Hi there everyone, especially those of you just starting at SLAIS. If you’re coming here after meeting someone from ASIS&T at the LASSA orientation on Wednesday, thank you very much for following up the face to face into the digital. I’m not sure that makes an entirety of sense, but let’s roll with it.

ASIS&T@UBC’s most visible function throughout the term is running our Cool Tools days in which you (yes you!) get to tell your peers about the cool digital tips tricks and tools you use. You can also come and just absorb information if you want. (Check out some notes from previous Cool Tools Days on our wiki.) We haven’t scheduled our first Cool Tools day of the term yet but we’ll be doing that at our first meeting.

That meeting is scheduled for Thursday, January 12 from 12pm to 1pm in the Trail Room and we hope to see you there. Also, we’re on Twitter @asistubc where we’ll try to keep you informed as to what’s going on.

We’ll post the minutes from the last meeting of the year sometime soon, but before that I just wanted to thank everyone for coming to all the events we’ve had this year. Also thanks to Bronwyn for writing up such a nice post about our Cool Tool Days for HackLibSchool (which you should completely be reading if you’re at SLAIS).

Special thanks to our outgoing executive members Mahria, Tosha, Shannon and Jessie, who made this an efficiently-run student group that did a bunch of useful and fun stuff. It was a pleasure working with you all. We had elections at the meeting today and hopefully Andrew, Adam and Jamie will be up to continuing the work come September. Expect more trivia and tools that are cool and research and all that good stuff. We don’t really do meetings in the summer semester, so the blog here’ll slow down a bit. We’ll try to keep some content trickling through on our linkblog to tide you over.

The coffee and donuts at Cool Tools days (along with the gifts for the speakers we have come in) don’t pay for themselves. Shocking, I know. Supporting SLAIS Research Day is another part of our mandate that takes cash. So, to raise some money, we’re joining up with the SLAIS Librarians Without Borders student group for a trivia night fundraiser. (I’m unsure which group is responsible for the punny title. Perhaps that will be a trivia question?)

Who: SLAIS students, faculty, staff, alumni, and community members
What: Trivia Pub Night: Form teams of 2-4 to compete for a round of beverages
When: Wednesday, March 9, 5:30 – 7:30pm
Where: Koerner’s Pub, in the basement of the Graduate Student Centre at UBC
Why: A fundraiser for SLAIS student groups ASIS&T and LWB
How: Pre-register your team to guarantee a table by emailing Heidi at hkschiller@gmail.com, or just show up at the door!
Cost: $20 suggested minimum donation per team (cash only please)

For more information, email Heidi at hkschiller@gmail.com

Want to find out more about LWB? Here’s their website.

Thanks to everyone who came out for our chat with Rex and Allan today. If you couldn’t make it (or your memory was affected by whatever delicious lunch you were eating – my chocolate cake was distracting me early on) here’s a quick recap.

Discussion ranged over a bunch of topics, most of which were about being a non-traditional librarian. Both Rex and Allan have jobs that aren’t exactly the things that put them in the majority at library conferences, which is something most of our attendees seemed interested in. They talked about funky titles librarians in other academic systems have and how that actually makes a difference in how you’re perceived outside of the library field. Both of them talked about the importance of marketing ourselves as information problem solvers before being librarians. We’re the humanizers of the computer science tools, which is a role that needs filling.

The other thing was how little our schoolwork matters in professional life and how we should be diversifying our experiences to be good infopros, constantly upgrading. This is something I’ve heard from a bunch of visiting professionals in my year here at SLAIS, and is a good reason for coming out to our ASIS&T@UBC events! (I’m sorry for the gratuitous plug, but really, getting involved is a good thing to do.)

That’s the main gist of how the talk went. My (very) rough notes are online if you want to take a look. They’ll be giving a talk on the New Age of Librarianship in April at the BCLA conference in Victoria (their talk is scheduled for Friday morning).

Thanks very much for taking time out of your schedules, it was a well-spent hour.

When: Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Where: IBLC 460
What: ASIS&T@UBC is very happy to announce that information professional Rex Turgano (founder and editor of thegreenpages.ca) and a couple of his info-professional friends will be having an informal, bring your own lunch Q&A session with us.

This’ll be a good chance to talk to someone who uses the IT side of his information training in a number of different ways. If you have questions about how IT is used in an academic environment like UBC, bring ‘em. If you have web startup kinds of questions, bring them. If you have general “what will I do with my career?” angst, heck, bring that too! (Note that this lunch may not be enough to cure your angst in and of itself.) It should be a fun informal kind of chat. There’s no set agenda, just a chance to talk to some techie information professionals like we might be some day.

The event is open to all SLAIS students, but there is limited space available, making it first come first serve. So if you want to attend, just send us an email to let us know to save you a spot. If in the event that all spots are taken, Jessie’ll put your name down on a wait list. If you do sign up but later realize that you can no longer attend the lunch, then please let Jessie know so we can let people on the wait list in.

Bring your questions and lunches February 23!

When: January 18, 2011 12:30-1:30 pm
Where: The Trail room (just off the SLAIS lounge with all the windows)
What: It’s a meeting. We’ll welcome new/interested folk, talk about Cool Tools Day 3 which is coming up in January (you can sign up on our wiki now if you want), see where we’re at in the t-shirt design contest thing, and more! So much more!

As Jessie said in her email “All are welcome to attend! Techie skills are NOT a requirement, so please don’t feel shy if that’s a concern!” Hope to see you there.

So January 4th is almost here and we’ve got a new cohort arriving, and hopefully checking out this website here. If you are new, welcome! Just so you know, ASIS&T@UBC is the student group for all you techy kinds of archivists/librarians, but it’s not intimidating. I mean, we have a few programmers hanging around, but there are lots of history majors and the like too. Basically, if you know or don’t know about all the latest technology type things that affect information science and like to learn about them, we’d love to have you come to our meetings and participate in our events.

Our next meeting is going to be January 18, at 12:30pm, and then a week later (that’d be January 25th at the same time but a slightly different place) we’ll be having our first Cool Tools day of 2011. (For future reference here’s a handy calendar showing when all the SLAIS Student Groups have their meetings/events and such. See, this is what ASIS&T@UBC does: helpful things.) We’ll post more information here about both of those January events (and more) as time keeps dragging us into the future.

Until then, welcome and we hope you’re ready to scowl at the overused suffix “2.0″ (or maybe it’s just me who’s hoping that). In any case, don’t scowl at Susie for having to teach you about it, okay?

Date: November 9th, 2010
Time: 12:30 – 1:30pm
Location: SLAIS Terrace Lab

Presenters and their “cool tools” (also available as a PDF)

Will “Firebug & Firesheep”
Firebug

• Shows html, css for each element in a web page
• Can test/see how styles were implemented to specific elements
• Look at layout (ex. pixels in padding & layout)
• Other features – will tell you what elements are causing issues if pages are having trouble loading
• Can help identify errors/messy code (it’s nice to have clean code)

Firesheep Sidejacking

• People can use cookies to steal your information
• Dealing with cookies – install it in your firefox for when using wifi networks
• Making sure you use secure wifi networks
• Should see https if the wifi is secure instead of http

Alex “Yahoo Pipes”

• Interface is confusing, but should be aware of the tool
• Can send RSS feed links to friends etc.
• Can use for sending filtered (types of) images from flickr

Meghan “cIRcle”

• UBC Digital repository
• SLAIS graduates’ work are not being heavily represented
• Contribution to cIRcle helps increase visibility, helps students, helps for future job opportunities (ex. can send employers links to works)
• Uses open source software
• Think about submitting your papers for showcasing your work
• In sending paper, student is not giving up copyright
• Just need to 1) sign form to say cIRcle can showcase it on the site, and 2) have a professor email cIRcle saying “yes this is a good paper.”

Catie “blekko”

• Search engine uses slash tags in search box
• ex. search query can be watchdog /Christian … Recipes /vegan … Recipes /vegan/ gluten-free … etc.
• If a slash tag doesn’t exist in the list of slash tags, you can add it to the user index
• The user generated libraries added to the index is makes this search engine different
• So the user searches through the site’s original list of slash tags and users’ added slash tags

Tosha “GazoPa”

• Image search engine
• Search by image (not by keywords – no words needed)
• Upload, draw, or type in URL of image to search
• For example, upload an image and get results of similar images and information on how similar retrieved results are to the searched image
• Can change view of results
• Good for finding information with an image that would be very difficult to describe using words
• Has flickr option, so you can search through license types for images (fair use or copyright)
• Can retrieve information about the subject in the image
• Advanced search with colours, shapes etc. to find other related images
• Cross-language
• If you upload your photo, it doesn’t get added to the images searched – but it does stay on their server
• You can add text to your image

Cynthia “Foxit”

• free for downloads
• PDF reader tool if you want something different from Adobe
• Can add annotations/notes to all pdf texts (not same restrictions as in Adobe)
• Text recognition is a little wonky, but still okay
• Add notes to highlighted sections of the text (icon put in the margin)
• Write comments in the margins of the text (easy to add and delete)
• All notes are visible and readible in the actual document

Alex “Mendeley”

• Mendeley is another type of reader that also allows for annotation in notes and also is good for creating bibliographies.
• Foxit is good for editing pdf when done (ex. good for signing a pdf document etc.)
• In January a PDF conference in california will be held for fixing the tool

Justin “ebook management”
Calibre

• Open source e-book management
• Tag all books, metadata
• Conversion tool – take a pdf and convert to other style of document
• Features include ability to set it up to sync through wireless to your phone from your desktop at home
• Built in e-reader (for epubs and other ebook formats)
• Possibly useful for annotation – need to explore that option

ManyBooks.Net

• didn’t want to be locked into the system from Amazon/Kindle
• Good site for finding public domain ebooks with better interface than Project Gutenberg itself
• Can browse through different categories – ex. creative commons
• Get in different formats (html etc.)
• Also check Baen who have a good good selection of older or advanced reader copies for sci-fi DRM free and for cheap.

Qinqin “Wink”

• Free download – capture screen shots for creating instructional videos etc.
• Can set it to capture many screen shots/frames over a set period of time
• Can use voice overs/audio track to accompany video
• Create video project of frames taken, edit frames, copy and paste frames, set time duration for viewing of each frame
• Set streaming medium in firefox
• File size is very small
• Can send to friends
• Compatible for Mac and PC use
• Limited features, but good for creating basic videos

Shannon “What I Learned Today”

• Blog by Nicole C. Engard (Director of Open Source Education for open source library systems)
• Talks a lot about gadgets
• Library based tech blog and other library related topics that might not be found elsewhere
• Useful for keeping track of information related issues
• For example, getting announcements about Facebook’s privacy setting changes etc.

Comments/suggestions from participants:

In posting summary notes of tools presented, tools should be hyperlinked to their live web urls.

Attention all SLAIS students and faculty,

With all the positive feedback and suggestions from our last Cool Tool Day, we’ve decided to have another event! All are welcome, no previous tech skills or knowledge required. If you want to give an informal 5 minute talk about a “cool tool” you like using or heard about, a sign up sheet will be posted soon.

The date: November 9, 2010… the time: 12:30 – 1:30… the location: Terrace Lab

Coffee and cookies will be served in the SLAIS lounge right after the event!

For those of you who missed the last event, here’s a recap of who presented what.

Last Thursday, March 4, UBC’s ASIS&T student organization hosted another in its recurring student-led workshop series. Members Alex Garnett and Justyna Berzowska led 20-minute presentations on the open source citation management platform Zotero, and the collaborative wiki solution PBworks, respectively.

Approximately twenty SLAIS students were in attendance. Alex began with a functional overview of how to import several different resource types into Zotero, as well as how to make use of its built-in web annotation and PDF metadata lookup features. He concluded with a demonstration of the Microsoft Word 2007 Zotero plugin, using just a few clicks to compile a brief bibliography of the books, journal articles, and websites he’d worked through as examples.

Justyna began the workshop’s second half with an overview of best practices for using PBworks, including effective sidebar management and the logistics of embedding files in the workspace. She also provided a demonstration of some of the embeddable “gadgets” available within PBworks (e.g. a calendar), noting a favorite quandary of web design: “Is this useful or shiny?”.

Both students remained afterward to answer questions and engage participants with the software in greater depth. Cheers, guys!