Cliff February 23rd, 2008
My home computer has crashed. Anyone with more than one minute’s experience with a computer will have experienced a devastating crash. Luckily, I had enough of these in my past that I purchased online backup, and am in the process of retrieving my files. It’s slow-going since I have to download about 33 gigs of data, so until I get everything fixed, my posts and photos are on a bit of a pause. Wish me luck. And patience.
Cliff June 26th, 2007
Wow. After having lost a video file to the aethers, I was forced to dig through my home hard drive to try to find it. Well, no such luck, but I did come across a bunch of video files I had forgotten that I ever took! It makes me wonder what all those lifelogger people are thinking. So here, in attempt to make up for losing important academic material, I present cute puppies playing and fighting over rawhide. Enjoy!
PS–I fixed the broken presentation and blogroll links. Leave me a meebome message if you see anything out of place!
Cliff June 25th, 2007
Looks like I’ve been cited–somewhat accidentally.
A couple of months ago the Librarian In Black discovered a video that I had put up on YouTube for my Tantalizing Technology workshop. It was designed to show how faculty could use online videos for their classes or departments. My original response to Sarah is here.
A couple of months ago I was consolidating my online identity, and decided to delete the YouTube dummy account that contained the solitary video, since it was intended to just be an example, and was not formally “adopted” by the library. Today, I received an instant message from Heather at DePaul University, who pointed out that the video had been cited in a College & Research Library News article. Uh-oh! When she typed in the URL, it says the account was deleted due to terms of use violation (which is untrue, it was just plain deleted).
Sarah’s original response to the video raised questions about where information desks should be placed. This new development raises new questions for me:
If it still exists at home somewhere (I’ve searched all my work stuff), I’ll repost to my “official/personal” YouTube account, and link it here. Otherwise, it may just be lost forever.
Cliff May 3rd, 2007
There’s nothing quite like the beauty of an empty inbox.
I hope to resume my consumption/production of Library 2.0 Goodness in the next few weeks. I have a lot of catching up to do…y’all have been busy!!!
Cliff November 27th, 2006
Sometimes I sit around and dream of the perfect tool. The waffle iron that does my taxes. The electronic pet sitter. The personal-assistant-in-a-box. Then occasionally, some of these tools will magically appear, such as the USB beverage chiller. Zotero appears to be one such tool.
I’ve been waiting on the perfect citation manager. One that:
Zotero, a Firefox 2.0 extension, is able to do all of these. However, in addition I want a citation manager that can be accessed anywhere. Although Zotero isn’t web-based (yet), it can be successfully installed on Firefox Portable, and taken with you on a flash drive (I had to download the .xpi file, because Firefox Portable didn’t want to recognize the extension). Once it is installed on your flash drive, you can take your citation manager (and the attached files!) with you to any computer.
Zotero is supposed to automatically pick up metadata. In my sample search in online databases, however, it was unable to automatically harvest the metadata from the citation page–I tried to create a new citation from a Library Journal article, but it grabbed “EBSCOhost” as the title. This means that I’ll be doing most of the data entry by hand, since I primarily use citation managers for academic purposes.
**Edit:Â It looks like the problem is with EBSCOhost databases–I tried getting the same article from a ProQuest database and it worked as advertised.
It allows you to “attach” files to records, but these are actually links to local copies of the files (so I keep the saved articles on my flash drive). Once files are attached, I can choose to “view file”, which opens it in the browser, or “show file” which opens the local folder the file is saved in. I primarly use PDF so that I can comment on documents, so I will need to open the file in Acrobat (and not Acrobat Reader). The citation manager also allows for “notes,” but these refer to the article as a whole, which doesn’t help me.
Zotero also allows me to create relationships between citations, tag them, and organize them into folders. These features will become useful as I prepare articles and bibliographies.
Last, the extension allows the user to input a citation, and then click the “locate” button to search for the article at George Mason University (one of the sponsoring institutions). In the future, I hope to see Zotero allow local searches. This could come in quite handy when searching GALILEO!
It looks like future versions will include citation sharing, and perhaps exporting in different citation styles.
I stumbled upon Zotero while looking at reference management software in Wikipedia. It looks like it could be very beneficial to researchers as well as students, and I look forward to seeing what features they add.
Cliff November 7th, 2006
One of the cons of being a Reference Librarian is that you have to work some weekends. Those weekends that I don’t have to work, I try to “get stuff done.” This last weekend, this consisted of my battle against the dreaded disease Packratitis. Being the archivaholic that I am, I save everyting with the hopes of one day cataloging it for future generations. And when I say I save everything, I mean that. From graduation cards, to notes from my mom, to ticket stubs from concerts. All of this has piled up over the years to create a giant mess in my home office.
My final decision? Photograph the lot and toss it. Yes, throw it away. I figure that it will save more of my sanity points in the long run to have it photographed and tagged (making it searchable while preserving the memories) rather than having it take up space and me never putting it into scrapbooks. Trust me, it was a tough thing to do. And since packratitis is a often a hereditary disease, my mom about went into fits when I told her.
But I did save some things, such as my sister’s wedding announcement, and a handwritten letter from my grandmother. These things can’t really be replaced, and even though I’m backing up all the pictures, I don’t want to risk losing the original artifacts. Altogether, I currently have around 540 pictures, and I’m not done. I’m not going to set the majority of them as public on flickr, but at least this way I will be able to organize them.
Somewhere admidst all of this home memorabilia preservation, I got the sudden urge to garden (?!?!). So with a little help from Dennis, the neighbor’s cat, I weeded the side garden and put down ground cover. Imagine my surprise to find that I still had peppers growing from two seasons ago. I dumped ‘em in a flower box, and we’ll see if they make it through the winter. I’m thinking of giving up on veggies this year, and just planting herbs and flowers. Any suggestions?
