Week 1 Task 2 Google Scholar

Sorry to be doing tasks out of sequence; believe me for a logical thinker like me to do this is well outside my comfort zone, but needs must!

I am going to review Google Scholar, although it isn't in the top ten list, because
(a)I want to draw it to people's attention and
(b) I've already done the work which I published as a Library Guide at http://www.library.bham.ac.uk/searching/guides/g04Google_Other.pdf

Google Scholar is Google's academic search engine, aimed at finding published material like journal articles, books, technical reports etc of relevance to students and researchers in higher education. As a librarian I recognise its value for our students, but want them to be aware of its strengths and weaknesses - hence the Library Guide mentioned above.

I would also like to make a plea for people to make more use of Google's Advanced Search, which allows you to not only makes the use of the Boolean 'and' and 'or' more obvious, but also allows you to refine your search to different domains like .ac, or looking for different formats such as .pdf. This results in fewer, more relevant results.

Any comments on my Library Guide would be most welcome as I'm always looking to improve it.

Bill - how can I get this to a wider audience than just on my and Lisa's blog?

Week 2 online task 1

What I like about RSS readers is that you can bring all the information you are gathering into one place, although I still might prefer to have it all coming into my email account so I only have to check one place. The big challenge is information overload - I'm not sure how I'm going to read all this stuff. I haven't' gone into it deeply enough yet to be confused, but I'm sure it will happen.

Week 2, Activity 1 - RSS feeds and Readers

The main thing I don't like about RSS feeds is that it can feel like information overload sometimes if the feed that you are following updates too often.

I think anybody using RSS feeds needs to really consider what they want to be getting updated about so that they only get a manageable amount of updates.

From showing students how to set up RSS feeds for research alerts I find that most of them start enthusiastically but when I talk to them later on in the course they have stopped looking at their feed readers. The less places people need to log into and check for information the better. This could be the advantage of something like iGoogle, if you are already using Google mail as your main page.

I know that the Uni Portal already has a number of RSS feeds that students can follow, but this will be much improved once the new service is launched that allows students to add their own RSS feeds to the My Place tab in the portal. Students already log into the portal on a regular basis and there will be no need for another username and password. It will be interesting to see if students follow their RSS feeds for longer once they are in the Portal.

JISC Web 2.0 study

UKOLN are doing a JISC funded project looking at how the academic sector are using Web 2.0 tools. Take a look at their blog for more information and to add details about how you are using Web 2.0 tools:

http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/jisc-sis-landscape/

Activity 3 - a useful blog for me

This blog is all about books and portable devices: http://handheldlib.blogspot.com/

This blog is clear and easy to read, and is about a topic that I have an interest in. The only bad thing about this blog is that it only has occasional updates, but they are good updates. I'd rather have quality and useful blog posts than lots of long useless ones. This blog is supposed to have 5 contributors but it appears that only one of them has updated the posts in the last 2 years. This blog could potentially benefit from the others contributing on a regular basis. So a key point with blogs is how to you motivate a team to add regular entries?

Activity 3 - confusing blog

The first blog that I have looked at is called Confessions of a Science Librarian: http://scienceblogs.com/confessions/

I found it confusing to understand who his target audience was, was it other science librarians, friends, or just his own personal online diary. For me the content was very mixed. Some of the content is detailed information about science librarian conferences that he has attended and the next entry are his top five songs. I don't like this mix of content, so from this I'm guessing that a blog should really have a target audience who you can imagine yourself addressing with each entry. I also found the font size of the text to be very small and hard on the eyes to read.

Some of his posts are a little too long and I think that short to the point entries work best.

I did like that he had a photo of himself as it made the blog some more personal

Activity 2 - Delicious

I had a look at the delicious bookmarking tool: http://delicious.com

I have used this service for some time as I found that the my favourites on my computer were getting out of control. Delicious helps me to keep the details of any important websites to me in a clear and usable fashion. I have downloaded the toolbar onto my browser so that I can easily access and add new websites to my account at any time. I have found it best to give the websites keywords so that I can quickly find them again in the future. Anything that I come across that I think is useful for the ILWG group, I tag with the keyword ILWG so that I and other members of the group can easily locate these items in the future.

When I'm adding a website, I sometimes find it useful to see who else has been adding that website to their accounts and to see if they have links to any other useful items. This can help me to expand my knowledge in that area. I could use the service more by following these people, so that I got more information about what they are tagging. It can also be useful to do a keyword search in delicious rather than google, as you can get very good hits arriving at the top of the screen.

I could create delicious tags or URLS for groups of students to make it easier for them to find good quality websites on their topic.