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.

Present: Adam, Kristoff, Jamie, Joy, Andrew, Mary.

• Cool tools days re-cap: We still need to put a write up on the Wiki. Discussion also turned to re-organizing the wiki to better suit our long-term needs of transferring information from one exec group to the next.
• Next cool tools day set for November 8 from 12 noon to 1PM in the Terrace Lab. We’ll serve timbits (Jamie) and coffee (Adam). We’ll also live blog the re-cap (Adam).
• Trivia Night: still need a location. Tossing around some off campus ideas. May mean that event is more of a social gathering than fundraiser if we need to slip in to an existing trivia night.
• RFID brown bag: Andrew to email David re: his contact.
• Conferences: Andrew attended part of Access 2011. He will email link with videos of presentation to ASIS&T listserv. Also, on Nov 12 there is a conference in Washington that he will send more info about. THAT Camps?
• Next meeting: Tentatively set for second week of school in January. Will email when date is closer to pin down time. Need to have it confirmed before January cohort orientation.
• End of meeting.

Sorry for the delay in posting these, and thanks for coming out!

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.

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.

If you missed our Cool Tools Day in October, well, I’m sorry. Here’s what we talked about (also available as a PDF). Just to show there’s no hard feelings.

Bronwyn’s “iTunes & Audio Podcasts”
Visit iTunes website for free available podcasts including:

• TechNews TodayThis Week in Tech (TWIT)
• MacBOOK weekly
• This week in Google
• Search Engine – net neutrality and copyright
• Spark from CBC radio – lifestyle and tech

Alex’s “Pure Text“
For Windows users:

• Application stevemiller.net/puretext
• Keyboard shortcuts that allow you to maintain font and formatting when copying & pasting text

For Mac users:

• Visit alternativeto.net (similar to the process of using Firefox add-ons)
• Browse site for applications you want to use
• Select application and then click on “Visit Website”
• Download application to your browser

Franklin’s “Data Visualization: Many Eyes“

• Website: http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/
• Good place to find data sets
• Good place to share data sets (warning: no way to keep data sets private so careful about uploading data sensitive documents)
• Can do tricks with mapping
• Provides options for visualizing data (example: using tag clouds, word trees, bubble chart, etc.)
• Alternative website: visualizing.org (It is free, but new – so it is still being built)

Will’s “UBC Blogs & UBC Wiki”
UBC Blogs:

• Digital Learning Commons
• All you need is your CWL to make a blog or website
• Social media aspect to blogs are groups, forums, profiles, friends, etc.
• About 6000 people are using the service now
• Built using WordPress
• Supports custom CSS in themes
• Consider it a content management platform (rather than a blog platform)

UBC Wiki:

• Functions on Media Wiki software
• It is not private, anyone can edit
• Based on philosophical ownership, not structural
• Your CWL should last “forever”

Jonathan’s “WilsonWeb”

• Audio capability for reading/hearing articles off of WilsonWeb interface
• Can download audio files as well as text
• Can listen to audio while following along with the html text (words are highlight as they are read)

Trevor’s “OneNote“

• Virtual notebook
• Can organize into binders – notebooks – pages
• Can type anywhere on screen/page (not line-based)
• Can keep all different kinds of documents/files in one page (so that you have all related documents in one place)
• Can link from it
• Takes good snapshots of pages & will include url of html pages (only difficult doing this with pdfs)
• Can keyword search through ALL One Note documents at once
• Autosaves along the way (no save button)
• Create shared notebooks
• Can draw on page
• Saves time in filing
• visitmix website – works with silverlight

Schuyler’s “Search Shortcuts in Google Chrome”

• Edit search engines
• Can set up keyword shortcuts for different sites
• Add to google toolbar add to chrome search
• Example: type “gs” for google scholar
• Might be able to do sim in FireFox
• Another tool is Yubnub
• Can set Yubnub into Chrome search bar and execute yubnub commands directly into your search

Schuyler’s “Dropbox & GoodReader“

• Backup option
• Stored in the cloud
• Can stop using usb keys (all you need is access to the internet)
• Can invite collaborators to your folders
• For iphones, load GoodReader to navigate into your Dropbox account

Frankin’s “Portable apps“

• Website: Portableapps.com
• Legitimate site
• Can store on usb key without having to download applications onto the computer’s hard drive
• Good way of getting around restrictions of downloading

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!

Interesting project out of University of California at Santa Cruz: software that can (purportedly) track the accuracy of information inside Wikipedia entries. The software, developed by Luca de Alfaro, a Stanford Ph.D. who is currently an Associate Professor of Computer Science at UCSC, monitors the trustworthiness of Wikipedia entries based on the reputations of their contributors, and modifies the display of Wikipedia articles based on realtime, calculated contributor metadata.

Quoting from Professor de Alfaro’s own statement about the project, it computes the “trust value of each word of a Wikipedia article” based on the reputation of its original author and the reputation of all its subsequent authors. If you’re curious to try it out, there’s a description and demo of the system available at the UC Santa Cruz web site, using a dump from Wikipedia created in February of 2007.