SHUSH!

It has been a while since I have felt moved to contribute to Shush! but I am so excited about this tool that I simply have to share it. The tool is called Prezi and it is a really slick piece of software for producing presentations.

Instead of the very linear approach of MS Powerpoint, Prezi adopts a ‘mind map’ style of presentation - meaning that you can move from a big theme to a little one, and jump to a related area with a squeak of your mouse - great if you wish to be flexible when interacting with your audience. (Traditionalists can still define a straightforward ‘path’ through their presentation and navigate using arrow keys if they prefer.)

Limited use of Prezi is free; you can see sample presentations at http://prezi.com/; and the presentation that got me all fired up? - that was Theo Andrew’s and it’s available here.
Go on - take a look!

Thanks to Roddy MacLeod, Joss Winn and the JISC-REPOSITORIES mailing list, I’ve just had great fun generating tag clouds for various web pages and chunks of text. A tag cloud or word cloud is a visual representation of how frequently specific words are used in a block of text. So the more frequently a word is used, the bigger it will appear in the tag cloud. You can see the Shush! word cloud on the blog’s home page.

TagCrowd and Wordle are both tools for creating your own tag clouds from web pages and text files.
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After over a year of plotting, planning and piloting, NECTAR has finally arrived!

NECTAR (the Northampton Electronic Collection of Theses and Research, to give it its full title) is the University of Northampton’s open access institutional repository – the place where university members can make their research outputs visible and accessible to the rest of the world.

As of today there are some 87 bibliographic (metadata only) records in NECTAR and two full text items. Waiting in the wings are hundreds more metadata records, representing the university’s full research output for 2007 as well as items submitted to the recent Research Assessment Exercise.

Over the next weeks and months we will be gathering and uploading the work behind the metadata – the full text of articles and papers as well as multimedia items. Students will be able to see their tutors’ work, and members of the research community will be able to see what their colleagues have been up to – they may even find new opportunities for collaboration.

If you have any questions about NECTAR, please look at the NECTAR FAQS or contact the NECTAR team at NECTAR@northampton.ac.uk

I’ve just come back from my annual pilgimage to the ‘Online Information’ exhibition in London. There were the usual range of information products, seminars and freebies, and a few new toys to get excited about.

Checking out a couple of presentations to share with my colleagues, I came across ‘Slideshare‘, “the world’s largest community for sharing presentations on the web”.

The purpose of my visit was to find Karen Blakeman’s ‘Searching without Google: alternative tools for more expert searching’.

Both Slideshare and Karen’s presentation are worth a look. But don’t forget - if you want further information you can always ask your Academic Librarian.

Sorry - the headline was a cheap attention grabber. I just wanted to say hello from Durban in South Africa where I’m at the 73rd IFLA general conference.

I was lucky enough to win the trip from the information supplier, Proquest (who says nobody ever wins those exhibition stand prize draws?). I arrived here on Sunday after a 30 hour trip (a hideous experience I dread repeating to get home), and have been on the go ever since.

The conference sessions are varied, as is the quality of the presentations, but the whole international dimension is both inspiring and thought-provoking. The disparites between the western world, talking about ‘virtual learning commons’ and the like, and the African nations, struggling with internet connections and bandwidth, really bring home how lucky we are at Northampton.

The downside of the trip has got to be the pervasive fear of muggings. I’ve been OK because my hotel is right beside the conference centre and I’ve not been anywhere alone, but it is true - several delegates have already been attacked. This isn’t a place I would choose to live.

Are you a research student or a research active member of staff? If so, I’d love to hear from you. I’ve recently been appointed to a new role in Information Services - that of ‘Research Support Specialist’ - and I’ll be working alongside IS colleagues to meet your information needs.

Over the summer I’ll be doing some research myself, to get up to speed on how best I can serve the research community here. I’ll also be working with the rest of the project team to develop NECTAR - the Northampton Electronic Collection of Theses And Research. I’ll be keeping you informed on that project as it develops.

In the meantime, if you have a question, please do contact me by email (miggie.pickton@northampton.ac.uk) or phone (extension 2245). Or if you’re in the library anyway, just drop by for a chat - I’m based in the Academic Librarians’ office on the first floor.

Many thanks to everyone for contributing to the discussion on categories and tags for Shush!  (see Categories or tags?)  Everybody was in favour of some type of organisation (with most of the respondents being library folk, how could we not be?) and categories were the preferred method.

Following Julie’s recommendation I therefore propose that we divide the posts into the following categories:

• Library updates (new services and resources, promotional events etc)
• News and views (information in the news, opinion pieces)
• Subject support (UoN course related information)
• Tools and tricks (new gadgets from the web)
• Web discoveries (sites we’ve found and want to share)

All we need now are some suitable names for the new categories… as ever, all comments gratefully received.

Having recommended this site twice in the last week, I thought I should share it with you.

www.nationmaster.com is a great database of statistics covering a huge range of subjects: crime, health, media and sport are but a few on offer.  If you want to know a country’s GDP per capita in 1820 or how many times a country has lost in the World Cup (Mexico is the greatest loser) then this is the place to look.

Don’t take my word for it - check it out for yourself.

As a born-again librarian I am getting increasingly twitchy about posts on Shush! disappearing into the big black hole that is the ‘General’ category.  The control freak in me is just itching to organise them into something sensible and orderly.

One option is to choose a new set of meaningful categories (’Help’, ‘Tips’ or ’Rants’ for example); another is to go for the web-friendly system of using tags.  Tags are simply short descriptive labels, chosen by the writer of the post - for this post I might choose ‘tags’, ‘categories’ and ‘blogging’.

What do other folk think?  Should I be allowed to impose order on the blog, or shall anarchy rule?

Here’s another useful screen capture tool - FastStone Capture.  Like Snippy, it lets you copy chunks of your screen, but FastStone Capture then lets you do a lot more with it.  Check out the ‘Capture scrolling window’ facility which allows you to copy the whole of a web page - not just the part you can see on screen.

FastStone also offers some clever looking image handling products.  Image Viewer is an image browser, converter and editor - if your application won’t recognise your image then use Image Viewer to save the image in another format.  Alternatively, use MaxView, another product for viewing and manipulating images - have a look at the FastStone website for details of all their freeware.

Personally speaking, I love finding out about new free gizmos on the web - so if anybody reading this knows of a really useful freebie, please do let me know.

Snippy is a great free screen capture tool. You’ll need to download a small program first but then just click on the Snippy icon in your toolbar and select an area of screen.

Both rectangular and freehand snips are possible. The resulting image can be saved to disk (several formats are offered) or pasted straight into an email, document or whatever.

Sometimes the simplest things are the best.

Everyone knows that the purpose of a search engine is to locate web pages containing your search terms.  That’s what they’re there for, and some of them are very good at it.  But will the results you get from Google (say) be the same as the results you get from using the same terms in Yahoo? 

The answer is probably not.  (more…)

… no, not SHUSH! but the History Matters “One day in history” blog.  October 17th has been chosen as the day upon which we are all asked to keep a one day diary and upload it to www.historymatters.org.uk.  The hope is that the collective musings of the masses will contribute to an historic record of British life.

Next Tuesday has been chosen, not as a special day, but as an “ordinary weekday of no particular significance”; likewise, the intention is to record the “ordinary and mundane lives of citizens”.  So, you don’t have to be doing anything special, just tell it how it is.  You could even use it as your excuse for a first try at blogging.

The diaries uploaded will be held by the British Library, so you never know, your ramblings may be studied by the historians of the future. 

Grab yourself a slice of immortality at http://www.historymatters.org.uk/output/Page95.asp.

OK, I’m a librarian, and librarians like to organise things, but even before I thought of this career I was using lists for everything.  Shopping, holiday packing, Christmas cards, household chores - you name it, I would have a list for it.  Starting with the back of an envelope, in no time at all I could come up with a set of at least eight things that were essential to my list-of-the-moment.  The difficulty was, my list would invariably not be where I wanted it - I’d stick it on my fridge door when I really needed it at Sainsbury’s, or I’d leave it on my desk at home when it should have been at work.

So my excitement knew no bounds when I discovered a type of list that I could access and update from anywhere.  (more…)

This is the ultimate objective of EThOS, the Electronic Theses Online Service. 

The JISC-funded EThOS project mentioned in the most recent edition of ‘Shelflife’ has now successfully fulfilled its objective of a financially viable prototype web-based UK theses service.  Both the prototype and an Institutional Toolkit, designed to help universities introduce electronic theses to their institutions, were demonstrated at the project’s final seminar at the British Library on Monday 11^th September. 

If EThOS progresses to a live service, researchers will be able to search and freely download the full text of doctoral theses.  Added value services such as thesis printing and the provision of copies on CD and DVD will also be offered by the British Library, a major sponsor of the project. 

There is more about EThOS on the project web site at http://www.ethos.ac.uk/