joy at moll projects dot com
If you use Blogger via ftp (meaning you host your blog somewhere other than blogspot), do some research before switching to the New Blogger. Try going to the Blogger Help Group and searching on ftp to see the kinds of problems people are having. The new layout tools and the instant publishing feature are not available to ftp users.
Blogger has been pushing it's new version for months, so I made the switch yesterday. Today I happily labeled a bunch of my posts (labels is what the new Blogger uses for categories). That works. In fact, it feels a lot like applying labels to Gmail messages--no surprise since Blogger is now owned by Google.
The next question was "how do I get these labels to appear in my sidebar?" Apparently, it's a piece of cake if your blog is hosted at blogspot. But if you host your own? Impossible. So, let me get this straight. I go to all the trouble to make the switch that I've been requested to make and I don't get the feature that I most wanted? And, you didn't bother to tell me?
To find out that information in advance I would have had to either read the help group or read, and interpreted correctly, two different issues on Blogger's known issues blog. The first one says that I can add labels to my posts but I only get a list of labels in my sidebar if I switch to the Layout templates. The second one tells me that if I use ftp, that I can't use the Layout template and, furthermore, I will probably never have access to that feature.
Blogger is frustrating its most sophisticated users by blowing this. It looks like I won't be the only one looking into making a switch. I've been holding off for months because I thought the new Blogger was going to meet my needs and, instead, it led me down a primrose path to nothing but wasted time. My host, lunarpages, offers Wordpress. Anyone have advice on switching from Blogger to Wordpress?
Labels: reviews
# (1) comments
I had been planning to give a workshop to students early in the spring semester about free, web-based tools for organizing research notes, citations, and links--all those things one accumulates when working on an academic paper or project.
I struck out with Zotero as I wrote in this post because it only works in Firefox 2. In the same post, I noted that EndNote Web wasn't quite working for this purpose either (although I went ahead and wrote a review, mostly because I told people in my workplace that I would and some did find it useful).
To find more tools to look at, I used these two posts from Solution Watch:
I found interesting things to look at, but nothing I wanted to offer a workshop on. Many of the tools were note-taking tools in the sense that you take your laptop to class and take notes with it, not in the sense of making notes for a project. Since our campus is not fully wireless, a web-based tool for class notes is not something my students can use consistently.
I looked at Studicious and found the note-taking features much to rudimentary for my purposes. And it took several tries to figure out how the grade-keeping feature worked. You put down the assignments at the beginning of the semester, then insert the grades as they are received. The software does all the calculations which is pretty cool, but not that exciting by itself. I couldn't make the Friends feature work at all--perhaps my "Friends" need Studicious accounts as well as Facebook ones.
Notecentric is WYSYWIG. It's purpose is for sharing classroom notes. This might be useful for some campuses, but not ours (yet). It couldn't really be used for making project notes because there seems to be no way to not share notes with this tool. Every note you make is shared with everyone who signs up as belonging to the same class. [Update: I enabled comments this morning and received my first this afternoon--a correction from the developer that Notecentric does facilitate private notes.]
Backpack seems like a good possibility. But I couldn't remember how many pages you get with the free account. And I didn't want to create a new one, since I know I made one a year or so ago. If it's five, however, that might work well for students--one page for each class where the student can store notes, images, calendars, to do lists, and links. Unlike the other tools, this one is more general--not aimed at students, specifically.
mynoteIT has a WYSYWIG editor, a calendar for assignments, to do lists, and the ability to make things either private or public. This was probably the best of the lot, but since I hadn't heard about it before, I was a bit afraid to trust it. Will it be here for the whole next semester? What happens if I teach students about it in January and they lose the site and all their notes in April?
Fortunately, at about this stage in my explorations, another librarian came up with an idea for a workshop. I gave her my time slot and I'll wait until summer to see if any of these tools strike me as being ready for prime time and something I want to tell students about in the fall.
Labels: instruction, reviews
# (3) comments
The Web is a magical place. I joined the 2007 TBR Challenge on 43 Things yesterday. As an afterthought, I threw the post up on my blog as well. This morning, I received email from David Weinberger author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined, a book on my list! That's so fun that I've been smiling all day because of it.
That, and some other things, have me thinking about Steve Lawson's recent post on See Also..., Experts and Novices. Here's the bit that keeps coming to mind:
People who don't read a bunch of blogs and similar sites through RSS, who don't have any kind of online social/professional network must have a completely different experience of surfing the web from those of us who do. That's why they ask us questions like "how do you even know about all this cool stuff?" It ain't by Googling random keywords, that's for sure.
I have that experience with the library blogosphere and on 43 Things. I briefly had the goal "Lose 30 pounds" on 43 Things, until I discovered that as a community-making mechanism, that goal was useless to me--it drew too many adolescents who either had anorexia or wanted to have it. Not a healthy group and not particularly responsive to the preaching that is the first reaction of most adults when they encounter those posts.
A 43 Things novice might be put off by that and never come back. As a 43 Things expert, I knew there were better places for me to find the group I wanted. In recent surfing of goals (looking at the lists of people connected to me because they share one or more goals with me or because they cheered me on one of my goals), I had noticed a couple of people with the goal eat healthily. I noticed not because of any immediate interest in the goal but because, to my Midwest ears, that doesn't sound grammatically correct even though I suspect it probably is. It turns out that besides knowing how adverbs work, this group has a nice little community of people who encourage each other, share triumphs and failures, and offer tips.
The point of all these thoughts? Mostly gratitude for the connections I make through the librarian blogosphere and 43 Things. But also, this all reminds me that if I want to get more people to use Bloglines or another RSS feed reader (and I'm pretty much of the opinion that almost anyone would benefit from it, especially the people in academia who I work with), that I need to provide them with feeds to get started. From there, they can make connections rather than try to find their own way--encountering a Web that seems wild and wooly instead of magical.
Labels: instruction, social software
# (0) comments
I found the 2007 TBR Challenge on 43 Things, but it originated on the blogosphere in this post by MizB. The idea is that you pick 12 books you've been meaning to read (on your To Be Read list or pile), then read one a month in 2007.
Here's my list:
1) The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
2) Life of Pi by Yann Martell
3) Dreams of My Father by Barack Obama
4) Small Pieces Loosely Joined by David Weinberger
5) Leave me alone, I'm reading : finding and losing myself in books by Maureen Corrigan
6) The long tail : why the future of business is selling less of more by Chris Anderson
7) Never eat alone and other secrets to success : one relationship at a time by Keith Ferrazzi with Tahl Raz
8) Resonant Leadership : renewing yourself and connecting with others through mindfulness, hope, and compassion by Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee
9) The knitting way : a guide to spiritual self-discovery by Linda Skolnik & Janice Macdaniels
10) Transforming leadership : a new pursuit of happiness by James MacGregor Burns
11) What the river knows : an angler in midstream by Wayne Fields
12) A pirate looks at fifty by Jimmy Buffett
Labels: social software
# (1) comments
Institutions subscribing to ISI Web of Knowledge received notice on Monday from Thomson Scientific that our users now have access to EndNote Web, a web-based version of the citation management software. I’ve never used EndNote and was curious how I, as a novice user, would find the experience. Is having “free” web-based access enough to make me want to use citation software? Is it enough for me to encourage undergraduates to use citation software?
Setting Up
The first step is to register, just as you would to use other customized features of the database. The first difficulty I encountered was that the password has to be 8 characters and contain a number and a special character. My throw-away internet password doesn’t meet those criteria so I had to invent a specific password just for this purpose. I guess I can rest easy knowing no one is going to steal my three citations about research management software while I sleep tonight.
I scanned the terms of agreement. I didn’t see anything scary like they own everything that I put into EndNote Web.
When I logged in the first time, I was given the option to download toolbars for Firefox and Internet Explorer and a plug-in for Microsoft Word. I did all of that, taking the advice in the sidebar to download the IE toolbar using IE. The toolbar provides a link to my EndNote Web folders—unfortunately, they call this button “My Library.” Could they think of a more confusing term to use when it’s mostly libraries that will be providing this service? There is also a “Capture” button to load the citations into EndNote Web.
Tours and Tutorials
The Guided Tour within EndNote was dry and uninspiring. The online tutorials, screencasts with sound, were worth the effort--particularly since they were short and I could pick and choose which ones to watch.
Capture
The Capture button on the tool bar is what should make the citation collection process easy. In the tutorial, it shows that you can be looking at a citation in PubMed, click on Capture and all the citation information loads into the appropriate fields of the pop-up window—much like Illiad works when requesting an article through interlibrary loan from a database.
Unfortunately, that lovely picture is not the reality for every database that we have. EndNote Web was unable to fill any fields for citations from the Wilson Web database, Library Literature and Information Science. It did slightly better with the EBSCO’s Library, Information Science, and Technology Abstracts—but it messed up many fields and I found it really annoying to attempt to edit the tiny boxes to get the citation correct.
The citation handling from FirstSearch was a big improvement over both Wilson Web and EBSCO. I didn’t have to correct anything that went into the citation. I chose to add a few things, but the item I found was an article from a Proceedings book, so I wouldn’t necessarily expect software to capture it perfectly.
Oddly enough, the Capture button couldn’t retrieve any information from the Web of Science or INSPEC databases that we get from ISI! That’s when I noticed a button in the right sidebar that said “Save in my EndNote Web.” That, as expected, saved a perfect citation. There’s also a link that takes me right back to the citation in Web of Knowledge—wish they could do that for every database.
Successes and Failures
Folder names are restricted to 17 characters. Who does that anymore?
The Shared Folder concept works well, although the interface was a bit clunky. It took more than one try for me to share my “Research Mgt” file with my boss. But when it worked, he could see the citations I had collected on the topic of Research Management software.
The Online Search which allows simple searching from within the EndNote Web interface didn’t work at all in our environment. I was prompted for usernames and passwords even for databases that I know we have. And the search of our library catalog said that it found 7 books but then got an error message when it attempted to retrieve the list. Since the search interface is so simplistic, I would feel just fine telling our students to use the native interfaces or our multisearch instead of this feature. I was told that the search feature in the installed version of EndNote has the same problems in our environment.
Conclusion
EndNote Web will be most useful to people who need to handle a lot of citation data and do it from both a home computer and a work computer. These researchers will be able to download a toolbar on the computers they use most often and access the same data from either location.
It will be less useful to people, including students, who frequently work at publicly-accessible computers. Downloading a toolbar will be inconvenient or impossible on those computers, diminishing the utility of the software. However, the citation data will be available for access on the Web and can be edited manually in situations where the Capture button would ordinarily be the best method. Since the Capture button is an imperfect tool, this may be no great loss.
As I noted yesterday, citation management software doesn’t really solve the problems I’m working on, but I’m convinced that there are people who need it and will appreciate the added access to their data they will get from a web-based solution.
Labels: reviews
# (0) comments
I want to give a workshop to students about keeping things organized while doing research. I want to target this to undergraduates. I spent much of the day looking at EndNote Web that we now get for "free" with our Web of Science database. More on that in another post.
I'm beginning to realize that a citation manager isn't the tool I'm looking for. While I see that this software would be a godsend to someone who has to prepare a bibliography with hundreds of citations, I’m not finding it that useful for the kinds of research I do or that undergraduates do. It’s a lot of work on the front end to make the bibliography easier on the back end.
When I’m finding articles, books, and websites, I want a tool that’s going to keep track of that material and get me back to the full text quickly. Sure, it would be nice if it would make nicely formed citations at the end, but that’s not really what I’m thinking about when I’m in the midst of the research—and I’m guessing it’s not what undergraduates are thinking about until the night before the paper is due. So, it would be a hard sell to get them to learn and use EndNote Web as they are going along—much easier to teach them to go to the Citation Machine or find the appropriate handbook when they are ready to make their bibliography at the end.
That brings me to Zotero that does seem to be the kind of tool I would love to teach my students. Unfortunately, it only runs on Firefox 2.0 and we've been asked not to download that in the library. Of course, students can download whatever they want on their own computers. I wonder if it would be worth bringing in my laptop to do a demo?
Labels: instruction
# (0) comments
I just "got friended" by the American Library Association on My Space. The Books entry under Interests made me laugh out loud. I'm guessing we have Jenny Levine to thank for this--thanks!
Update: Jenny Levine reports that Wendy Prellowitz is reponsible for the MySpace page. Thanks, Wendy!
Labels: social software
# (0) commentsBoth of our houses have power! So does my brother's house and the houses of my old neighbors and new neighbors. I don't know much about my coworkers yet. I missed a meeting on Friday where we were going to set up a virtual staff bulletin board on the wiki. It's too bad we didn't get it done earlier, we could have been swapping stories, resources, and information--things like this bit of useful news if you happen to live in my area:
The Schnucks grocery on Manchester in Des Peres is without power but is selling non-perishables. The Schnucks on Manchester in Kirkwood is fully functioning.
Labels: real life
# (0) comments
I bet I wasn't the only person in the St. Louis area to sleep in my clothes last night. But I was more comfortable than the ones in shelters, warmer than the ones in cold houses.
I bet I wasn't the only person to sleep in two locations, either. I imagine a lot of kids had the experience of going to sleep with extra blankets in their beds, only to be moved to a warmer location when their parents had done all they could for the house.
Driving along the block that our old house is on, a stranger could guess which households have children. Those are the ones that don't have cars in front of them. It looked to me like most people without children stayed in their houses all night, but all the families found someplace warmer.
We could see the progress of the electric company with each trip in the dark--oh, this block has power, now! But not our old neighborhood, yet.
Labels: real life
# (0) comments
The last time my region was under a state of emergency, I almost felt guilty about how little I was affected by the situation. This time, the situation has been quite a challenge for us.
We temporarily own two houses--neither had power when we woke up, cold, before sunrise. With temperatures predicted in the low teens tonight, we were operating pretty low on Maslow's hierarchy of needs today--mostly focused on plumbing and a warm place to sleep.
We're in pretty good shape tonight--a result of luck, neighborly assistance, and the payoff from years of overpreparedness.
The first priority was getting out of our new house--we spent a couple of hours shoveling snow off our steep new driveway for the first time.
The second priority was making decisions. This, I think, contributes a lot to making disasters so stressful. It felt like we were being tested and it took awhile to convince ourselves that there wasn't one correct answer--we had to make some choice and act on it.
Third priority, after that process, turned out to be to get the generator going in the old house and wire up the furnace. With the help of a young neighbor, an electrician, we accomplished that by early afternoon. The generator, which we have rarely used and mostly as an amusement, made a big difference to us today.
Fourth priority was an emergency assist to get my brother out of his garage so they could go to a hotel.
With protected plumbing and a place to sleep, if needed, we turned our attention to the fifth priority--turning off the water in the new house and draining the pipes as much as possible to minimize the risk and damage from frozen pipes. The luck came when the power turned on before we got very far in that process.
So, we're feeling fortunate at the moment, even if we will be spending a very cold night going back and forth to check on both houses--at least, both have heat.
Needless to say, I didn't go to work today. Wash U was up and running, but my boss was cool with me taking a vacation day to take care of things at home as needed.
And more good news, my brother just called and they are safely checked into a hotel about 40 miles south of here.
Labels: real life
# (0) commentsJune 2004 July 2004 August 2004 September 2004 October 2004 November 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007
