Odd endnote issue when opening word

I have dealt with this endnote issue twice in the last couple of weeks. The issue occurs when opening word, an error message comes up "The specified Word library can not be unloaded because it is in use" and CWYW cannot be used.

There is a solution on the FAQ page here which involves going into Help>About MS Word> Disabled items, and enabling any endnote related items.

First mass adoption eBook reader - iPhone

Richard Wallis from TALIS discusses the iPhone as an eBook reader on his blog here



I've been using the Stanza software for a few weeks on an iPod Touch, and it is very nice, you just touch one side of the screen to turn a page, and the display is quite readable. There is a pretty good selection of free books (out of copyright classics mostly) to download via wireless, and you can download software to turn other documents into compatible files. You can also get some newspapers for free. I haven't read a whole book on it, yet, but it is quite comfortable to read newspaper articles on. I like it, but I haven't stopped borrowing Library books yet.

The official website of the Stanza software is here

What does this mean for libraries? Should we be promoting software like this to our users? Could this be the ebook application that reaches a critical mass of people and changes the book market for good?

Endnote and Refworks

We had quite a chat about whether we should buy RefWorks in MML yesterday and agreed that there is no hurry to rush into it. A higher priority is to do a better evaluation of EndnoteWeb (ENW), which we already have access to at no extra charge.
I have been working on a helpsheet for ENW for some time and have sent it out to most of you by email.
I have put at at:
N:\PVC-T&L\Library\Functional Documents\Information Services\Guides_2008
I would be good if a number of LLs could give ENW a really good test and feedback to me.
We really need to answer these questions:

• Is ENW a viable and reliable enough web based bibliography system for undergrads?
• Could we transition most undergraduate training and support to it rather than traditional EndNote?
• Is there any prospect of shifting our labs to ENW rather than continuing with the complex two yearly upgrades of labs to a new version?

Answers to these are needed. We should be thinking about what to do for semester 1 next year.

Postscript: Linda Forbes sent this extra useful information:
Yale have a table comparing EndNote Web with EndNote and Refworks - http://www.library.yale.edu/cite/whichone.html - thought it might be useful in your present discussions.

UWashington has one too - http://www.lib.washington.edu/help/endnote/endnoterefworks.pdf - which has references at the end to others.

Yes this is a web search engine!

Is this really the future of "Search"?
You've got to 'check out' MSDEWEY.
...and don't foget to try the "Best of.." button a few times.

Great short Web 2.0 tutorials

Have a look at the wonderful short tutorials "...in Plain English", all made by the same folks at Common Craft:

• Wikis in Plain English
• Wetpaint Wikis in Plain English
• Social Media in Plain English
• Podcasting in Plain English
• Twitter in Plain English
• RSS in Plain English
• Social Networking in Plain English
• Blogs in Plain English
• Online Photo Sharing in Plain English

These clever videos are all shorter than 4 minutes but pack in a lot of information.
The Common Craft site has other interesting things to offer as well.

Most importantly, thanks to Juliet, who alerted us to a useful tutorial on how to avoid a zombie attack (Zombies in Plain English).

EBooks and University presses

Some university presses are now releasing e-books for Amazon's portable reader Kindle two weeks prior to the print release date. Princeton University Press apparently unsuccessfully experimented with e-distribution in the past but reckon the time is now ripe for scholarly material to be disseminated in this way.

Read more
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/24/kindle

Evaluating Information Skills Training

Karmen and I are currently doing an interesting and potentially very useful course called 'Evaluating Information Skills Training' delivered online by the University of Sheffield, UK.

I'm sure you will hear more about this in the future but in the meantime here's the bibliography for the course http://foliozinfoskills2.pbwiki.com/f/bib.doc

What researchers want

"What I would really like to see here is a way of pivoting my view of the literature around a specific item. This might be a paper, a dataset, or a blog post. I want to be able to click once and see everything that item cites, click again and see everything that cites it. Pivot away from that to look at what GoPubmed thinks the paper is about and see what it has which is related and then pivot back and see how many of those two sets are common. What are the papers in this area that this review isn’t citing? Is there a set of authors this paper isn’t citing? Have they looked at all the datasets that they should have? Are there general news media items in this area, books on Amazon, books in my nearest library, books on my bookshelf? Are they any good? Have any of my trusted friends published or bookmarked items in this area? Do they use the same tags or different ones for this subject? What exactly is Neil Saunders doing looking at that gene? Can I map all of my friends tags onto a controlled vocabulary?"

from Science in the open

Sounds good, I don't imagine it would be all that difficult if Scopus, WoS etc wanted to cooperate with other vendors and create a product. Perhaps Google are listening.

Maybe when this happens computers can start publishing their own literature reviews too.

Google puts papers' archives online

From The Guardian:

Speaking at the TechCrunch 50 conference in San Francisco late yesterday, Marissa Meyer, the vice-president for Google search products and user experience, said the company had been working with the New York Times and Washington Post since 2006 to make their full archive available through Google News.

Google has been working with 100 newspaper partners, including the 244-year-old Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph and specialist firms Heritage and ProQuest, which integrate news archives on microfilm.

more here

Information Literacy Logo

An official logo to represent information literacy has been established. It was designed as an entry in a competition run by UNESCO and IFLA to produce a logo which can be an internationally recognised symbol to be attached to organisations and particular project dealing with information literacy. You can read about the competition and download the logo from here.

Found via ResourceShelf