Monday, June 29, 2009

LC Call Number game

This is fun.

The Library of Congress Call Number Game
, by someone at the University of Pittsburgh

Using tags for Reference

Using web-based tags has made organizing websites I like SO much easier! I've been using Delicious, but there are a number of other tagging sites available. Here's a fun video on how tagging - also known as social bookmarking - works:



Nan and I have been discussing creating a Delicious account for Reference, where we can all access a number of bookmarks that might be useful. Currently there are many bookmarks saved in Internet Explorer and Mozilla on the Reference computer, but as the video points out, these bookmarks are only available on THAT computer. Tagging them with a service like Delicious makes them accessible from anywhere. There are further uses for these bookmarks as well, like incorporating links to them in Research Guides or other places on our website.

The main drawback to social bookmarking is that your bookmarks are saved elsewhere, so you are dependent on that service for retrieving them. In January of this year, tagging site Ma.gnolia lost all of its users data. Oops.

Technorati is the other most popular tagging site. According to Wikipedia, Faves "has a wider range of functionality that encourages interaction with 'friends' in rating the content of linked webpages." This might be more group friendly and worth considering for something like Reference tags.

Diigo allows you to also highlight parts of a webpage and attach sticky notes! I'm going to have to try this one out.

Leave comments and let me know if you prefer a particular service or have other thoughts on creating common tags for Reference-related websites. Oh, and the other great thing is we can assign as many tags as we want to a site. So if I would call something "instruction" and Nan would call it "infolit", we give the site both tags and then can both access it intuitively. No more need to be mindreaders!

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Finding Marketing Plans

I feel like this is the kind of thing that comes up now and then: students needing sample Marketing plans. There is a guide on the Lexis Nexis wiki that describes how magazine articles from the database can be used to piece together the information that would be contained in a proprietary marketing plan for a specific company.

There's also some other great guides to Lexis Nexis created by users on the wiki.

The New Invisible Web

In this article in School Library Journal, Joyce Valenza recommends a number of search engines to get to what she calls, the "new" invisible web: blogs, wikis, and other web2.0 areas that might get lost in the Google shuffle. Some suggestions:

Wiki.com

Google Wiki Search
SearchTwitter
IPL Blogs

The new search engine Zuula that Nan discussed earlier also searches many of these less common areas of the internet.