january staff meeting - delicious bookmarks

delicious is a service for finding, saving and sharing links. This is sometimes called social bookmarking. Other social bookmarking services include digg, stumbleupon, and reddit.

The new library subject guide pages use links stored in delicious.

• This allows us to give all staff access to our links, so they can be edited at any time, by anyone (as long as they have the password).
• Delicious allows us to import links lists into our webpages automatically, without editing them.
• Delicious uses tags, which gives us more flexibility in how our links are grouped. It also gives us powerful tools for making changes to whole groups of links at once.

How do tags work?
A tag is just a descriptive keyword applied to an item. Tags are similar to subject headings in that they organize information and make it retrievable. Unlike subject headings, tags are usually created on the fly and usually do not belong to a formal hierarchy.

• Tags are used on many websites, including LibraryThing, Flickr, and blogs.
• Many library staff have trouble getting used to the chaos of tags, but many patrons find them intuitive and useful.
• One item can have unlimited tags, and these tags can describe different aspects of the item.

When we save items on delicious, the tags we use make it possible for us to find bookmarks again. They also help improve the description of that link provided by delicious, which is useful to the whole community using the site.

This tag cloud shows all the tags used in our delicious account so far. The tags correspond to the categories and sub-categories used in our old Selected Sites pages. The larger tags have been applied to more pages.

You can access our full list of tags by clicking on “Tags,” next to the blue-headed bookmark man.




How to save a new bookmark:
The options in the right-hand menu include “Save a new bookmark.” If you click on this, you will arrive at the “Save a new bookmark” screen:

Complete, at least, the URL, title, and tags fields. Once a bookmark has been saved, you can edit this information at any time by clicking on the word “EDIT” below the title and description.

The words in the bottom right corner of the bookmark entry are the tags used for that link. The number in the top right corner is the number of other users who have saved that link. The default way these bookmarks are sorted is by date; the other way to access them, of course, is using their tags.

What to save? This delicious account is replacing our Selected Sites (which will soon be removed from the website altogether). If you stumble upon a link you believe is useful enough to save, especially if it is a difficult subject to research or a frequently asked question, go ahead and add it (even if that Selected Sites page was not your responsibility).

delicious: sign in
delicious: our account
delicious: help

From LibraryJournal: Tags Help Make Libraries Del.icio.us

Current tag cloud:

Beyond TAL: The Finest Union Catalogues the Internet has to Offer

Sorry it took me so long to post these. If anyone is interested here are the links from my training session about union catalogues.

• WorldCat (OCLC - 1.4 billion items)
  Advanced options/features: Keyword search, limit by format/publication date/audience/language; select only results in fiction/non-fiction/biography/thesis
  

• AMICUS (Library & Archives Canada - 30 million records from 1,300 Canadian libraries)
  Advanced options/features: Keyword search, subject browse, limit by date/format/language, specific target audience, specific publication type (including government publications!)
  

• LibraryThing (User-driven website - 38,549,578 books catalogued [4 million + titles])
  Advanced options/features: Search using tags (including combining or excluding tags!)—great for compiling book lists or doing readers’ advisory; includes reviews and recommended “readlikes”
  

• AlouetteCanada
  Search Canadian digital collections including records, diaries, photos, artefacts… from a large number of contributing institutions including libraries and archives
  
  
• The European Library
  Access the 48 national libraries of Europe from one portal. Includes books but also all kinds of other materials, including digital resources. 150 million records.
  

• Google Book Search
  7 million titles in full text (although not all books are browsable cover to cover), with advanced search functionality.
  

• OpenLibrary
  The goal: “One webpage for every book.” 20 million records with a wiki interface and philosophy. A project of the Internet Archive. Audience: public rather than libraries.
  

Canadian Copyright Online: What Libraries Need to Know

Canadian Copyright: 5 bullet overview

• Copying of recorded or published materials in Canada is governed by the Copyright Act, first ratified in 1921.
• Copyright protects ideas as expressed in a particular form, not the ideas themselves.
• It applies to "original literary, dramatic, musical and artistic" works.
• The standard term for copyright is 50 years from the death of the author.
• Strathcona County Library pays a licensing fee to Access Copyright which gives our staff and patrons the right to photocopy—as a rule of thumb, up to 10% of a published work (such as a book) or one entire newspaper article, short story, play, poem, essay, etc. from an anthology or serial.

Libraries’ Rights
Libraries have specific rights that are set out in the Copyright Act. First, libraries can copy works in order to maintain and manage their collections. For example, a library can make a copy of a rare work it owns if the work itself is in danger of deteriorating.

Libraries also have certain rights that control what they can provide to their patrons, especially through interlibrary loans. Libraries may copy an entire article of a scholarly, scientific or technical nature for a patron. They can also copy all other periodical articles, as long as the article is at least a year old at the time the copy is made. These copies must be for private research or educational purposes, and these rights apply only as long as no commercial alternative is available.

Fair Dealing
What is called “fair use” in American copyright law is known as “fair dealing” in Canada (although the two are NOT exactly the same, as fair use extends much further and is more clearly defined). Fair dealing is the use of copyrighted works for one of the following five uses: (a) private study, (b) research, (c) criticism, (d) review or (e) news reporting. Much of the copying patrons engage in could be considered this type of use. More specific guidelines for what constitutes fair dealing have never been defined by Canadian legislation or court decisions. Fair dealing is a legal defence, in the sense that only the courts can determine if a particular use of a copyrighted work is fair dealing or infringement.

Fair dealing covers only the five types of use outlined above. It has nothing directly to do with the amount of the original source used, whether the copier profits from the use, or whether the source material has been altered. These factors may be considered as part of a fair dealing defence, but any standards set using these criteria are arbitrary and do not come from the law.

Copyright Collectives
There is no central agency in Canada that registers all copyright holders. The closest thing to such an agency is copyright collectives, which represent groups of copyright holders, authorizing copying and collecting compensation on their behalf. The main collective for English-speaking Canada is Access Copyright (http://www.accesscopyright.ca).

Copyright Online
A common conception is that material available on the Internet is not subject to copyright. Even if we know online material is copyrighted, we often tend to act as if we believe it isn’t. In the eyes of the law, material published online is no different from any other type of published material, and reproduction of online works is subject to the same restrictions as the use of any other copyrighted material.

The exception to this rule is websites and other materials that are intentionally published with alternative licenses. For example, all the text of Wikipedia is licensed under a GNU Free Documentation License. Therefore, Wikipedia authors do not retain their copyright, and the content from this website can be used in many ways. Many blogs (including this one), photos and academic papers published online are given Creative Commons licenses by their creators. Creators can specify how their content can be re-used, rather than taking advantage of the blanket protection offered by traditional copyright. These alternative forms of licensing are developed because creators do not want their works to be subject to all of the constraints of copyright. They voluntarily give up some of their rights to make their work more freely available.

The Digital Music Exception
Canada is one of the few countries where copying of music onto blank media (CDs, cassettes) is legal, because music industry copyright holders are compensated through a levy that is paid by consumers on such blank media. Such copying is legal even if the copier does not own the original recording. To constitute a legal copy, the recording must be for private use only, and it cannot be rented, sold, or distributed in any way. Uploading a file (which usually happens automatically with the use of a peer-to-peer network such as LimeWire) is not necessarily legal, however, and it is not covered by this levy.

End User License Agreements and Digital Rights Management
The way libraries can provide access to information is often dictated by End User License Agreements (EULAs) and other types of contracts. Even if all you do is click on “I Agree,” or even open a shrink-wrapped CD-ROM, this may constitute entering into a contract, which supersedes copyright law. EULAs apply to many electronic resources such as databases, and they often prohibit use that would otherwise be considered fair dealing—including, in some cases, making copies of any kind.

“Digital Rights Management” (DRM) refers to any type of control that is placed on an electronic product to determine how it is used or distributed. For example, some audio CDs cannot be copied to a computer. Like EULAs, DRM can prevent use that could be considered fair dealing. One of the most important aspects of copyright reform in Canada is whether it is legal for users to circumvent DRM.

Often, electronic products have “use rights” instead of “ownership rights” attached to them. Both DRM and EULAs affect how users can access materials, even materials that they have purchased or that are in the public domain. DRM and EULAs can result in digital products that can are useful in only very limited ways. They can also have serious, negative ramifications for the privacy of end users.

Resources

For finding public domain or un-copyrighted material:

• Compfight: http://www.compfight.com/ - A search engine that searches flickr. Turn the “Creative Commons” setting to “Commercial” to find images that can be used for any purpose.
• PicFindr: http://www.picfindr.com/ -A search engine for stock photo sites. Photos may be watermarked.
• Public Domain Music: http://www.pdinfo.com/ - A site to identify public domain music and lyrics.
• Prelinger Archvies: http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger - one of the Internet’s largest film archives, containing advertising, home movies, educational films and ephemera in the public domain.

For learning more about copyright:

• Canadian Intellectual Property Office – Guide to Copyrights. http://snipurl.com/2xgkh
• Canadian Library Association’s Copyright Resource Centre. http://www.cla.ca/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Copyright_Information
• Copyright Act. http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/C-42/index.html [note that a bill to revise the Copyright Act, Bill C-61, was tabled last year and will likely be re-introduced in 2009.]
• Laura J. Murray and Samuel E. Trosow. Canadian Copyright: A Citizen’s Guide. 346.710 MUR 2007.
• Media Awareness Network: Canadian Copyright Act Overview. http://snipurl.com/2xert
• University of Alberta – Copying Right. http://www.ls.ualberta.ca/copyrightoffice/copyingright.htm

Two copyright bloggers:

• Laura J. Murray at http://www.faircopyright.ca
• Michael Geist at http://www.michaelgeist.ca

Google and Meta Searching

Google Tips and Tricks

Google automatically “ands” search terms, and excludes common words (“stop” words) and most punctuation. Google automatically stems words (use phrase searching to avoid this). Word order in search affects how results are ranked. Use capitalized OR to “or” search terms.

Boolean Operators for Google: OR, +, - , ( )

Quick Look-Ups

To Find:	Type:	Example:
Time anywhere	time location	time Lima
Weather anywhere	weather location	weather Edmonton
Word definitions	define:term	define:pedantic
Stock information	stock:abbreviation	stock:GOOG stock:MMM
Get a cached version of a page (When a site is down)	cache:URL	cache:http://www.sclibrary.ab.ca

Perform conversions and calculations

To Perform:	Type:	Example:
Conversions	x in y	70 in in m 4 tonnes in pounds
Math calculations	numbers and + - * / ( )	4*7 (15*3)/7
Currency Conversions	amount in currency	1 USD in CAD 1 Canadian dollar in Australian currency

Search limiters - Retrieve fewer results

To:	Type:	Example:
Search within a single site	query site:www.domain.com	cabinet site:www.gov.ab.ca
or type of site	query site:.domain	entrance requirements site:.edu
Limit to a single file type	query filetype:extension	presentation filetype:ppt
Exclude a particular file type	query -filetype:extension	presentation -filetype:ppt

"Fuzzy" searching--retrieve more results

Tilde (~) adds related terms to a search: for example, “~auto loan” will also retrieve car loan and truck loan

Recommended links:

Googling to the Max [From Berkeley Unviversity] [PDF] - a guide to Google searching features, with a focus on in-depth research.
Google Labs - Google's page for their new and upcoming features and projects
Google and Libraries Wiki - This wiki is based on the Netspeed 2008 Presentation "Google and the Future of the Public Library," delivered by Kay Cahill and Michele Pye. It includes lots of tips on how libraries can use Google features, including some more in-depth ones not covered here.

Answers to questions I sent out:

• Question 1: use a phrase search, eg., "Namey McName" OR "Namey P. McName"

• Question 2: define:alacrity
  This function retrieves definitions from all over the Web
  

• Question 3: 1 Canadian dollar in US dollars, or 1 CAD in USD
  Note: This will work even if you don’t know the abbreviation, or even the name of the currency you are looking for. You can just say “Chinese currency” or “Russian currency” or whatever.
  

• Question 4: search the job name (possibly in parentheses) followed by site:www.macewan.ca. This is mainly helpful if you know the URL of the site you are searching. (Note: Many sites will have their own internal search, but the quality of these search functions varies. This can be a good workaround if you find the internal site search for a particular site is not giving you good results.)

• Question 5: search “hot chilli peppers” –band and/or –music

• Question 6: Time Toronto (This will provide time zone information as well)

• Question 7: Search “effective e-communications” filetype:ppt
  Note: The filetype is the actual file extension. .doc for Microsoft Word documents, .txt for text files, .mp3 for MP3s, etc.
  

• Question 8: use brackets and OR to combine search terms. Recipe (Kenya OR Tanzania OR Uganda)
  

Meta-Searching

Examples of meta-search engines

• Dogpile
  http://www.dogpile.com/
• Surfwax
  http://www.surfwax.com/
• Clusty
  http://clusty.com/
• MetaCrawler
  http://www.metacrawler.com/

How Does Meta-Searching work?
Advantages:

• Can search the deep/hidden web
• Can retrieve more results and a greater variety of results than a single search engine
• Reduces interference from a single search engine—for example, if a page has an artificially high ranking in Google or Yahoo a meta-search engine may help to compensate
• Can provide more in-depth tools for organizing and limiting results

Disadvantages:

• Within aggregated results relevance rankings may be skewed—best results may not always be at the top
• Sponsored results may be interspersed among results without adequate disclosure
• The quality of meta-search results is limited by the quality of the data in the databases being queried. Many meta-search engines use free or small search engines for source data

Recommended link: MetaCrawlers and Meta-Search Engines [Links to many of these services including reviews)

Tell Me More Language Learning

"Tell Me More Language Learning" is a new product we have added to our databases. It
is an online program for learning languages, including:

• German
• American English
• Dutch
• French
• Italian
• European or Latin American Spanish

This database is an excellent recommendation for patrons who are traveling, or learning a second language for fun or in school. Because it can be used to learn English, and the interface is available in any language, it could also be recommended to patrons who are learning English. Tell Me More contains glossaries and word look-up features, but there are quicker and easier ways to quickly look up a translation.

Tell Me More is not a traditional database. It does not contain articles. It is an interactive, multimedia program that includes videos, dialogues, and exercises to learn language for business or everyday life. It "remembers" what you have already learned, and it includes a proficiency test to help users establish what level they are at.

Signing up for a Tell Me More account is free, but it is quite an involved process. The interface is not particularly intuitive, and users may require help and encouragement when they begin using this product for the first time.



These screenshots show what you will see of Tell Me More the first time you log in.

The Welcome Screen: The first thing you have to do is login, or create an account.

Create an account: This is free, and only requires a single screen to fill out. It DOES require an email address, and patrons may need encouragement to get past this step (you can't explore the content of the database without creating an account, but it is relatively painless).

Choose your language: Once the account is created, the next step is to select the language you want to train on. One account can include learning programs for multiple languages. Select your language of choice in the top right.

Multimedia: An example of the type of content this database includes. Users may require headphones and, ideally, a microphone to get the full advantage of using the program (however, content can be accessed without audio).

Other considerations:

• Guided vs. Free to Roam mode
• Tell Me More opens in a pop-up window, may require pop-ups to be temporarily enabled (to see where to find this feature in IE, see below)
  Tools > Pop-up blocker

Links:

SCL's database list
TellMeMore.com - Auralog, the makers of this product.
For information specific to libraries, see Libraries

Training materials from Auralog:
Getting Started
Quick Reference Guide