Knowledge Leadership Associates

The future: how will e-books affect libraries and the culture of reading?

Peter G. Underwood — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 16:14:12 +0000

Val Skelton has an interesting set of comments on the future of e-books in the 8 December 2011 issue of Information today Europe, where she reviews the proceedings of Online Information 2011 . Several speakers noted that the book industry is becoming somewhat like the music industry, with more consumers downloading material than entering a music store or bookshop. Inevitably, this will change the way in which media are marketed and will also have a profound effect on the way in which we shop, especially when the new generation of e-books become available. These are likely to offer a different experience of reading and provide better search and index facilities. What does it mean for libraries? Probably that services need to be geared to the “socially-networked” reader; however, what the impact might be in an African context has still to be explored.

The future: how will e-books affect libraries and the culture of reading? is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Beware phishing attempt: Google Wallet for Business Beta

Peter G. Underwood — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 09:18:50 +0000

A new “phishing” attempt that is circulating is an invitation to install what appears to be a beta development of Google Wallet, called Google Wallet for Business Beta. The invitation arrives as an e-mail and looks very convincing. At the bottom is a “copyright” statement:

©2011 Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043 You received this email because A Google Wallet user [soch0653] has requested to pay you using Google wallet. . Wallet For Business Beta is available free for a limited time. If you choose not to complete registration you will not receive further email communication from Google regarding your invitation.

Consign it to the wastebin — it is an attempt to discover your credit card details and relieve you of money!

FraudWatch International maintains a regularly-updated guide to phishing attempts: http://www.fraudwatchinternational.com/phishing/index.php

Beware phishing attempt: Google Wallet for Business Beta is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Zotero Personal Bibliographic Manager — new Android and iPhone applications enhance its functionality

Peter G. Underwood — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 12:43:09 +0000

Zotero has become a popular choice for those seeking a free and open-source Personal Bibliographic Manager (PBM). In addition to its many useful features, several independent developers have produced helper applications (“apps”) for use with cellphones using the Android operating system. These apps are mostly aimed at the tiresome end of using any PBM: getting the metadata into the system.

Zandy is a well-configured application that allows users to edit and view their Zotero libraries, add new items, and work offline. This means that metadata can be added easily and from various locations, such as a library or when conducting research. So, instead of scribbling notes (and then losing them) about new publications, an Android (version 2.2 or above) user can capture the metadata and upload to a personal Zotero datafile. Costing R31.35, it offers a lot of functionality and future releases promise even more.

Let’s go a little further: how about being able to scan the barcode of a book and automatically capturing the metadata about it? This is what Scanner for Zotero offers for a price of R15.64. Scan the ISBN barcode of a book with an Android (version 1.6 or above) phone, and the software will add the book to a personal Zotero datafile.

If you are an iPhone user, then BibUp may be of interest. It is also a scanner but provides the additional functionality of photographing specific pages to be collected, on which BibUp will even perform Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Users of the iPod Touch should note that the low quality of the images captured by its camera makes effective use of this application difficult.

ZotFile Reader eases the transfer of Zotero-based files in Portable Document Format (PDF) to and from mobile readers like Android devices and the iPad, by automating the attachment of PDFs to Zotero items, and the renaming of those files according to conventions decided by the user.

Quite a feast of useful applications! it is well worth following the Zotero blog for information about other useful innovations and, also, for some excellent advice and tutorials on using Zotero.

Zotero Personal Bibliographic Manager — new Android and iPhone applications enhance its functionality is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Facebook, Linkedin . . . I haven’t got time!

Peter G. Underwood — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 08:17:15 +0000

You know the feeling: everyone is talking about the use of social media, even in our information services domain. Many librarians and information services managers are making use of it to promote the use of information resources, launch discussions about searching techniques and search engine features — but how do they manage the time? Lisa Buyer is coming to your rescue: her article, “18 minutes a day to social media time management” (Search Engine Watch, 12 October 2011), provides some simple and effective guidelines. In summary she suggests a three-step process:

Plan your use of social media a first activity of the day: make this a regular entry in your work diary and do not let this activity be displaced.
Commit a certain amount of time to using the social media and set an alarm to monitor its use.
Review what has been done at the end of the working day: do not take this aspect of work home with you!

She also suggests that one should be rigorous in deciding in what to get engaged and what to ignore. So, if you cannot see the value of responding to invitations from colleagues or friends to join them on some social networking site, then don’t — and don’t feel guilty about it.

Facebook, Linkedin . . . I haven’t got time! is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

How to make your own e-book

Peter G. Underwood — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 07:39:03 +0000

There are many e-books available in a variety of formats — but suppose the text you want is not available in an e-text format? What if you wanted to create your own e-book for personal use or to convert it from a common format such as Portable Document Format (PDF)? Two software applications may be useful. Sigil, is a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) open-source, XML-based, ePub editor that is free and available in versions that will run under Windows, the Mac OS and Linux. Sigil allows you to produce an e-book in the ePub format (which is an open standard) by either importing text in HyperText Markup Language (HTML) format or by copying-and-pasting text from a document in a .txt format (other format import options will also soon be available). With the exception of the Kindle, the ePub format is accepted by all of the major e-book reading devices. In the case of the Kindle, processing the Sigil-produced text using Calibre will convert it to the format used by Kindle: .mobi — which is an abbreviation for “Mobipocket” — try http://www.ehow.com/facts_5563134_file-extension-mobi.html for further information. If you wish to read more about these possibilities, an article by Mark Sample, “Create your own e-book with open-source Sigil” (Chronicle of higher education, 12 October 2011), is a good place to start.

How to make your own e-book is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Google at thirteen

Peter G. Underwood — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 05:13:24 +0000

Did you notice what happened on Tuesday? Google celebrated its thirteenth birthday! In a thought-provoking piece, Danny Goodwin acknowledged this moment and reviewed the recent history of Google in order to remind us that the “terrible teens” can affect companies and organisations as well as people. His article, in Search Engine Watch of 27 September 2011, identifies twelve major developments that have occurred during the previous year and warns that these may be symptomatic of the behaviour of the search engine company in the future. In a summarising comment, Goodwin says, “Google faced several lows – luring Bing into public fights, revealing their Facebook envy, releasing baffling algorithmic improvements, facing public humiliation in the form of mainstream news stories calling out the quality of Google’s results, and relinquishing $500 million for accepting advertising from online Canadian pharmacies, but also had several highs – Google bought several shiny new companies (retail therapy?), Larry Page returned to his role as CEO and cleaned house, Google saw record revenues, Google introduced a suite of Instant products, and Android continued to grow”.

Google at thirteen is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Citation mapping

Peter G. Underwood — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 06:00:41 +0000

Bibliometrics is an information science technique that aims to show the relationships between documents; however, the results have often been difficult to understand and the real meaning obscured by mathematical and statistical relationships. A new approach is being developed by three researchers at the University of Washington, United States of America: Carl T. Bergstrom, Jevin D. West and Martin Rosvall. the essence of the work is to develop a mapping technique that can be used to capture the associations between patterns of citations and, thus, to map relationships. In her article of 11 September 2011, Jennifer Howard explains the origin and reasons for developing the technique (Citation by citation, new maps chart hot research and scholarship’s hidden terrain, Chronicle of higher education, 13 September 2011). Their system, InfoMap, makes use of a statistical technique called “Eigenfactors” that provides a rather more sensitive measure than the Journal Impact Factor that has been so widely used. The researchers aim to make their system freely and easily available. Rosvall and Bergstrom’s paper about the technique as applied to the development of neuroscience, Mapping change in large networks (PLoSONE, 5(1) doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0008694) explains the technique and highlights its advantages.

Citation mapping is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Marketing our services

Peter G. Underwood — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 06:41:15 +0000

Ned Potter, in his guise as “The Wikiman”, has produced excellent guidance on the seemingly-simple task of marketing our library and information services. Simple, yes, but all too easy to get wrong. His blog entry of 25 August 2011, Three simple marketing rules all libraries should live by… can be summarised as:

Market the service, not the content: tell the potential user what your service can do, not what it contains.
No-one cares about the “how”! Market in terms of the benefits of using the service, not how it works.
Market what THEY value, but continue to do what WE value: know what it is that users want or need to do and orient marketing to that.

If you are designing a marketing campaign for your service, his blog entry is required reading — and don’t miss the second part of the entry!

Marketing our services is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

DuckDuckGo receives plaudits

Peter G. Underwood — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 06:08:31 +0000

DuckDuckgo, the search engine that offers searching without snooping, has been selected by Time Magazine as one of the fifty best websites of 2011. The search engine was launched in 2008 by Gabriel Weinberg and is remarkable in having only one full-time employee! It has built its reputation on offering excellent searching and allied this with the promise that searches will not be tracked and recorded — many search engines, including Google, keep records of searches and link them to Internet Protocol (IP) addresses so searches emanating from a particular computer can be tracked.

DuckDuckGo receives plaudits is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Related material: a Google extension

Peter G. Underwood — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 15:58:40 +0000

There have been various attempts at providing links to suggested related material when searching — some approaches have been successful and others have merely added to the dross that accumulates during a purposive search. Google has just released an extension which may prove quite useful. It adds a “Google Related” bar to the bottom of the browser window and, through an analysis of searches conducted, assesses what might be considered “related”. If you do not object to this scrutiny by Google, find more details about the extension at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/find-more-while-you-browse-with-google.html and make your own decision about whether to install it.