One of my favorite new blogs to read is Prof. Hacker. They take such a no nonsense approach to technology and productivity in higher education.
Most recently, they wrote a post about blogging and tenure: specifically talking about your blogging efforts in your tenure notebook. The author of the post included the paragraph he included in his notebook about his blog and said this:
I want to highlight that I did not present my blog as a piece of scholarship. I considered it to be a part of my professional development, meaning it played a vital role in the creation of my scholarship even though it was not scholarship itself.
However, I have seen a number of blogs written by professors (even some here at Baylor) which I would definitely include in the “piece of scholarship” column. The author of the post asks those in the comments to state the ways they wrote or talked about their blog when they went up for tenure, and many of the commenters mention that they do consider their blogs to be serious scholarship.
Perhaps in another post here at InfoSandbox, I will list some of the great blogs I have found that Baylor professors write.
I just learned about PubMed-EX, a new Firefox Addon which performs text-mining on any record in PubMed and provides additional background information on key terms in little pop-up boxes. A great feature if you regularly search PubMed.
If you are one of the many who have discovered the extraordinary power of Zotero in collecting, managing and citing your research references, but have previously used RefWorks – never fear! You can very easily export your current library in RefWorks and import it into Zotero. Here are the steps:
To export your RefWorks library for use in Zotero, click “References” and then “Export.” Choose which references to export and set the output style to “BibTex – RefWorks ID” and click “Export to Text File”. It should come up as a webpage, so in the browser window click “File” then “Save as” and save it as a text file.
In Zotero, click the button that looks like a gear and choose “Import.” Just double-click the text file you exported from RefWorks. The new references will be added to a collection named “Imported” followed by the date and time.
Adblock Plus: Ever been annoyed by all those ads and banners on the internet that often take longer to download than everything else on the page? Install Adblock Plus now and get rid of them.
Morning Coffee: Keeps track of daily routine websites and opens them in tabs…
Coral IE Tab: An enhanced version of IE Tab which enables you to use the embedded IE engine within tabs of Mozilla Firefox. It supports Adblock Plus in IE, and can sync cookies between IE and Firefox.
LeechBlock: LeechBlock is a simple productivity tool designed to block those time-wasting sites that can suck the life out of your working day. All you need to do is specify which sites to block and when to block them.
TimeTracker: Do you spend too much time on Firefox? Do you open tabs faster than you can close them? Cannot get things done? Keep track of how much you browse with TimeTracker.
Read it Later: This Firefox extension allows you to save pages of interest to read later. It eliminates cluttering of bookmarks with sites that are merely of a one-time interest.
Dictionary ToolTip: Press ctrl+shift+K (or) double-click to see its meaning. This extension is ideal for those who doesn’t like to switch their window to see the meaning of a word.
WeatherBug: Get live, local weather conditions in Firefox with the WeatherBug extension. Featuring forecasts, radar, and severe weather alerts from WeatherBug’s community of neighborhood weather.
Some other addons that other workshoppers have mentioned:
Session Manager: Session Manager saves and restores the state of all windows – either when you want it or automatically at startup and after crashes. Additionally it offers you to reopen (accidentally) closed windows and tabs.
Xmarks: Xmarks is the #1 bookmarking add-on. Install it on all your computers to keep your bookmarks and (optionally) passwords backed up and synchronized. Xmarks also helps you uncover the best of the web based on what millions of people are bookmarking.
I’m at a workshop on Zotero at Emory University at the moment, and I’m currently testing the citation format drag and drop option.
Kern, M. Kathleen. Virtual Reference Best Practices: Tailoring Services to Your Library. Chicago: American Library Association, 2009.
Kovacs, Diane K. The Virtual Reference Handbook: Interview and Information Delivery Techniques for the Chat and E-Mail Environments. New York: Neal-Schuman Publishers, 2007.
Google Scholar and More: New Google Applications and Tools for Libraries and Library Users. London: Routledge, 2009.
Today I learned about a wonderful serendipitous research/learning moment an MFL faculty member here at Baylor had after coming to my RSS presentation a few weeks ago. During my presentation, I showed the group Baylor Libraries’ new materials RSS feeds. She immediately added the new German books feed to her shiny new Google Reader account and in doing so, found this book, about Franz Kafka. She checked it out because she was planning on teaching a course on Kafka next summer. Well, it turned out to be a fabulous book which has revolutionized the way she is planning to teach the course, and she never would have known it was in the library were it not for that RSS feed. She’s now hooked on RSS and all the delightful and interesting tidbits it can deliver to her. And I’m convinced even more about how RSS can revolutionize your teaching and research.
If you have a faculty/staff homepage using WordPress (http://homepages.baylor.edu) RSS feeds are automatically built in. Start publishing your own RSS feed today! Contact Lance Grigsby to set up your homepage.
Congratulations to Pam Sessoms, who was just named a 2009 Library Journal Mover & Shaker. Pam is one of the co-creators of Libraryh3lp, which is the software that the Baylor Library librarians use for their chat reference service. We started using libraryh3lp back in April 2008, and it has improved our service tremendously. We now have the ability to transfer the questions we receive over instant message to other service points in the library and to subject experts. We route all of our IM clients through one easy to use interface. Pam and Eric (her husband and the other co-developer) keep working on new innovations for the service too, based on the feedback they receive from the library community. For instance, just a few days ago, they announced a new way to do SMS reference via libraryh3lp, using Google’s Android phone! It’s that kind of innovative thinking that makes Pam deserving of the Mover & Shaker award.
Commoncraft has done it again with a great short video on a few common web search strategies which will help to target the results you get while searching.
This blog is a place where I post my thoughts about libraries, technology and library technology topics and post links to other sites of interest. It is my information sandbox to play in.
