flaw I've found so far is that it seems reluctant to assign a title to your post based on your document's name - you may need to login to Typepad and assign a title to your post, but that's a small price to pay for the convenience of directly publishing documents you've already created.

Who or what is big oscar, and should I be afraid?

Big oscar is a subdomain at AOL, specifically:

http://big.oscar.aol.com/

We make use of a small service offered by AOL, namely, the ability to toggle images for our chat application based on the status of our AOL login. When a page loads that uses this functionality, such as:

http://www.lib.k-state.edu/reference/vref/

or any of our catalog search pages where one finds a Meebo chat widget (or, more accurately, a picture of one), before the image of the chat widget loads, a little query goes out to big oscar, who either says, yes, the library account is logged in, in which case the "click to chat with a librarian" image loads, or no, which loads the "no one available" image. This is completely benign, and in no way poses a security risk.

Why bring this up? If a person uses Internet Explorer and cranks their security settings way up high, IE will flash a warning when this query gets sent to big oscar. Personally, I don't want to use a browser that's such a namby pamby about this kind of stuff (which is why I use Firefox, which applies a lot of common sense security fixes without being so annoying), but some people have been burned or otherwise convinced they need ultra-high security on their machine. Not much we can do there other than tell them to allow it.

Lightning Talks: Sign up

For those of you who missed the January All Staff - a new addition to the All Staff meeting agenda was discussed. From this month on, every month, there will be a 5 minute slot  to do the Lightning talks.

What is a Lightning talk ?
Wikipedia defines it as "a short  presentation given at a conference or similar forum. Unlike other presentations, lightning talks last only a few minutes..". Generally these are for 5 minutes or less and follow the theme of the conference. But in our case, content is pretty open.

What will be covered?
In this age of information overload, there are some tools that can help us manage this abundance of information. Be it online bookmarking tool (del.icio.us), feed readers or google portal, a combination of these freely available tools can help everyone in some way. Some teams within our Library are already using google docs, delicious, etc in creative ways. Wouldn't it be nice to hear from them on how they are using these latest tools ?

In addition, the 2.0 paradigm has redefined innovation. New tools are cropping up faster than any one  person can blog about them leave alone use them. It would be great to have a collective pool of people identifying them, trying out and sharing them with others. You don't have to be a techie to try these tools.   

Why All Staff & why only 5 minutes?
The best place to catch majority of our colleagues is the All Staff meeting. With these new tools, if we cannot give someone a reason enough to use it within the first 5 minutes of introducing the tool, then they either wont use it or they don't need it. Also, if there is enough interest in any one particular tool, we can always follow-up with a focused training session later.

Now what?
If you are excited about sharing your new found wisdom in 2.0 era, then volunteer to lead a 5 minute talk at an All Staff meeting. Or if you want to hear about a tool you heard from someone & are interested in knowing more, then suggest a topic. Just drop me a mail (harish) either way with "lightning talk" in the subject.   

A new toy

Props to Dan Chudnov for blogging a new goody in a place where geeky librarians (like me) will see it. He points his faithful readers to Jing, a Web project from TechSmith, the makers of Camtasia Studio.

Having only read bits of the web site, but not downloaded the gadget, I can't give you a first-hand account of what Jing does. What TechSmith says it does is pretty cool. It captures a piece of whatever is happening on your screen that you'd like to share as either an image or a video. You then get a URL that you can paste to your IM buddy, email, blog post, forum, etc. The image or video is hosted on Screencast.com, another TechSmith product.

The most immediate application I see at K-State Libraries is the one Dan C. suggests - as a supplement to IM and other virtual reference services. I've had endless chats with IM patrons that go something like, "You should be looking at a small screen that says Get It @ K-State and has a Powercat. Do you see that?" So much more concrete to shoot them an image of what they should see, or a video of how to get from point A to point B.

Currently, Jing is a free download and service as TechSmith figures out what they're going to make of it. In the future, it will likely be a paid software and service. Bonus: the download works on both PCs and Macs. Go play.

Stacks Guide

The stacks guide is ready to go if you don't find more mistakes on it.
http://ksulib.org/stackguide/

New: Html equivalent of rss feeds for new books

Sometime back Beth Turtle made a great suggestion to create html version of rss feeds for new books  that would complement the existing feeds. Here is a brief demo of how the pages would look like - https://catalog.lib.ksu.edu/ksul/rss/html/biology.html  [just replace 'biology' with other subjects to see their respective html versions].

Though the major thing is done, there are a few things that need to be done - (i) Create a light weight header with an embedded search box (ii) List some helpful links to rss tutorials and (iii) modify the index page to link subjects to both feeds and html pages.

As always, please take a look at it and pass on your comments/suggestions (especially if you come across any useful rss tutorials to link to ).

new online stack guide

Hi, All. Check out the new online stack guide I am working on. Its a beta-beta-beta-be... version. http://ksulib.org/stackguide/ There are a lot of missing maps and photos. I am still working on them. However I want to get feedback before I make further changes. Please take a close good look at it and tell me what improvements you want to see. What kind of information should be included in.

It is a flash movie but it can be updated easily because all information are pulled out from a xml file. If you are interested in, you can take a look at the xml file http://ksulib.org/stackguide/stackguide.xml

Thanks

Additional RSS feeds: DVDs, CDs, etc

We had several requests for additional rss feeds from our catalog - one for DVDs, one for CDs and an another one for feeds by location. The revised version [1.5 - why not 2.0?], under test, generates seperate feeds for DVDs, CDs and one for "reference books on Hale 2nd floor" [location feed]. This version also fixes some issues that arose because of inconsistencies in the call numbers[documented in our local test wiki]. This should go into production early next week if all goes well.

The 3 new feeds are at: http://catalog.lib.ksu.edu/ksul/rss/test/newfeeds.html
Note: The links will point to the actual xml files and you need to point your rss readers to the individual locations.

Title lookup from any webpage

ISBN lookup has certain limitations in that that it works only with isbns and that too isbns that appear in the urls[amazon]. We can definitely customize it and extend it further to lookup isbns anywhere on the webpage. But after getting some input from Adam and Sara, I agree that it would be nice to have a title lookup feature rather than just an isbn lookup.

For starters, we now have a title lookup feature. This bookmarklet does a couple of things - 1) You can select text on any web page and do a title lookup on our catalog. (2) If you are on Amazon.com, then this script would extract title from the webpage automatically and do a title lookup - so you don't have to select text explicitly when on Amazon. The second feature works only for Amazon though, at the moment. To install just right click on the link below and save it to your bookmarks/favorites.
Title lookup

In version2.0, we'll try and integrate with xisbn service from OCLC. What this does is gives us an ability to go beyond the given isbn and gather information from related isbns [eg: given an isbn for a paperback, we'll get isbn for hardcover,etc]. More on this later..

Student bond money proposals

These are the two proposals I submitted.

3/1 Meeting Notes

Attended by Allen, Askey, Devlin, Ekart, Maringanti, North, White

• Server Migration  
  • Grace (web development box) up by Friday
  • Content switched to Cosmos (Dewey) and Pulsar (Horizon) on Saturday March 25th
  • Vista going to the SAN, needs a SAN card
  • Dewey and Horizon going to scrap heap
• EZProxy
  • Creating PURL to full-text objects doesn't work off-campus because of current need to login
  • Some places (KU) pre-append proxy to avoid this problem
  • Only drawback - won't be able to live demo login on campus for instruction
  • Shouldn't increase load on EZProxy server; just adds a single call for on campus users
  • Dale will ask public services people about it
• OPAC
  • Login drop-down order flipped so SSN is on top
  • Dale will add note regarding potential outage on 3/25