ASIS&T@UBC’s next Cool Tools Day will be Tuesday November 8th in the Terrace Lab from noon to 1pm.

Cool Tool days are an informal means of sharing and learning about helpful tools. Some that might improve your scholastic skills and others that are just fun to know about. We also welcome new presenters with hidden gems or just new ways to use technology. You don’t have to member of ASIS&T to present or attend – everyone is welcome.

You can see the schedule on our wiki and sign up as a presenter here. Presentations are 5 or 10 minutes in length including a minute or two to ask and field questions. The wiki also contains re-caps of the previous Cool Tools days if you’re interested in learning more about what sort of content is covered.

Thanks and we hope to see you there!

What: Cool Tools Day
Where: Terrace lab @ SLAIS
When: Tuesday October 4, 2011 noon-1pm

Cool Tools Day is an event we put on to share some of the neat tech tools that are useful for infopros like ourselves. Last year we talked about DropBox, bookmarking accounts, podcasts, visual search engines, visualization tools, screencasting software, and loads more.

You can sign up to present on our ASIS&T wiki-page. (It’s really informal and a good way to practice explaining technology in a short amount of time.) If you don’t want to present and are just interested in learning about tools, come on down. There will also be coffee and some sort of snacks.

IMPORTANT: You do not need to be a tech-nerd to attend or even to present at Cool Tools Day. Please come and share your knowledge.

Thanks to everyone for coming to the Dewey Know Our Trivia fundraising event last week. It was a lot of fun and a tight race to the very end. The top three teams were:

1. #winning
2. Brian Patrick & Woodrow Wilson
3. See Also:

We raised some money and had a good time. Many thanks to Shannon, Mahria, Heidi and Jessie for organizing the event and to Koerner’s Pub for providing us with a location. Do you think we should do more of these next year? Let us know in the comments, or you could show up at our next event and talk to us in person.

What? A next event? Why yes! On Tuesday March 15th we’ve got our final Cool Tools Day of the term in the Terrace Lab from 12:30-1:30pm. Learn/share about some nifty tech tricks before it’s too late. Too late because we won’t be doing any more until at least September. Sign up here!

Also, we’re going to hit you up for coming to our last meeting of the year on March 29th. If you’d like to be involved with ASIS&T@UBC next year we’ll be holding elections at that meeting so let us know if you’re interested.

Just a reminder that our first Cool Tool day of 2011 is coming up on January 25th from 12:30-1:30 in the Terrace Lab at SLAIS.

What is a Cool Tool Day? I am glad you asked. You know those little bits of technology you use that make your life easier? That’s a tool that is cool. Would you like to tell other people about this fascinating little gem? That too is cool. Come and share with your colleagues!

Generally we’ve been doing web-based things or little bits of software that are easy to demonstrate in a computer lab (if it’s software that needs to be installed it’s generally easier if you bring it in on your laptop but we can figure it out if you let us know what you need), but we’re open to any short information-technology-type presentations.

So come and share, or come and learn about the tools other people use! They’re just 5 minute presentations (we have a strict timekeeper) and good low-pressure practice for presenting information to a bunch of interested people.

We’ve got a signup sheet on the ASIS&T wiki. (Also on that page is a brief list of the Cool Tools from last term. You can get more information about those previous tools here and here.)

If you want more information about Cool Tools day and how you can participate, you can also come to our regular ASIS&T meeting this Tuesday January 18 from 12:30-1:30 in the Trail room. We’ll be discussing more than Cool Tools and we’d love to see people from the new cohort. All are welcome, technophiles and technophobes alike.

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.

When: Tuesday, September 23rd
Time: 11:30AM-12:30PM
Where: Terrace Instructional Lab, SLAIS
Who: ASIS&T@UBC

Workshop will be conducted by 2nd year SLAIS student Maureen Bezanson. All SLAIS students are welcome to attend to learn the basics or share their own wiki knowledge. Please RSVP to asist.ubc@gmail.com if planning to attend. Thanks!