nirak.net - Musings of an LIS Student

The title is, of course, supposed to ruffle some feathers.

I was reading reviews on the book “Eat to Live: The Revolutionary Formula for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss” and found this comment:

“Fuhrman does cite many scientific journal articles, but most people will not be able to access those articles to see if they truly support his statements.”

On one hand, I feel like the reviewer is naive to expect all researchers to use publicly available data, and on the other hand, I can totally see where he/she is coming from. Not many local libraries carry the expensive databases needed to verify the research, and not everyone has access to a university library. Isn’t it reasonable for people to expect that they can check to make sure an author is doing the research? Isn’t it great that people are even interested in critically analyzing works?

Will we see the tides turn, when information locked behind a pay wall is not cited by popular writers because it lacks credibility with the general population? Would this be a good or bad thing?

Photo of the “Pay Wall” here: http://flickr.com/photos/cgc/1200935/

karin :: Dec.23.2007 :: Information Literacy, Library, Open access/Open source, Sites and Stories :: 5 Comments »

Just a random collection of cool stuff where I live.

OLPC’s for Lincoln Schools

The Cooper Foundation, a local grant giving institution, has given a grant to buy XO laptops in Lincoln Schools.

“President Art Thompson said the final grant approved for the year was $8,000 to the One Laptop Per Child Foundation for 40 laptops. Under their Give One Get One Program, 20 of the laptops will be sent to a developing nation and 20 more to Lincoln.

The One Laptop Per Child Foundation’s mission is to stimulate initiatives designed to enhance and sustain the effectiveness of laptops as learning tools for children living in lesser-developed countries. The laptops coming to Lincoln will serve that same goal for children here.

The Cooper Foundation is working with the Foundation for the Lincoln Public Schools to develop plans to distribute the laptops.”

From “Cooper Foundation grants more than $1 million in 2007” in the Lincoln Journal Star.

I’ve heard tell of people in other locations whose schools have not even heard to the OLPC program, so the fact that LPS has taken the initiative to pilot the program is great.

Blogging Police Chief

As Michael Stephens recently pointed out, Lincoln’s police chief, Tom Casady, has his own blog. He’s a great blogger, and amazingly frank. A great example of engagement is this post, where one of the people he wrote about responded in the comments. Oh, and you can also learn the chief’s stand on zombie attacks.

It’s like geocaching for people without a GPS

Lincoln has a new initiative called “Lincoln Safari” where you use a map to go visit some out of the way places in Lincoln, take a rubbing of the signpost, and for some locations you’ll get a trinket. From the website:

“Lincoln Safari will get families and other groups of people off the couch and into unstructured corners and hidden places within Lincoln thus encouraging a sense of exploration and discovery. It will provide opportunities throughout the year to experience the natural environments in the Lincoln community.”

People can get the kits at any local library. Sounds fun! And, it’s free. I’m going to go pick up my kit today.

karin :: Dec.19.2007 :: Local, Misc, Sites and Stories :: No Comments »

I’ve had my OLPC for about 24 hours now, so I’m going to post some initial thoughts. I’m sure I’ll have plenty more to say later.

First, I am so very happy with the purchase. It is, indeed, a machine for children. It’s small, it’s fun, and, most importantly, the programs encourage creativity over productivity. This is the single biggest advantage of the OLPC. There are a limited number of programs, to be sure, but the programs play together very well, and make me want to make things just for fun.

One of my favorite features of the OLPC is the built in camera and photo/video taking software. You can turn the computer into a photo booth contraption, which is quite fun (and something I know I would have LOVED as a kid.) The camera is not very high quality (the recordings are no better than most cell phone cameras, the photos are 640×480.) but it looks pretty good on the XO screen, which, for most kids, is all that’s important.

When you take a picture, it’s automatically logged in the “journal” - the combo file system and system activity log. The journal is a hard concept to wrap your head around at first. Instead of saving files to a hard drive in a particular folder, everything is saved chronologically. You then have the option to go in and tag the photos to organize them, add a description, etc. You files are searchable through the journal interface, so finding something is a matter of either remembering a keyword, when it was done, etc. Since everything is logged, parents can easily check on what a kid has been doing.

I didn’t like the journal system of saving files at first. It’s just so different from the way I am used to dealing with files on a computer- but really, it’s much like the way I save, say, blog posts or Flickr photos. Now that I have used the system a big more, I like it a lot. The file system is built into the computer, so when I go to upload a picture to Flickr, I’m presented with the journal interface to find the file, not the place where the file actually is on the computer. Incidentally, uploading to Flickr takes a very long time - mostly because it takes forever for the journal/finder/exploreish interface to come up. I’m hoping someone will hack the system to either add a quick Flickr upload feature or make it possible to upload to Flickr straight from the record (photobooth) program.

There is a terminal program, so one can still navigate to files (via command line) and copy them elsewhere. I have not delved into command line much- I know how to bring up the terminal through the applications, and how to switch the computer to text only , but then I’m asked for an admin name and password, which I don’t have. I’m wondering if I missed the login name and password somewhere?

The other thing I really like about the interface is how sharing between applications is built in. You can take a picture and send it to another program, or use the journal to open up a documents from one application in another application. I think the collaborative features across the mesh network will be a lot of fun. I can’t wait to try out the collaborative features with other OLPC owners (right now, I know of my mom and my co-worker. If there are others, let me know!)

A few other random observations and thoughts:

The touchpad works pretty well- better than a lot of laptops I have had, actually. I don’t know what’s up with the two areas to the right and left of the touchpad, though. I read that they were supposed to be a stylus sensitive area, but there’s no stylus, and nothing I have works on it.

Although the touchpad is good, in some programs it is a little laggy, most noticeably in the drawing program. this makes it near impossible to draw anything, which is a shame. I’m sort of hoping that either a future generation will have a touch screen (it seems a natural fit) or that they come out with a drawing device. I see tremendous creative possibility here, but it’s a little stilted right now.

The python program Pippy looks like a lot of fun, but isn’t really all that useful for learning python without another source- unless I’m missing something. It would be great if they could get a combo textbook/programming environment like Hackety Hack on the OLPC. I think Pippy will be a very nice place for me to teach myself programming, though.

The word processing program underlines misspelled words, but I can’t find a way to replace the word with the correct one. This may be a feature, though. For me, having spellcheck always available as a kid probably would have made me an even worse speller than I already am.

The keyboard is tiny. I can actually type fairly quick on it - but I have small hands and I can’t type that fast anyway. You can hook up a USB keyboard and it works just fine. Hooking up a mouse works too. I really like the springy feel of the keys.

The black and white feature is OK. It really is beautiful and clear, but the contrast just isn’t that good. I think the device has tremendous potential as an e-book reader, though. I hope that the screen technology gets even better (though I am quite pleased with it as is.)

Networking is a little spotty. The machine will always pick up the unsecured networks around us, but I have only been able to pick up our in house (secured) network once. The other times it just hasn’t shown up. When I did connect via our network, the web experience was pretty zippy.

karin :: Dec.16.2007 :: Free as in Freedom, Linux, Sites and Stories :: 2 Comments »

When I talk about RefWorks and Zotero, the one feature mentioned that RefWorks can do and Zotero can’t is sharing. Right now, the only way to share materials in Zotero is to export and re-import. Even this has some major advantages over RefWorks: you can export the materials themselves, and your notes and annotations, not just the citations. However, the RefWorks method of sharing bibliographies, especially within an institution, is useful.

So I was excited to see the first article about Zotero’s sharing feature (at least, the first I have seen). I was curious about how the sharing would work, and this article answered a lot of my questions. It’s better than I had hoped. Easy uploading of scholarly materials, and, get this, the Internet Archive will run Optical Character Recognition and store the materials. How cool is that?

Laura Cohen picked up on one particular quote on her blog: “an effort at George Mason University seeks to bypass libraries entirely.” I read the quote as an offhand comment. Obviously, scholars are going to still need libraries- the new sharing system will only handle copyright free materials. Scholars will have to “complete an online form with legal assurances” that the work can legally be uploaded. The majority of materials don’t fit into this category… yet. My hope is that the system will be so fantastically awesome that people will want to use material they can upload- say, open access.

Laura said: “I see no evidence that academic libraries have it in them to band together to sponsor a project like Zotero Commons. We don’t have the group vision.” I think we do. I hear librarians talking about Zotero all the time. They’re promoting it to their students, featuring it on their web pages. Many are supporting Zotero. I’m guessing that many will support this new initiative as well. (Side thought: could this supplant, bolster, or even replace institutional repositories? Drag and drop uploading is an improvement over the current system.)

There are a lot of questions, still. The most pressing one for me, right now, is that I have not kept track of which materials in my Zotero database can be shared and which can’t. There has to be a method of tagging sharable items- and a way for scholars to mark their own content as sharable (by the way, Creative Commons is running a donation drive until December 31st). I am optimistic that these ideas will be addressed, and that librarians will be part of the conversation. Now, whether that means that libraries can be part of the conversation remains to be seen. I certainly hope so.

Edit: Dan Cohen has posted on his blog: Zotero and the Internet Archive Join Forces.

karin :: Dec.12.2007 :: Free as in Freedom, Library, Open access/Open source :: No Comments »

I meant to post this before, but, well, I didn’t. This is the video I created for my Library Use Instruction class. I wish I could link to my classmate’s tutorials, because they were very good.

Design video from karindalziel on Vimeo.

If you link over to the vimeo page, on the bottom right, you can download the full size Windows Media version. Feel free to do with it as you will.

I am a little ambivalent about this project. I think the concept was good, but I feel I could have illustrated my points more clearly.

I used CamStudio and I may have used recordMyDesktop to record the screen. I used Inkscape for the design of the flier, and Windows Movie Maker to put it all together. I also used Power Point for the slides (I just got Office 2007 and wanted to play) but I could have used Open Office Impress just as easily.

I started out trying to do this entirely with open source software, but settled for free (as in free beer) software. Video editing, unfortunately, still has a ways to go. But it is getting better- I have no doubt that soon I’ll be able to ditch Windows Movie Maker as well.

karin :: Dec.12.2007 :: Free as in Freedom, Library, Linux, My Stuff, Open access/Open source, School Stuff, Tutorial :: 3 Comments »