Librarian Way

Marydee Ojala’s editorial in the July/August 2004 issue of Online discusses Clayton Christensen’s book The Innovator’s Dilemma. She wrote

I find the notion of librarians and informational professionals being disruptive technologies extremely appealing. What a wonderful role to assume! …I suggest we enjoy this pivotal role, relish our power, rethink our priorities, and assert our distinctiveness.

So, my fellow library school peers, we are becoming a disruptive technology.

Information Today, Inc. - ONLINE Magazine

ResearchBuzz posted a note Sweet Google Results Scraper in a Bitty Bookmarklet — ResearchBuzz, June 24, 2004 about a Google search scraper bookmarklet hack written by David Crossman and posted on the O’Reilly Hacks site. Why would you use it? It creates a comma-delimited text file that can be loaded into any application that reads such files. Once you have it in an application, such as Microsoft Excel, it is data that you can sort or manipulate in some way that makes sense to you.

O’Reilly Books
O’Reilly is my favorite technical book site because of the breadth of free technical articles, book excerpts, and user feedback. They publish a lot of “hacks” books. See O’Reilly Hacks Series.

Who is ResearchBuzz?
ResearchBuzz explains their site, “this site provides almost daily updates on search engines, new data managing software, browser technology, large compendiums of information, Web directories — whatever.” It is written and edited by Tara Calishain. She is the lead author in the book Google Hacks.

What are bookmarklets?
Wikipedia has a page that explains a bookmarklet . If you want to create your own, check out the article Bookmarklets - www.docjavascript.com on Webreference. Bookmarklets have a wider use in the library realm, such as those created by Indiana State University, which are available at Library Bookmarklets. SearchEngine Watch has additional links and an article about bookmarklets: Library Lookup: A Simple but Powerful Search Tool.

While I was letting my weblog stagnate,
Eli Edwards was busy keeping us informed about happenings at SJSU that are of interest to SJSJ SLIS students. By the way, Eli, congratulations on graduating!

In her posting “King Library and Weblogs”, Eli posts information about the King Library’s beginning explorations into possibly implementing a Weblog for the library.

She has also posted the information from John Fink, about a new Wiki that he set up for SJSU SLIS students at Sliswiki. I believe its main purpose is to create an FAQ about things that are not covered, and should not be covered by the SLIS Web site. Future librarians have to know how to use this technology, so it might not be a bad idea to give it a try if you are a SJSU SLIS student and believe there is something that should be on the FAQ. Note that you need to create a login.

I gave it a try and added one entry that just points back to the first steps for new SJSU SLIS students. I found that it is best to use the icons at the top of the edit page. For example, to bold a sentence, select it and click on the icon to bold it. It will surround the text with three single quotes on each side. Instead of using a HTML construct, you select the icon that shows the world, and it will create square brackets which you fill with the http://… page title. You don’t need to know any HTML.