Nicole C. Engard's Blog, page 23
May 7, 2013
Bookmarks for May 7, 2013
Today I found the following resources and bookmarked them on Delicious.
Annotator – Annotating the Web
The Annotator is an open-source JavaScript library and tool that can be added to any webpage to make it annotatable.
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April 30, 2013
Bookmarks for April 30, 2013
Today I found the following resources and bookmarked them on Delicious.
FromThePage
FromThePage is free software that allows volunteers to transcribe handwritten documents on-line. It’s easy to index and annotate subjects within a text using a simple, wiki-like mark-up. Users can discuss difficult writing or obscure words within a page to refine their transcription. The resulting text is hosted on the web, making documents easy to read and search.
O'Reilly Open Books Project
O’Reilly books with open licenses
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April 23, 2013
Bookmarks for April 23, 2013
Today I found the following resources and bookmarked them on Delicious.
Open Access Library & Information Studies
OALIS (Open Access Library & Information Studies) is an open access peer-reviewed journal covering all aspects of library and information management. The journal is published twice per year and welcomes research articles, as well as case studies and practice reports.
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April 11, 2013
Bookmarks for April 11, 2013
Today I found the following resources and bookmarked them on Delicious.
Vyew
Continuous meeting rooms for real-time & anytime visual collaboration
NewsBlur
Personal news reader
RSS Guard
Very tiny RSS 0.91/0.92/0.93/1.0/2.0 and ATOM 1.0 feed reader.
selfoss
The multipurpose rss reader, live stream, mashup, aggregation web application
Sensei
Teaching coursework has never been easier, all within WordPress. With the Sensei plugin you can create courses, write lessons, and add quizzes. Set lesson and course pre-requisites, allow user registration and even charge for your course content using WooCommerce if you want.
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April 9, 2013
Bookmarks for April 9, 2013
Today I found the following resources and bookmarked them on Delicious.
Catincan
Crowdfunding marketplace for open source software
Connexions
Connexions is a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc.
GOKb
GOKb will be a freely available data repository that will contain key publication information about electronic resources as it is represented within the supply chain from content publishers to suppliers to libraries.
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March 18, 2013
Paying Fines in Koha 3.6
With the release of Koha 3.6 came some improvements to the fine paying interface. This tutorial will show you those changes and how to use them in your library.
As always, if you have an idea for a video, please just let me know and I’ll add it to my list of things to record.
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March 15, 2013
DRM or How to lose a customer
Like many of you SimCity was one of the first games I ever played on the computer. I knew that a new version was coming out, but didn’t really keep up with the news about the release – until now. Apparently the newest SimCity was released about a week ago and has been making a splash in the news. Not because it’s an awesome game, but because of horrible DRM and failing servers. EA games has decided that in order to play SimCity (even in single player mode) you have to be on the Internet. While this fan refuses to support software with such insane DRM, many others did and it crashed/slowed the servers to such a point that no one could play the game.
This from ReadWrite:
Server problems wouldn’t normally hamper a video game’s launch, unless that game is developed by EA. In an effort to combat piracy – or something, it’s not quite clear – EA deployed an online-only Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology through its Origin service for SimCity, which came out on March 5. That means in order to play the game, you need to be online at all times and connected to EA’s servers, even when playing the single-player mode. When player demand starting causing the servers to fall, it also brought down nearly every player’s ability to play any aspect of the game.
To apologize EA is offering people effected a free game from their catalog – but why the heck would I want yet another game with DRM that makes it so that I can’t play games when I’m on the road? SimCity was the perfect game to play when on a train or a plane when you don’t want to pay for Wifi … in fact that’s how I still play SimCity 4.
I understand that gaming companies are worried about piracy, but this kind of DRM is not the solution. I’m sure someone will crack it eventually – but more importantly it is stopping loyal fans like me from continuing the buy in to the franchise.
Going forward, the only real solution may come from the most helpful 1-star review on Amazon, from a user named Malor who earned more than 7,700 recommendations. He noted that SimCity is not a typical game with a beginning, middle and end. It’s a toy, and you used to be able to buy that toy and play with it. But now, Malor wrote, “You don’t even get to buy your toy. Rather, you rent a toy from EA, who lets you play with it only in very limited, circumscribed ways, only on their servers.”
Malor’s final recommendation offers perhaps the best approach: ”You would be wiser to take three twenties out of your wallet, and light them on fire.” In other words, don’t waste your time or money on products with draconian DRM, no matter how intriguing they might be otherwise. Only when DRM affects sales will EA and other publishers take this situation seriously.
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March 14, 2013
How Search Works
As a trainer I like sites like this new one from Google that show you how stuff works. How Search Works goes in to a lot of detail about how search engines work. I thought it might be a useful resource for those of you who teach web searching workshops in your libraries – or just a cool site to check out if you’re the curious type!
On the site you can check out an animated explanation of search, as well as take a closer look at Google’s major search algorithms and features. A live slideshow gives you a glimpse at how Google removes spam, and complementing graphs show the spam problem and how Google is fighting it.
Search enthusiasts can also read an included 43-page document on how Google evaluates its search results.
Learn more about How Search Works at Mashable.
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March 13, 2013
March 12, 2013
Visualize Tasks with DropTask
Lifehacker pointed me to this cool looking tool that I thought might interest some of you. It’s called DropTask and it lets you visualize your tasks in a sort of Ven Diagram way. I created a couple tasks in a project called ‘Blogs’:
This from Lifehacker:
DropTask is incredibly intuitive, and while it can seem a little weird at first—not to mention space-inefficient—it can be pretty handy if you’re managing larger projects. In fact, where it really shows its stuff is when you work with other people. If you sign your entire team up for DropTask, you can assign tasks or groups of tasks to different people with just a flick of the mouse, making it really easy to dole out responsibilities. Check out the video above to see it in action, or click the link below to try it out.
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