Technology on Your Own Terms

The Weinberg Memorial Library and the Center for Teaching & Learning Excellence (CTLE) are proud to announce a new faculty and staff advancement series, Technology on Your Own Terms.  The series will introduce University faculty and staff to emerging technologies in a hands-on environment, in order to encourage innovation in the workplace and in the classroom.

Technology on Your Own Terms will begin this Fall with four sessions:

Tweet Your Words
Tuesday, September 15 from 12pm – 1pm (WML 306)

You’ve heard about Twitter on the news – now find out what it’s really like.  In this workshop, you’ll create a Twitter account and post  your first tweet.  You’ll also learn how to follow other tweeters and find useful information in the Twitterverse.  (Taught by Kristen Yarmey-Tylutki, Library)

Curl Up with a Kindle
Thursday, October 1 from 12pm – 1pm (WML 306)

Learn how to use an entirely new class of device -a convenient, portable reading device with the ability to wirelessly download books, blogs, magazines, and newspapers. The device is the Amazon Kindle.  During this workshop, you will learn how to use many of the Kindle’s features including digital highlights and notes. (Taught by Aileen McHale, CTLE)

Really Simple Steps for Managing the Web: An Introduction to RSS
Tuesday, October 13 from 12pm – 1pm (WML 306)

This workshop will explain how RSS feeds and RSS readers can help you manage the abundance of information available on the web.  You’ll create a Google Reader account and will learn to import, organize, search, and share up-to-date content from your favorite websites.  (Taught by Kristen Yarmey-Tylutki, Library)

Stay Alert! Keeping Your Research Up-to-Date
Thursday, October 29, from 11:30am – 12:30pm (WML 306)

Do you spend an inordinate amount of time keeping your research up-to-date? During this workshop you will learn how to set up e-mail alerts and use RSS feeds to gather scholarly information.  (Taught by Bonnie Oldham, Library)

Sessions will be taught in Weinberg Memorial Library Room 306. All faculty and staff members are welcome, but seats are limited, so please register for sessions you plan to attend (select Special Event).

Introducing the Library Research Guides Wiki

The Weinberg Memorial Library is proud to announce a new collaborative project this fall -  the University of Scranton Library Research Guides!

The Research Guides basically act as a starting point, where students and other researchers can find useful resources in their discipline.  We’re using the Guides as a “home” to bring together helpful databases, reference books, e-books, and web resources for each subject.  While we’re focusing on traditional academic disciplines, we’re also creating Research Guides for interdisciplinary issues like Sustainability and New Technology.

The best thing about the Research Guides, though, is that they’re in wiki format (like Wikipedia) – which means that anyone can contribute links or references they find useful in their work.  It also means that the Research Guides are fluid.  Unlike static web pages, they will change and adapt over time as contributors add, update, and reorganize resources.

We’d like to invite all members of the University of Scranton community to view, edit, and improve our Research Guides.  If you’re new to wiki editing, take a minute to visit our Getting Started page.  Let us know if you have questions, comments, or suggestions.  We’re looking forward to collaborating with you!

We Speak Web 2.0!

Thanks to all who attended the “Do You Speak Web 2.0?” session here at the Library today.  We had a great time – there were a lot of tough questions about the ins and outs of Web 2.0 that hopefully will lead into even more good conversations in the future.

If you missed the session or would like a refresher, you can see the slides below.   You can also see pictures from the event on our flickr page!

Do You Speak Web 2.0?

View more presentations from Kristen Y-t.

Joining the Twitterverse

Ellen DeGeneres, The Daily Show, and 110 members of Congress all Twitter – so why not us?

From now on, get the latest Weinberg Memorial Library news (and an RSS feed of our blog posts) by following us – @UofSLibrary.  While you’re at it, reply and let us know what you think of our Library!  In 140 characters or less, that is.

If you’re like us and new to the Twitterverse, here are a few resources to help you get started on your new so-microblogged life:

• Feeling tweepish about not knowing what the heck your tweeple are tweeting about? You need the Twitter Glossary from the Twitter Fan Wiki.
• With Twitter Search, you can watch what the world is doing in real time.
• Nearby Tweets helps you find other tweeple in your city.
• Tweet Deck is an application that can help you manage your incoming tweets.
• Last but not least, if you’re presenting to a group of techno-savvy people anytime in the future, check out speaking expert Olivia Mitchell’s recommendations for “How to Present While People are Twittering.”

Need help figuring out who to start following?  Here are some of our favorite Scranton tweeters – it is #followfriday, after all!

• @univofscranton
• @ScrantonAquinas
• @ScrantonAlumni The University’s Alumni Office
• @scrantonsbdc The University of Scranton’s Small Business Development Center
• @timestribune Local news from the Scranton Times-Tribune
• @ScrantonLibrary The Scranton Public Library

We’ve also noticed a mysterious new Twitter account, @scottpilarz.  Could it be our very own University president?

Update: On our Research Guides wiki you can now find an introduction to Twitter, as well as a continually updated list of University of Scranton Twitter accounts and our favorite NEPA Tweeps.

Pandora Radio, Music Genomes, & Beautiful Sounds

Here we are, in the thick of finals. All-nighters. Citation madness. Dum-dum lollipops from the Reference Desk.

I know all about it — I’m the trusty librarian that is up at least half the night with you this week, at the Reference Desk ’til 2 am when we close.

But boy, did I come across a gem of a website that I believe you will love as much as I do. Because we all love music, right? But of course we love very different kinds of music… And that’s where the brilliance of Pandora Radio comes in.

This website allows you to create personalized, customized Internet radio stations that play only the music you love. When I first heard about it, I was very skeptical as to how user-friendly, effective or accurate such a claim could be. But I moseyed on over to the URL, where I was prompted to input a favorite artist or song. I humored Pandora, and typed in “Jason Mraz.” A station called “Jason Mraz Radio” started playing, with the first song as “I’d Do Anything” off of his first studio album, Waiting for my Rocket to Come. Okay, that’s neat, and I figured it would just play Jason songs in succession… But then, the second song began, and it wasn’t Jason, but a groovy rendition of “Over the Rainbow” by a Hawaiian artist whose name I can’t remember, accompanying himself on a ukulele — a version of the song I had heard about but never gotten around to looking up. A little pop-up from Pandora told me they were playing this song because, essentially, it “sounds” like Jason’s music. Well, it wasn’t Jason, but it was groovy in all the ways Jason is, and I was pleased. And the neat part is, now I have learned about an artist I never would have known about, for free, who plays the same kind of music as Jason — the kind of music I like. This is very cool indeed.

So I started creating other stations, and decided it was well worth creating an account at the site, so I could save my stations for future use. Right now, I am listening to “Bluegrassy Instrumental” (one of the genre-stations they also offer), and I’m loving it. And when Pandora plays a song I like in particular, I have a few options: I can rate it w/ a thumbs up, so the station knows to play more songs like it, and I can also Bookmark the song, so I can remember the artist and album for future reference. There are also ways to interact with other Pandora Radio listeners, recommending songs, creating profiles, etc. This site rocks my socks, and it will rock yours too. Just trust me on that one.

But you may ask, how does Pandora achieve this? How can a website or even an extensive database of music know what songs are really like other songs? That’s where the Music Genome Project comes in. I won’t go crazy trying to explain how the participants do what they do, but in short, they basically map the musical DNA of every song, characterizing and analyzing each song for many things like “melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics” (taken from About Pandora — worth reading too). Then Pandora takes these DNA maps (as I’m calling them) and uses them to match songs with other songs, to create a stream of music that can continually be customized to fit your taste in that style of music.

I think this is just awesome, and I felt the need to share it with all of you. We all love music, and this tool not only gives open access to the thing we love, but it enables us to discover artists and songs we might never have before.

So, if you need music in the background while you work on papers and finals — for my part, certain kinds of music (like “Bluegrassy Instrumental”) help me concentrate — check out Pandora Radio.

This is technology and the Internet at their best.

A case for the new Facebook

By now, I think we have all had exposure to the “new Facebook.” For those readers who don’t know what that refers to, it is basically a complete redesign of the social networking site Facebook, which the developers have been working on for some time now. Since 2004 when Facebook was first launched and created, the design of the site has remained the same, where a person’s personal profile is viewable on one single page, and links to get to other parts of the site were in familiar and convenient places on that page. But Facebook has been expanding to include new features, like “pages” (i.e. pages devoted to people, places and things, which users can become “fans” of — see our Library page for an example: The University of Scranton Weinberg Memorial Library ), and interactive applications (widgets or add-ons to your profile, created by 3rd parties, that allow for more ways to interact). The Facebook design crew felt the structure of the site could be improved to handle all of these new features, and so they redesigned the whole site, and made the switch from “old” to “new” voluntary for the past month and a half or so.

Until late last week, when the option to revert back to the old Facebook was taken away from users… (See this article by Michael Liedtke of the Associated Press for more details on this.)

And the reaction has been pretty strong! Three out of 5 stories on my newsfeed these days are of my friends joining groups like “6,600,000,000 Against the New Facebook!” and “Petition against the ‘New Facebook.’” And here I am… not minding the new design at all, and in fact digging it for various reasons. It makes a gal feel as if she didn’t get the memo that said to dislike the new Facebook with a passion, when everyone she knows is having such a strong negative reaction to this change, and she is not.

And so, for your reading and discussing pleasure, here are my top 5 reasons for liking the new Facebook:

1. Home Tabs:

I like these tabs on my “Home” page because they organize all of the information about my friends that I care about. The 2 tabs I use most often are “Status Updates” and “Photos.” I have heard criticisms that this new accessible layout increases the opportunity for people to “Facebook stalk” their friends. But answer me this: When you sign into Facebook, other than updating your friends on what’s new with you, isn’t your next interest, well, finding out what’s new with them? I mean, come on, if someone is your friend on Facebook, I’d like to hope they aren’t gonna “Facebook stalk” you — and hey, if you think they are, then you can change your privacy settings regarding what gets published in newsfeeds about you. These tabs mean less pages to load, in order to see what people have updated about themselves. Which is one of the reasons I sign into Facebook in the first place. So, I like ‘em.

2. Profile Tabs:

This is possibly my favorite change. You can’t tell me that, in the old Facebook, you didn’t find it annoying that it took so long for most people’s profiles to load with 50 applications attached to each one. The single-page-per-profile layout of the old Facebook was so cumbersome and slow, I love that the Facebook designers have now tucked most of our crazy applications behind a tab called “Boxes,” making the load time for profiles a lot shorter. I also think it’s neat that “Info” is clustered under one tab as well — let’s face it, sometimes we are interested in seeing where our friends work and what movies they have listed, and sometimes we’re not. When we’re not, we’re usually more interested in seeing who’s posted on their Wall lately — or, to make that sound less “Facebook stalkerish,” what sorts of social interactions they’ve been engaging in recently. And there is nothing wrong with this, as far as I’m concerned. The site is designed for us to interact — I’m not gonna pretend that’s not why I use it. Along these lines, on the old Facebook my click pattern was to click on a person’s name to get to their profile, and then speed-scroll down to their Wall. In the new Facebook, all that clicking, and loading, and waiting, and scrolling is eliminated. I like it.

3. Photo Tab:

And scrolling down on the same page you find:

I think the new photo tab is brilliant in its simplicity… Now, ALL of my photos are in one place. I don’t have to click one link to see tagged photos of me (first screen shot above), and another link to view the albums I have created (second screen shot above). When you click on a person’s Photo tab, all of their photos are on the same page, in one place. You also have a convenient button to “Create a Photo Album” right on your own Photo tab. All of this just makes more sense to me.

4. Customization:

I like that the new Facebook has buttons all over the place for you to immediately make changes to the content on your profile and on your newsfeeds. Note in particular the “Settings” button I circled in the above screenshot (right side). I admit I didn’t like the default settings for my “Wall” tab, since it was publishing stories about every little thing I did on any of my applications… So I just clicked on the convenient “Settings” button and made it so the only stories that get published on my page are for status updates or posts from my friends to my Wall. You can do this for your general newsfeed (on your “Home” page) as well. I can also change my profile picture really easily using the “Change Picture” button (see upper left corner of screenshot) which has a picture of a little pencil next to it… You will find these little pencils everywhere, and they are Edit functions, there to make it easy for you to change the content of your page. Very convenient and considerate of Facebook, if you ask me…

5. Accessibility of Applications:

Finally, I like what Facebook did with my applications. I can now access them very easily from my “Home” page, in the upper right-hand corner of the page, which is where the above screenshot comes from. Note especially the “more” button, which will expand the box to list every single application you have. You can also drag applications from below the “more” boundary so that your most often used applications are always visible. I also love that there is yet another “Edit” button right there next to the apps, which means I can go in and purge my Facebook account of unused or unwanted apps, just one accessible click away. “Edit” will also take me to the page where I can change settings for individual apps, so I stop getting emails every single time someone interacts with one of my applications, etc. This is very convenient and helpful, to me.

And so, there you have it. Perhaps my clicking patterns and behavior on Facebook are different than yours… and if that’s the case, maybe these changes I have listed don’t affect your use of the site at all. If so, I would love to hear some feedback from you avid Facebook users out there, as to why the new layout DOESN’T work for you. Because honestly, I see nothing wrong, and lots right with it… But I am open and very interested in the other point of view, since I want to understand where all the resistance to the new design is coming from.

So, discuss.

(Now, if only Facebook would fix the chat function so that it works more consistently and wasn’t so glitchy, I’d be even happier!)

eBooks, in case of emergency

iTablet

I’m somewhat of a traditionalist when it comes to reading, that is to say, I prefer paper and ink over plastic and electrons. However, I’m always open-minded and willing to try new things; so, a couple years back, I decided to read Aristophanes’s The Clouds entirely on my desktop computer. Sadly, I couldn’t make it all the way through and eventually ended up taking the book out of the library.

However, I did learn something from my experience, namely that it is possible to read large amounts of text entirely online. Personally, I read online all the time, but usually in the form of newspaper/journal articles and other short passages, though occasionally I have pulled-up a couple chapters from a book, in order to get by for the time being.

So if you left your book on the bus, or the library doesn’t have it (highly unlikely), or your shipment hasn’t come in from Amazon yet and you need to have a chapter read by tomorrow, then I suggest giving some of the following resources a try. Keep in mind, you don’t need an iPhone or iTablet to read most eBooks, usually you can open them up right from your desktop/laptop, or even on most SmartPhones and PDAs.

Here are the top 5 FREE eBook sites, in my humble opinion:

1.) The Online Books Page – An Index of eTexts brought to us free of charge by the University of Pennsylvania Libraries.

2.) Project Gutenberg – There are over 25,000 free books in the Project Gutenberg Online Book Catalog. A grand total of over 100,000 titles are available at Project Gutenberg Partners, Affiliates and Resources.

3.) Bookyards.com – Bookyards has a total of 16,045 books, 41,384 external web links, 4,197 news & blogs links, 384 videos, 32,787 Ebook links and access to hundreds of online libraries (800,000 Ebooks) for your reading pleasure.

4.) JustFreeBooks - This website is actually a specialized search engine (similar to Google, except only searches eBook sites). Use the search box to find exactly what you are looking for.

5.) MemoWare.com – Contains over 18,000 “premium” titles. I can’t vouch for exactly what they mean by premium titles, but there are some excellent Literature selections and even some Reference texts.

Librarian in Distress!!

Hello U of S Community:

Today is Labor Day and I’m in the library with very few students coming in to ask questions; so, inevitably my mind has been wandering.

Along the course of my thoughts I had run into this question: I know librarians and other geeks along similar lines get excited about Web 2.0 technologies, but what about normal (cool) people (students/faculty)?

In case you don’t know what Web 2.0 is, I like to think of it as a wide and varying set of open source programs and web sites that allow for people to connect in various ways.

This blog is an excellent example of Web 2.0; Facebook is another. In case you have yet to realize, Librarians are embracing Web 2.0 and trying to make ourselves more transparent. By transparent, I mean to say, we librarians want you to know that we aren’t just bookworms who are here to ask you to be quiet. Rather, we are people too, some of us even have personalities.

The goal of Library 2.0 (or Libraries/Librarians embracing Web 2.0) is so Librarians and Libraries become more friendly to the average user. One of the main goals of being a librarian is always to try and reach as many different types of people as possible.

I know I’m interested in hearing students’ and faculty members’ thoughts on the educational/library usage of Blogs, Facebook, Podcasts, etc.

So please, comment back to this post and let us know what you think. The librarians have been dying to get some student responses on this Blog, please make us feel appreciated, we are developing an Inferiority Complex.

Are you a Fan?

The Library is now on Facebook!

Show your love for The University of Scranton Weinberg Memorial Library by becoming a Fan of our page. Feel free to post your favorite photos of the Library, and use our Wall to give us comments and suggestions.

So far, we have 18 Fans. How quickly can we make it to 100?