What I Learned Today…

Web 2.0 and programming tips from a library technology enthusiast, What I Learned Today… covers blogs, rss, wikis and more as they relate to libraries.

Monthly Archives: September 2006

Innovate

September 2nd, 2006

I’m so glad that Agnese Caruso at Slaw mentioned Innovate the other day.

Innovate: Journal of Online Education is a bi-monthly, peer-reviewed online journal focusing on the innovative, creative ways information technology is used in corporate, academic, and government settings to enhance the learning process. Articles are authored by leaders in information technology and education, including librarians, professors, program administrators, and software designers. You can search articles going back to October/November 2004. Innovate also hosts webcasts with the authors.

I’ve signed up! And I’ve also signed up for their portal which is where their free webcasts take place. I love finding free webcasts and webinars that I can share with our staff – we all get together in our multi-purpose room and watch together – free online education!

Some Google Goodies

September 1st, 2006

I just read on Google Operating System about two new goodies. One I can’t get to load – so I’m going to send you to Google Operating System to read what they have to say about it. This one is Google Image Labeler. It apparently lets you add tags to images found in Google’s image search to help them with their indexing. Learn more from the people who actually got the page to load.

The other is an open source OCR program called Tesseract. Google announced that they have released Tesseract (originally an HP program) into open source because the people at Google…

are all about making information available to users, and when this information is in a paper document, OCR is the process by which we can convert the pages of this document into text that can then be used for indexing.

Sounds interesting – I doubt it will replace my Abbyy FineReader, but it’s interesting to keep an eye on.

Koha Libraries

September 1st, 2006

I’m loving having IM open!

This morning I got to talk to Chris, a Koha developer. He gave me a link to a list of Koha libraries. The one thing to keep in mind is that this is just a list of the libraries that have told them they’re using Koha – there may be others out there (if you’re one of them make sure you get added to this list).

Another place to see what ILS people are using is lib-web-cats (if your library isn’t listed – it should be :) ).

Handy Spam Tip

September 1st, 2006

First, let me say – Gmail is great! I love it. I have no idea why they heck people make such a big deal about Yahoo! Email.

That said I have recently been getting some strange spam messages that Gmail’s filter isn’t catching. Turns out I’m not the only one. This tip from Lifehacker tells you how to stop those spam messages that are actually images with text on them. I haven’t tried it yet – but I’m off to set it up now.

Upcoming

September 1st, 2006

Yesterday I found Upcoming.org – an event listing site. Why not add your library events? I added all of the classes for the night school I’m a board member of – and I’ll be sending the site to our Head of Professional Development at work.

It was very easy to add my events. Venues are stored in their database and if your venue isn’t there you only have to add it once and then it’s available to everyone. It also checks to make sure that your event isn’t already listed by showing you events at your venue on that same date. There aren’t many members yet – but every little (free) bit helps.