Ms. Dewey

HA! this is great. one of the faculty at CUA, Joan Lussky, sent this on to me. Try it out!

Extreme Internet Searching

In class last night I picked up a few quick searching tricks for using the following engines:

www.ask.com
www.exalead.com
www.google.com
www.yahoo.com
www.live.com


Plug these little puppies into your search box and you can perform very quick and effective advanced search of the internet:

* intitle:term searches for keywords anywhere in a title (ex: intitle:brady quinn browns)
* allintitle:term searches for pages that have all words in the title (ex: allintitle:three little birds)
* inurl:term searches for keywords in url only, useful for searching government websites. (ex: inurl:.gov)
* site:term limits search to one particular website (ex: site:cua.edu)
* filetype:term limits search to specific file types, useful if you're looking for, say, a powerpoint example on a topic. (ex: information literacy filetype:ppt)


Of course these major search engines all have advanced searching capabilities which walk you through these but this is much faster once you get the hang of it!

Spamdexing

Last night in my Internet Searching and Web Design class I learned that back in the real heyday of the internet in the 1990's, spammers figured out a few tricks to get their webpages up to the top of the ranking.

Wikipedia has a great overview of Spamdexing, tricks spammers have tried to manipulate web search engines.

One in particular involved loading their pages with certain keywords because the frequency of an occurrence of a word in a page would grant that site relevancy.

Luckily search engines are more sophisticated now but what cracks me up is that spammers would put all these words in their pages but then hide them by coloring the text the same as the background. So back in the day when you searched for info on say "autos" and got a XXX site that's 'cause they secretly typed out 'autos autos autos autos' all over their webpage! heh. (which frankly you might not have even noticed even if the text WAS visible on an XXX site....)

Anyway, now engines are a lot smarter and can do things like search for color on color as well as check for too MUCH frequency of a word.

Moodle

Information literacy is by far one of the most important elements of public librarianship and can take many forms such as teaching basic computing skills (how to use Word for instance), helping senior citizens navigate the Medicare Program website, or creating research guides for using the library.

Moodle is a "course management system designed to help educators who want to create quality online courses. The software is used all over the world by universities, schools, companies and independent teachers. Moodle is open source and completely free to use."

Perfect for the public library, no? Sadly a look through their directory comes up empty for public libraries in the US. BUT I found a pretty good example (login as a guest) put out by the 21st Century Fluency Project, which taught a course on moodle "Powersearching in a Web 2.0 World" which is essentially a perfect information literacy topic for a library to cover.

Baby steps to ebook reading....

E-paper is a whole new deal and it will blow your mind. It is nothing like a traditional computer screen that generates the light and screen flickering that strains our eyes. (My eyes just dried out thinking about it...) Instead, it is a flexible plastic that reflects light much like a piece of paper does. In fact, you can even write (AND erase) on it.



So we're working towards a solution for ebook readers in terms of comfort.

eReaders with the new ePaper display:
Cybook Gen3
Sony Reader
iRex Iliad

but there's still a wee problem:

NetLibrary and Overdrive (the main providers of ebooks to libraries) both wrote back to me and confirmed that at this time, they don't know of any eReaders that are compatible with their ebooks. Sigh.

This is because no one knows how to share. Each new eREADER with this fabulous technology makes it so that you have to download software that forces you to purchase books from their stores (sony uses Connect) and each PROVIDER is unwilling to remove the DRM requirements that would allow people to download their content to these eReaders.

Another problem? These eReaders are EXPENSIVE! So even if the ebooks were compatible with these flashy new devices, your average public library patron wouldn't be interested because they can't afford the nice viewing experience.

Sadly, there's a long way to go but I have a lot of faith in the trickle down theory....

Plastic Electronics....

In library studies we spend a lot of time thinking about how we will be expected to deliver information in the future. This means that we have to start thinking NOW about how best to structure our digital info for delivery via, say, contact lenses. Heh.

Steve Museum: A Social Tagging Experiment

I'm in this ridiculously great course at Catholic University, Art & Museum Librarianship whereby for a week straight we visit fascinating art museums and other cultural institutions all around Washington D.C.:

The National Gallery of Art
The Smithsonian Libraries
The National Archives of American Art
The American Folklife Center
The National Museum of Women in the Arts
University of Maryland Art & Architecture Library
University of Maryland Performing Arts Library
National Museum of the American Indian
The Thomas Jefferson Foundation Library and Monticello

Anyway somewhere along the way I picked up this neat website, Steve Museum an experiment in social tagging. Anyone can participate in this ongoing research project that will help develop new ways to catalog and describe works of art through social tagging. Just sign up and flip through images of art and start describing!

"See art you haven't seen before. Look in a new way. Describe works of art in your own words. Exchange your ideas with the community of art lovers. Lead others to artworks they wouldn't normally see. Create a personal relationship to works. Let museums know what you see. The more you tag, the richer the experience for all."