Alkek Library News

Apps to enhance your ScienceDirect / SciVerse experience

There are over 110 applications available for you to make ScienceDirect suit your needs!

Here are just two examples:

The Altmetric app helps you measure the social media buzz that articles receive.

With the new Science News App, you can check out related articles from New York Times Science News while you are using the Sciverse Hub

Check it out today!

Pump up your Presentations....

Do you have a presentation coming up? Do you want to WOW your audience? Then try one of the alternatives to Power Point Listed below. Most of the presentation tools are free, and only require you to create an account.

Ispiring free is a Power Point to Flash converter. It allows you to upload large files, keeps the embedded audio and video files and lets you embed as flash or to YouTube.

Sliderocket- flash effects (looks cool) but limits you to 15 mb file size. The interface is pretty easy to use and has some advanced features.

Prezi -collaborative, zooming flash effects, interactive

Glogster -poster presentation tool- has education version

Museum Box- This is an interesting tool that allows you to create a "museum box" with audio, video etc. (cool!) The site was inspired by Thomas Clarkson and anti-slavery campaigner who created a box that described why slavery was wrong. He carried around a box of items to illustrate his arguments during his campaign.(takes a little while to load.)

Animoto creates slick, professional, videos. There is an education version available. Allows you to create full length videos and  has large library of available music. You can also use voice thread/-with recorded narration- See the example: Great Depression using the Library of Congress collection.

Ahead.com- Create zooming presentations with Ahead. The free version allows you to have 300 mb of file size. Here are some examples of portfolios using Ahead.co

Go Animate- creates animated presentations. Free version for education.

Xtranormal- text to speech; animationed videos. This is where the "So you want to be a _______ videos. (Fill in the blank with lawyer, earn a PhD in political science major, etc.) 

Common craft is another animation creation tool. Many "How To" videos are created using Common Craft. Often used to explain complex subjects.

You can also just choose to share your presentations using GoogleDocs, Slideboom or Slideshare.  With Google Docs, you can also create and collaborate with others as a group project. If you presentation is really large, you might chose Slideshare whose file size limit is 100mb.

Timeline tools:

X Timeline-Easily create timelines using images & multimedia; Embeddable

Timetoast- Create timelines in minutes. Finished product has a slidable scale and highlights the important events.

Comic Strip Creators:

Chogger Use Chogger to draw your own comics, caption photos, take webcam pictures and add speech balloons.

Using Images:

Creative Commons - is a place to Share, Remix, Reuse — Legally!

Google Advanced Search: check box for images labeled with usable rights on images

Wikimedia Commons - is a database of 10,062,008 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute.

 

Use Startpages to Organize Your RSS Feeds & More

One of the coolest new tools I've been using lately is NetVibes startpage. A startpage is a personalized web homepage. Others include: iGoogle, Pageflakes, and MyYahoo. I've chosen Netvibes because you also have a public version you can share with others socially. (Pageflakes also has this feature.) Here is my Netvibes public page. Notice the different tabs .

On both the private and public page, you can choose what modules and widgets to add.  Netvibes already has many to browse and choose from. If you already have a delicious, facebook or flickr page you can have them fed to your startpage. See the larger view of the image by clicking on it.

You can also create different tabs to organize your feeds. I have one for blogs, database & journals feeds, and one I have created for research feeds for a presentation I am giving.  Tabs help to organize your RSS feeds according to how you want to view them.

On the private page, you see the same modules as on the public page plus you can add a widget to monitor your email from your different accounts in one place, have a calendar, weather widget, and more. Its as easy as clicking the "add content" button, pasting the RSS feed URL into the box and adding it to your page.

Most databases will allow you to subscribe to a search query or the latest articles from a particular journal. Use the databases help feature or look for the RSS image to find out how.

Here is a nice comparison of different startpages that discusses the different features of each one. At the bottom of the post is a chart that puts all the features together for easier comparison.

Watch the library workshop page for future workshops in late summer or the fall semester on setting up personalized startpages. Or follow the links above to create your own startpage now.

An Interesting Web 2.0 Blog....

Web 2.0 is a term used to describe user-generated or web-based services or applications. It fosters a sense of collaboration among users.  While preparing for a workshop about Web 2.0, I came across a well laid out information blog called iLibrarian.  Although the blogs audience is primarily librarians or information professionals, it is a very informative and helpful place to learn about Web 2.0 and the tools, websites, and add-ons to make anyone's life easier.

One thing of interest is the post about creating better presentations.  "4 Ways to Spice Up Your Presentations." It offers links to good examples of engaging presentations, advice Websites, and even tools to add charts or "on the fly" generated images.

I also liked her 3 part entry "40 Useful Firefox Add-Ons for Librarians." Anyone who uses Firefox knows there is a lot of extensions you can use to customize the browser to fit your needs.  I especially like the  screengrab extension. This add-on allows you to take a screenshot of a webpage (or region of a page) and save it as an image. It is similar to SnagIt. For those who use Twitter, Meebo or Facebook, there is an add-on that integrates these applications with Firefox. So you can Tweet, have a sidebar view of your buddies, and have Facebook running all from within the same browser.

There is more to this blog worth checking out. Note the "Most Popular Posts" and  the "Categories" to find out more.

Have You Downloaded the Library Tool Bar Yet?

With the release of the library's new website, we also have available a tool bar that you can download into either Internet Explorer or Firefox web browsers.  The tool bar has all the important library links added to it such as, the home page, library catalog, databases link, e-Books, eCommons, Periodical List, Hours and more.

You can also monitor RSS feeds, search directly from the browser and even listen to the radio.

To download the library tool bar, all you need to do is click here and then follow the directions depending on the web browser you use.