Shameless self-promotion!

I've been talking a little bit in this Learning 2.0 blog about a toolkit we're building to support evidence-based library and information practice (Libraries Using Evidence - eblip.net.au).

The new issue of EBLIP has just been published, and includes a news item announcing Libraries Using Evidence - eblip.net.au (even a mention in the editorial - how spesh!). Anyway - while that is all very exciting for us, I have a vague justification to be blowing my own trumpet here, as it does include a couple of paragraphs about Library 2.0 in it as well - see p.99 if you're interested.

If you do read the article - you'll also see the request we make for project plans (or any type of planning document) to contribute to our PEBL project. Please consider sending something (anything!) to us (pebl@eblip.net.au) - so far we don't have any from public, school, or special libraries. THANKS!

del.icio.us tip - action tagging

I just found this old post about using del.icio.us basically as a "to do" list. It builds upon what I had started doing with tagging items "readlater" ... I might try this out next week.

I've well and truly smashed "the vow" tonight. 2am - definitely time for bed!

Thing #11 - LibraryThing

Hmmmm. Not convinced I have a purpose for this one. For the exercise, I added a couple of books I have on my shelf at work. Wild.

the vow

See what happens when I take the vow to leave work on time, and not turn on the PC when I get home ... all the "fun" stuff gets left behind. So, I've broken the vow tonight to start catching up on a few "things" for Learning 2.0 ... (how very sad for a Friday night!)

Blogger has been vomiting tonight, so that's been a bit of a pain!

PLCMC - project plans?

Does anyone at PLCMC have a project plan that you would be willing to contribute for examination by our PEBL project? We have a number of plans from academic and health libraries, so are now particularly interested in hearing from public, school and special libraries.

We are developing a project planning tool that will build upon standard project methdology by ensuring the principles of evidence-based practice are incorporated. We will not be analysing your outcomes/study methodology, but will be focussing on what aspects of planning your tool does/doesn't prompt for (regarding EBLIP). Confidentiality will of course be guaranteed.

Please see our project blog for further information.

PDFCreator - open source

I downloaded, installed, and successfully used the free PDFCreator today. Three of the PCs in our Library have the Adobe version ... but not the one at my desk! I don't need to create PDF files all the time, but often enough for it to be a real pain to kick one of my colleagues off their desk while I use their machine (especially Supermuddle's as her mouse is set up for left handed use!).

It was getting to point where I was weighing up my priorities before asking my boss to buy an extra licence, but now there is no need - PDFCreator does the job perfectly well & I can save my favour asking for something else!

Using bloglines for email lists

I've just followed the instructions Lori has posted at Learning Express to receive a Table of Contents alert in my Bloglines account for a journal I read, that does not have an RSS feed - only an email alert service.

This was a great find - I much prefer the idea of receiving eTOCs via Bloglines than in my email... especially those which will drop each article (the ones with an RSS feed I guess) as a separate entry so I can mark/keep the ones I do want to follow up on. My email has been getting bit out of control lately, so removing email alerts will help a lot.

My workgroup will be using Bloglines to collect the TOCS, and other alerts, for the journals we want to scan to keep our "Articles of Interest" feed current. Selected items from these alerts will be tagged in our del.icio.us account and automatically displayed in the page.

Another action implemented thanks to Learning 2.0 :-)

Thing#10 - image generators

The "thing" for this week has already caused me one late night! I stayed up way too late last night playing around with a few of the different generators listed at The Generator Blog. Here are a couple...
- our site up in lights - movie marquee
- a concert ticket to use for invitations to our site launch
- a cassette to possibly use on our podcast page
- and my very own gold coin!

The Cheer Up generator was also fun.

Podcasting

I pretty much had the RSS feed thing under control before last week's "things" which gave me a chance to look into podcasting a little more. We had a seminar a couple of months ago and had made a digital voice recording - but it never crossed our minds it could be podcast!

After my experiment the other day which was straight forward, easy, and worked first time, I thought I'd give it a go. I downloaded the Audacity and Lame MP3 encoder, spent a while chopping our recordings up, cutting out "group work time", and resizing the files to 64kbps (as recommended here) ... and tackled uploading a bunch of huge files to Odeo. It took a bit longer than I expected, as the files kept getting stuck ... even though they were under the 25MB recommended. Eventually, I managed to get them all up ... and then hit problem number two....

... the player I had successfully embedded in the test one I did in this blog (and Helene uses in the Learning 2.0 posts) refused to show up in the webpage I was adding them all to. As I submitted files, a little cleanup action would happen that stripped the tags. Oh well, gave up trying to sort that out in the end and just popped in an icon and link to the page in odeo instead.

In anycase, they're all up now and have been introduced to the EBLIP community. So, although that little exercise was a pain in the bum, I did learn things ... and have another podcasting activity planned for our toolkit, inspired by Helene's use of introductory podcast's here in the Learning 2.0 program. More on that later...

A Librarian's Guide to Etiquette: Out, Burning

A Librarian's Guide to Etiquette: Out, Burning
Librarians should be weary of being too good at their jobs [read on]