Jason and the Moving Pictures

Blog posting. Right. How far behind am I? A bit, I reckon. Let's knock a few of these out. Videos of me doing crazy stuff anyone?

Jason and The Somewhat Clever Yet Monotonous Title

Dude, it's Monday. I can't be expected to come up with witty post titles this early in the week.

You know, sometimes it can be pretty hard to come up with feasible library-based uses for some Web 2.0 applications. I think Kristi has the right idea with the Becker Del.icio.us accounts, and the Becker Blogs and RSS Feeds are a great boon to the web savvy patron. When it comes to something like Flickr, which has a lot of great uses for the individual, I struggle a little bit in my thoughts on how a Becker Flickr account could be beneficial.

And then I had a cup of coffee. So, here a few thoughts:

First of all, why Flickr?

Simply put? Everyone else is doing it. Seriously, that’s how the internet works sometimes. You join up with a site because the rest of your family is already there, or your friends, or your old high school buddies, your study group partners. It’s a bit “lemming” in mentality, sure, and, yeah, there are other photo sharing websites out there (Picasa, Adobe Photoshop Express, Photobucket, etc.). Still, if you were to do a search for “Photos” on Google, the first thing you’d get is Flickr, and that’s kind of important, especially when Google accounts for more than 75% of general web searches in 2007. If you are going to share information, whether its text, images, video, or audio, you must put that information in places where people looking for it can find it. Folks are using Flickr. Let’s go where THEY are.

Second, what the heck do we use it for?

While we have a very nice looking library here at Becker, I really doubt anyone is going to want to click through pictures of our atrium or many fabulous study carols we house here. We need to give users what they would come here for in the first place, images pertaining to the practice, study, and history of medicine.

The first thing I thought of is Archives and Rare Books. While we already have several online galleries and exhibits, as well as an image search engine, by placing our collections on a more open platform, we not only add another venue for others to search through our image catalogue, we add functionality like RSS feeds, tagging, easy linking, tools for embedding, and bookmarking through “favorite-ing” . Not only that, but by providing links back to the Becker Library or Wash U Med School website in the same way we put our records together for the Missouri Digital Initiative, we do a fair amount of extra promotion for the school, which is always nice.

I linked to this a while back, but take a look at what the Library Of Congress is doing with their photo archives. I believe all of it is devoid of copyright, which differs from our collection, but it’s something to think about.

P. F. Andersen of Web Junction has a list of different library-based uses for Flickr you might want to read. The University of Michigan’s MLibrary 2.0 has some other helpful links, too.

Jason and The Visions of Futures Past

I thought this was pretty amusing, considering all the internet integration going on in libraries today. In 1962, a vision of the future was created by Arnold B. Barach in the book "1975: And The Changes To Come". The book contains a good handful of wonderful photographs documenting the march of technology. Here's the one on the new fangled Reference Finder:

Every 60 seconds, day and night, approximately 2,000 pages of books, newspapers, or reports are published somewhere in the world; and the output is increasing by leaps and bounds. Libraries will ultimately be forced to use computers such as this for locating documents and references, since it will be so difficult otherwise to keep up with the printed material.

There are plenty of other "future" visions at this link. Personally, I'm adding the lack of Toaster Bacon to the list of things I'm disappointed with the "future" about, right up there with the lack of jet packs and moon colonization.

Jason and The Recipe for Danger

We've got a couple of Catch Up weeks in Learning 2.0, and that makes me think of ketchup, which makes me think of tomatoes, which makes me think this is the worst segue way to ever make my fingers dance across a keyboard. Sigh.

When I was a younger man, full of promise and potential, I ate like crap. Seriously, if it wasn't Ramen noodles, Macaroni and Cheese and ______ (tuna, frozen veggies, sawdust, etc.) , or some horrible concoction derived of hamburger, pasta, and whatever was left of the bloody mary mix in my fridge, then I probably wasn't eating.

It wasn't until I started cooking for a fine dining establishment and wanting to keep a girlfriend for more than, say, two weeks that I really started looking into being a better chef in my kitchen. Nowadays, I get excited about cooking and eat a lot better. Or just a lot. Whatever. And you know what helps me come up with new and exciting ideas for über-tasty meals?

That's right, kids. Web 2.0. If you're a foodie, here's a few web sites you might want to look into.

First up is Tastespotting.

Tastespotting is a kind of blog aggregator. Folks find good looking recipes on the various food blogs all over the 'net and send them Tastespotting's way. Tastespotting then takes all those suggestions and posts a description of the recipe and a photo of the finished product. Just click on the photo of the food stuff that interests you and voila! The recipe is right there for your perusal.

Tastespotting also makes it easy to bookmark the entries you want for future use. Say I'm interested in trying my hand at making this beast:

You'll notice at the bottom right corner is a little star marked "Delicious" (no, this has nothing to do with the social bookmarking system we learned of previous). Now, let's say I want to save this recipe for a special occasion, like a Thursday or something. I just click that corner so that it looks just like it does in the picture above. When I come back to the site, all I have to do is go up to the search bar on the top right corner of the screen:

If I click on "Stars" in the "Sort By" section, Tastespotting will bring up any recipe I've marked. Conversely, I can click the other corner of any photo to "86" the recipe and report any problems.
You'll also notice there's an RSS feed for your feed reader, should you want constant tasty updates. If you find you really like it, I suggest signing up for an account so that your starred recipes don't go away if you do something like clear you browser cache or something.

Epicurious is another Web 2.0 recipe and food site, only this one is packed to the gills with features. Run by the publishers of Gourmet and Bon Appetit magazines, Epicurious offers you a ton of recipes and cooking tips, plus wine and food dictionaries, How To videos, RSS feeds for everything from what you're having for dinner tonight to brand new recipes and food news, email newsletters... It's got the works. HIGHLY recommended.

Actually, the Internet is flooded with food sites ranging from every taste and kind. Here's a few more to take a look at during the next couple weeks of Catch Up & Play:

All Recipes
Indian Food Forever
Group Recipes
The Food Network
Simply Recipes
BakeSpace

Good luck, and good eatin'.

Jason and The Flickr of Hope

After much thought on the matter, I've decided to just give you access to the Flickr site I already have. I'm pretty sure there's nothing in there that could be used against me. In fact, the only things you're likely to find out about me are:

1. I hang out in bars. A lot.
2. I am a geek.
3. I take my Zombie Squad stuff very seriously.
4. I have a Photo Club.

Above is a photo of my ladyfriend and I in Chicago last year. Cutie, ain't she?

Linkblogging 3: This Time, It's Not Linkblogging 2

- James Carson, Reference Librarian for the Lake-Sumter Community College Libraries, has put together a couple of amazing tutorial videos for The Cochrane Library and CINAHL. Simple, wonderful training tools, I must say. (via David Rothman)

- The Krafty Librarian give us an update on some of the changes coming to OVID at the end of the month.

- Jessamyn West asks the question "Why Should Libraries Be Social Networking?". For those of you asking yourself the same question, go take a gander.

- The National Network of Libraries of Medicine offers a traveling Technologies course for libraries across the country called "Geeks Bearing Gifts". Many of the resources they use for their class can be reviewed by downloading them from their web page.

- CollegeDegree.com lists 25 Useful Social Networking Tools for Librarians. CollegeDegree is worth looking over as well, with a ton of links to free online courses from many top level universities that you can take to brush up your knowledge and skills.

- Library Journal has named its list of library Movers and Shakers. Take a look at what some of the best librarians across the country are doing for their libraries, from community building to Web 2.0 integration. (We also get Library Journal here at Becker, should you want to look through the hard copy.)

- And finally, for your break time viewing pleasure, enjoy "Reading On a Dream", a musical about a library, set in a library full of unsuspecting patrons. Good times.

Jason and The Crew of the R.S.S. Feed

Oops. Skipped a step. Good thing Lucas is on the ball, otherwise I would've completely forgotten. So, RSS feeds and feed readers, eh? Hmmm.

Man, I could go on for days about how you should really embrace feeds and readers, how they're a part of any healthy internet routine, how it was as if the heavens did open and, lo, a beam of heavenly light did illuminate my pointy little head with inspiration when I first experienced the divine joy of RSS feeds, and how much extra bar time I've gained by using them. Lucas' post and the explanation on Becker's Learning 2.0 site, however, already give a pretty good overview of the advantages of getting friendly with feeds. And plus, as (I feel like) I keep saying, your mileage is going to vary on how you might use these tools, anyway.

As far as incorporating them into our patrons' internet usage, however... Well, here's a couple things I was thinking of.

First off, most of the Electronic Journals we have have and allow access to have RSS feeds available in varying degrees. For instance, the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism has three feeds available, one for the current issue, one for recent issues, and one for advance access to special "ahead of print" articles. Applied Psychopathology and Biofeedback has feeds for nearly way you could request information from them, from the latest articles to specific feeds for each of their article categories. While these features are a great way to keep students and faculty up to date with the latest research and information, there are a couple of things to keep in mind should we decide to pitch them to our patrons.

1. The patron must be on the Washington University Medical School Network or logged in to the Becker Proxy to have access to the Full Text. An oldie but goodie, that one. Same rule applies to the feedreaders and RSS feed. Sure, you can subscribe to the feed and even access the feed's information from anywhere, but if a patron want to be able to follow the link to the Full Text PDF, they'll have to be on teh network or proxy (or, of course, have their own subscription to the journal).
   
2. The feed the patron subscribes to must be the one provided when Linked Out from the Becker Medical Library website. A lot of our Full Access to the e-journals comes from places like ScienceDirect, rather than from the journal itself. So if a patron wanted to subscribe to the feed for Journal of American College of Cardiology though the ACTUAL JOURNAL SITE, they would not have access to the full text PDF. The patron must get to the journal through our record for the journal, link out from the web address provided, then subscribe to the feed provided there.

The second thing I wanted to address is something Lucas mentions in his post:

Just make sure you don't get too carried away, or at least have an efficient folder system to collect like topics, because you can receive a ton of stories you don't care about just to get to three or four really interesting and/or pertinent ones.

It's true. There are a ton of feeds out there for everything you can think of, all easily subscribed to. While most feed readers make it fairly easy to organize collections of feeds in different folders or tabs, it is still pretty easy to be inundated with a whole bunch of information you'll probably never use. It really pays to be frugal about what you subscribe to so that you don't get overwhelmed. Instead of immediately subscribing to something, bookmark the web site it comes from first. If you find yourself returning to that site a lot, THEN consider subscribing. It's a pretty good way of deciding whether or not a site is really useful or just a passing fancy.

One search engine that may be helpful to our patrons is MedWorm, a Medical RSS search engine AND Web-based Feedreader in one.



MedWorm aggregates information collected by thousands of medical related-feeds into one place and provides several filters and options to sift through it all. It also allows users to subscribe to specific search queries so that any new information that comes up pertaining to, say, the "reanimation of dead tissue" shows up in your personal reader. Medworm is also it's very own feedreader, too, should you choose to sign up for an account. You can get more details here.

And, as a side note, librarians can also get some help in the RSS field by clicking over to LibWorm, a MedWord clone that provides a search engine and feeds based on about 1,500 libraries, library blogs, and other library based web sites. A very useful tool for those interested in the library sciences. More details, anyone?