Time to pick up the threads

Sadly my personal blog has been sadly neglected for the last 30 months as I’ve been very busy with our works blog and wiki. Now I feel it is time to pick up the threads and to get going again by using my blog as a place to record some of the CPD that I’ve experienced over last year.

Desktop Feed Readers

As preparation for my part in an RSS training event in early June I started looking at feed readers or news aggregators – the two terms are used synomyously and interchangeably. My selection criteria was that they had to be low cost,  preferably free, as the audience for the event were librarians from organizations such as medical charities. I blogged a few of my thoughts before the event, but wasn’t able to do justice to the desk-top readers. Time to put that right.

For the purposes of the event I chose 3 examples from the many available: Feed Reader, RSS Bandit and Omea.

Feed Reader.

• Very straightforward, with no bells & whistles, installation adds it to computer’s start menu, so it’s running as soon as you switch on.
• User has ability to create  folders for their feeds.
• Can read individual feeds or an aggregation of the feeds in a folder
• Has smartfeed facility (automatically generated aggregation has blue RSS icon rather than normal orange one) – one “Unread news”  is always created.
• Automatically looks for updates - user has no control over the timings 
• Has pop-up notifications for new content – which I personally find distracting and haven’t found any way yet to prevent
• My only real gripe is the default text size in preview pane which is  small – this is adjustable with text larger/smaller buttons which are very inobtusively placed below the pane.
• For more info see http://www.feedreader.com/

RSS Bandit

• A good reader having more features than Feed Reader. Default screen layout is rather like Feed Reader, however user can chose from 4 different layouts and control the columns seen in the listing pane.
• Can be used for RSS feeds, Newsgroups and as web search
• Comes with a default set of folders and some feeds, which you choose to delete or add to.
• Like Feed Reader have ability to view individual feeds or folder aggregations. Items by default open in a new tab within Bandit, but user can chose to have them open in their default web browser as alternative.
• Within feeds can flag individual entries to “Follow up” and “Review”, also Read items remain visible in feed list for a period set by the user in Options.
• Provides Special Feeds in separate list, such as “Unread News”, Flagged items, Feed Errors.
• Options allow user to control reader behaviour such as whether opens as part of start menu, frequency of updates, how long read items are retained, the appearence of feeds in reading pane (although a few feeds do impose their own style), font used: appearence, size and colour, so can colour code flagged items etc.
• Subscribing to new feeds can be done by pasting URL into a wizard. This guides you thorough saving and setting preferences for the individual feed, default values from Options are completed, but you can select different values for the  feed, so can have feed update more frequently if its important, mark all items as Read when you leave a feed, etc. Alternatively when viewing an internet page or site within RSS Bandit, there’s a “Discover Feeds” button with the RSS logo which you can click to get a list of any feeds on the site, clicking on a feed in the list activates the subscription wizard.
• RSS Bandit can also act as Web search tool – by default it searches Google, Feedster, MSN and Yahoo News. User can add or delete search sites and the control the order in which they are searched via Options.
• More info see: http://www.rssbandit.org/
• My personal favourite and the one I have chosen to retain on my desktop and use day to day after my investigations.

Omea Reader

• A “Rolls Royce” of feed readers, as is very powerful organisational tool as well. Incorporates RSS reader, NNTP news reader, and web bookmark manager as well as providing a desktop search.
• Has all the functionalities found in Feed Reader and RSS Bandit plus
• Ability to create clippings
• Use flags to indicate priorities and annotate postings via Actions menu
• Can set up search to highlight interesting items within feeds.
• The slight draw backs I noted were: -
  •  that preview pane formating is control by feed supplier not user
  • when you open a link the list and preview panes are replaced large reading pane rather than it opening in separate tab or window. 
  • would need to dig a bit further to see whether these are set in stone or user controllable.
• For more info see: http://www.jetbrains.com/omea/reader/
• Comes highly recommended by experts like Karen Blakeman, who’ve done lot of research, but I found it bit overwhelming for the beginneer. I have kept Omea on my desktop so can compare it further with RSS Bandit. 
• Free reader can also be upgraded to Omea Pro – an integrated information environment.

So from this brief overview it’s clear that there are many readers with differing  features and facilities and that there’s no one-size fits all. If considering a desktop reader its worth trying several out, you’ll find one that does what you want and you that feel comfortable using.

RSS Feed Reader tip-bits

Preparing to do a session on Feed readers I’ve spent time this week investigating feed readers. Here are just a few of the things I found:

• Most browsers now either have built into them or all as extensions feed readers. I particularly like Opera 9′s and Firefox with Sage extension.
• For IE6 the addition of the Windows live toolbar and the Onfolio add-in make it a better feed reader than that in IE7.
• Bloglines has nice related links function which allows you to go from one feed to a list of similiar feeds, select several and subscribe to them all in one go.
• Google Reader – very straight forward web reader, but boy! was it slow loading the Manage Feeds page on my broadband link (up to 8MB, but running at 6.1 tonight). Never had patience to wait for enough of page to load to take a screenshot for my powerpoint. Turns out this is a problem with IE6 as had exactly the same problem at work, ended up changing browser to Firefox to investigate the options in Manage Feeds, pays to have access to multiple browsers.
• For desktop reader I really like RSS Bandit over SharpReader – this has annoying pop-ups when new stuff comes in. Will look at Feed Reader and Omea both of which have been recommended to me tomorrow.

I also put together list of directories of feed readers:

• RSS Compendium: RSS Readers
• RSS Specifications: RSS Software
• WebUser: Feed readers Review
• About.com: Find the Best RSS Feed Readers / News Aggregators
• HEBIG.org: RSS Feed Reader / News Aggregators Directory
• Aggcompare.com: Directory of RSS Aggregators– table of comparative features

BibMe

Today I’ve spent short while playing with another web 2.0 application that came to my attention in a blog. BibMe is a way of producing a bibliography. It was developed as part of a Software Development project course in the Information Systems department of Carnegie Mellon University by 6 students.

There are other web sites which help you build a bibliography like EasyBib, but the one feature I quite like in BibMe that they have linked it to a number of data sources like Amazon.com for book data, so you can search and try to retrieve data rather than having to enter each item. I tried search for 10 books using 10 digit ISBNs and found records for approximately half, when I tried again searching by title found 4/5 of the others, only 1 item had to be entered manually. Data retrieval is not perfect in most records there was no date. Also I did have to edit both publisher and place of publication to reflect the UK editions.

I found only one bug, in the record I entered manually the author details failed to appear. This threw up another shortcoming that it seems impossible to edit items in the bibliography if you make a typo, other than scrapping the item and starting again.

From the point of view of bibliographic software this is a very unsophisticated system as it has only 5 fields to be completed to describe a book: author, title, publisher, place of publication and year. This is far few than the commercial packages, whichare design to cope with complex descriptions of some scientific materials. There are other templates for other types of materials but I didn’t have any data to hand to play with these. Also there are only 3 output styles: MLA, APA and Chicago.

The group of developers have asked for user feedback, and lets hope they can develop this further into a more comprehensive package.

Clipping tools for the web

Today I’ve spent a little time looking at some add-ons to browsers which allow you to keep links, snippets or copies of webpages. These allow you to easily go back to something you’ve found.

Google Notebook

This is a beta extension from Google Labs at present. It clips and collects information as you surf the web. To install the extension you must have a Google Account and the notebooks created are stored within your account. Notebooks can store a link as an extra option of “Note this” appears in Google search results, or when viewing a page can select text or image and clip it using icon in the mini-notebook which you open from browsers status bar. Each clipping can be annotated by adding a Note to it in the Notebook. You can have multiple named Notebooks for different projects or researches. Notebooks can be private or shared: if you chose to share them you can invite collaborators to contribute or simply provide link to the Notebook for them to view only. The advantage I can see with Notebook is the remote storage of them, in that its not tidied to a browser or a particular computer so you can add, edit whereever your accessing them form.

For more information (including demo) go to: Google Notebook’s site.

Onfolio

This was a revisit to a tool which I had had installed c. 18 months ago, when free copies of the software were given away. Almost immediately afterwards the product was sold to Microsoft  and has now reappeared as free add-in to the Windows Live toolbar, which must be installed before trying to download Onfolio. Like Google Notebook you can clip links, content as snippets or copies of page and annotate them.  All the collections and folders are stored locally on your computer. The new Onfolio can also act as RSS feed reader, and has improved ability to share its content as you can email items, folders, collections or RSS feeds from it, post items or RSS feeds to a blog, share with Office Applications or simply as in past export items or collections. My perception of its advantage are that organization  of the storage of items is slightly better, as you have multiple communites and within each one data can be sub-divided in folders.

For more information including features tour see the Onfolio site.

Zotero

This is an extension for Firefox 2.0, it again allows collection, organization and citation of web resources and has been designed by reseachers for researchers, mainly in humanities but its features are fully applicable to science too. Like Onfolio information is stored in collections and folders used to subdivide. Zotero has facility to take a snapshot of page, store it locally, then allow highlighting and sticky notes for emphasis of relevance sections. Items in Zotero can have attached files of art work or the document that you are working on , items can be tagged for ease of retrieval. Information from Zotero can be out in a limited number of bibliographic styles either to word processor or web page. A server side is currently under development to make it possible to share materials collabatively. I will look at Zotero again once this functionality is in place.

 For more info see Zotero site.

Lastly:

All these tools are free and are part of the Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 picture for future as they will influence the way scholars work.

Hurrah for Web 2.0

One of the nice sidelines of my job is being a member of the Continious Professional  Development Group (CPDG) of a consortium of health related libraries which aren’t part of NHS or in universities. Currently the group is in the throws of organising a practical event on using RSS as information tool.

RSS is most often defined as “Really Simple Syndication” and is a way of pushing information to the user. The information provider creates a feed  (a structured file of data) which individual users can choose to sign up to and read using either a web based or desktop based feedreader. I don’t want to say more about RSS now as this is just one part of Web 2.0 stuff and I am likely write more on it as I prepare my elements of the event.

Web 2.0 is all about socializing and sharing using free web applications. Very simple things like web-based group email applications have been around for years, but in last 5 years there has been a revolution in  the applications and libraries are really beginning to look at these as tools for information provision, especially for the internet generation brought up with computers from day one who seem resistant to traditional library offerings.

I’ve come quite late to the Web 2.0 world, having only been contributing to our workplace blog for the last 15 months which replaced a multitude of lists, publications and webpages with a single source that could do more.  Creating a blog post when you get an item of news or find a new resource is much more immediate than writing an article for next newsletter or editing a web page which people may not visit even if there’s crucial stuff there. Also blogs can be set to allow comments which opens 2-way communication which we felt we were losing in the increasingly electronic information world.Can’t be bothered to check a blog periodically, make us of the RSS feed facility provided by them and have new stuff delivered to your feed reader.

I’m beginning to appreciate that Web 2.0 can also make other areas of my job easier. CPDG work has thrown up one example, our practical event is going to be involving 3 people – 2 of us work together in one library, the third is a solo librarian elsewhere, so we needed an easy collaboration tool which would allow us to share documents and avoid the “current” version problem which can arise with emailled documents. Enter a wiki – a great tool for creating and sharing documents in a group,all fully version controlled, and using the management tools of wiki secure and controlled access for trusted writer/editors only, yet with the advantage that its content can be made publically available for reading by anyone when we want. Genius!

Next grief: bookmarks – why, oh, why is the bookmark you need either on your other computer or saved in different browser. I think my rescuer here is going to be social bookmarking, exporting all my various bookmarks into a single web location. Sensible use of thought through tags will mean that I won’t waste time hunting through my browsers and their bookmark folders to find that website which had the gem of info I need right now!

The more you look the more you find of these gems:
To do lists – saved and stored try TADALIST http://www.tadalist.com/
IT project planning: http://www.ittoolkit.com/qtools.htm
Project management: http://www.basecamphq.com/ – offers limited free access one active project at time.

Oh for more time to explore!

New pasture

Last Monday I was at the inaugural meeting of UKCoRR (UK Council of Research Repositories) in Nottingham. About 50 people met together to discuss the role and needs of a relative new group of information specialists – Institutional or Research Repository Managers . So what are these Repositories – publically available collections of full text documents (most often research papers and theses) with appropriate descriptions, abstracts, and subject indexing. Repositories may also contain additional documents and data which support a published paper. They are a way of making publically funded research available to the tax payer.

We came from a wide variety of backgrounds, but many were from libraries. Our job titles were also extremely similiarly very varied as relatively few organizations have really recognised this new information specialism. The aim of the meeting was set up a professional group which can supply peer support in this growing area.

One common feature was trying to run the repository on a shoe string with both limited resource in terms of people and often money. There are very few specialist Repository Managers and most of these find themselves working on projects where funding is guarenteed only for the life of the project. Many of the librarians had simply had the Repository added into their job, as metadata (a series of defined tags which describe an item) is seen as an extension of traditional cataloguing skills and the librarian’s role of providing access to information regardless of format.

What were the big drivers for deposition? Most felt they had had little success in encouraging deposition, librarians can often put in the metadata, but need academics involved with deposition. One big driver was the RAE exercise in Universities, others were support from local head of department and positive publicity for department.

By the end of the meeting we had agreed to:

• try to define a skills set that repository managers need.
• to support one another through a closed email list.
• to try to form relationships with other professional groups so our skills would be recognised.
• to meet again in November.

Items for future meetings may include:

• teaching & learning materials in repositories
• training needs
• UK PubMedCentral – most research council funded research must be deposited here – librarians on ground will be seen by users as natural support – we will need access and appropriate training.

So what did I get out of the meeting – lots of things to add to my “points to consider” list as I begin planning our repository project.

Post course reflections

Today has been a good day. I’ve had the chance to focus on learning and to try out things like WordPress and PageFlakes that I’d never have found time to experiment with in the office.

I’ve come home with a number of ideas buzzing in my head:

• try using a blog as project management tool – to record the steps as each post is dated and time stamped. This may be quicker than keeping lots of written notes and is less likely to be misplaced than a slip of paper.
• am really keen to try out a wiki. Am thinking of applications for it both at work (operating procedures, tips & fixes etc) and a home (standard packing checklist for business trips, other lists)
• want to try social bookmarking – the portability of bookmarks from work to home and vice versa could avoid frustration (I know I’ve got that site bookmarked but…) and duplication.

The only disappointment on the course was the fact that we couldn’t try out writing RSS feeds as the computers we were using were tightly controlled and no software could be added, but at least we have notes on doing it. Perhaps I’ll bring the course documentation home this weekend and have a play! So watch this space.

Our tutor Karen was absolutely great, checking on each individual in group (22 on today’s course) to ensure all of us were happy and getting benefit from the day. I will follow up the course by looking at UKeIG website and blog more often – must make note of my access credentials for their site and add them to my home file.

Having fun!

Today I’m out of the office on a course learning much more about the practicalities of Web 2.0 technologies.

 The course includes:-

• Blogs – Creating & searching
• RSS feeds
• Wikis
• Social Bookmarking

It’s great preparation for the CHILL RSS event in June.