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
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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) commentsThis post, So I tried a little experiment… needs some link love to get the distribution I think it deserves. A student at my alma mater compared the responses from several web-based answer services to a question. She posted it on lisstlouis, a group blog that the St. Louis based students of the University of Missouri library school share.
Labels: reviews
# (0) comments
I just installed IE 7 on my home computer. We were asked to not install either IE7 or Firefox 2 at work. Security issues. A problem I'm finding in a big organization is that the Systems people will say "don't do this--security issues." But they have no motivation to get the problem resolved, so it's generally up to someone else to push the matter. Well, I'll wait a few weeks or a couple of months for the initial glitches to get ironed out before I push.
In the meantime, I thought I needed to see the new browsers to be caught up professionally, so I said "yes" to Microsoft's installation update.
After the update, I was asked: what do you want to set up as your default provider. When I responded with "let me see what ya' got," I got a list--and I could use the list for both the default provider and the ones that show up in the drop-down box.
I selected Clusty for the default. Using the recent spate of comments Walt Crawford received to the question "What's on your Firefox search dropdown?" as inspiration, I also added:
I couldn't get the Creative Commons search to add to the list. To add search providers to the search dropdown box in IE7, you do a search in the search engine on the word TEST. Then paste the results URL into the Create Your Own box. Creative Commons appears to be using some kind of AJAX software, so the URL doesn't change and IE7 doesn't recognize it as a results page that it can use.
Labels: reviews
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Improving Library Services with AJAX and RSS Feed
Hongbin Liu, Yale University
I sat next to Genny while she wrote a live blog post of this session for LITA. Mostly, this was a Web 2.0 awareness session. And, in particular, awareness of AJAX and what a site looks like that uses it.
Hongbin Liu showed us Google/IG, the home page personalization service launched in May 2005. I think I managed to miss it when it first came out but it appears to be an AJAX version of MyYahoo. Yale has built a MyLibrary site that works like Google/IG rather than the older library portals, which were always underutilized. He admitted, when asked, that Yale is not going ahead with this project. The audience seemed to agree that it probably makes more sense for libraries to teach their users about services like Google/IG and then make sure that our content is reachable through that.
He wasn’t able to get LCSH Live from OCLC to work live, but apparently it works like Google Suggest, where when you are typing in a search term, the software suggests possibilities, other words that begin with the same letters as the ones you’ve typed. This is an AJAX application.
Written tonight: I just tried LCSH Live and it's pretty cool, getting deeper into a subject the more I type. L gets me a bunch of topics that begin with l--and I guess it's giving me the ones with the most items in it. So I see "large type" and "literature" in the top ten results--not just an alphabetic sort. Also, when I type in a subject like "moonshining" it gives me the item "Distilling, illicit"--the correct subject heading. Nice. Clicking through on links gets you authority records, which would be pretty scary to a patron, but it's a nice tool for figuring out the correct subject heading.
Labels: conferences, reviews
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Thanks for taking the Survey Monkey survey. Very helpful!
I found Survey Monkey quite easy to use. I built the survey without reading any documentation--I had to go back a couple of times when I guessed wrong what a particular "question type" referred to, but that was easy enough. It was a bit less intuitive when it came to making the survey active and figuring out how to link to it.
The "other" in the types of books questions drew responses like: nonfiction, graphic novels, and history. Thanks, everyone! This was fun.
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