ebooks coming to cell phones

View the entire article from the New York Times here, but here's an excerpt: "In a move that could bolster the growing popularity of e-books, Google said Thursday that the 1.5 million public domain books it had scanned and made available free on PCs were now accessible on mobile devices like the iPhone and the T-Mobile G1.
Also Thursday, Amazon said that it was working on making the titles for its popular e-book reader, the Kindle, available on a variety of mobile phones. The company, which is expected to unveil a new version of the Kindle next week, did not say when Kindle titles would be available on mobile phones."

Final Meeting Date

Our final meeting will be Monday February 9th from 8-9:30 at the support services meeting room.  The agenda for the meeting is as follows:

8:00 – 8:05 – Welcome/Where’s Bob Tenny?/Future of Interest Group

8:05 – 8:20 – Social Networking Presentation

8:20 – 8:35 – Open Discussion

8:35 – 8:45 – Gaming Presentation

8:45 – 9:25 – Hands on Gaming

9:25 – 9:30 – Final thoughts and questions/Goodbye

The Mariott's A/V panel

From the Shifted Librarian: Some Mariotts are offering the Plug into Mariott service which includes the following (but be sure to click here for the picture): "The panel has four surge-protected outlets, an ethernet port, an audio-in port, RCA jacks, an S-Video port, a computer video port, and even a memory card reader. This means you can plug in your laptop (to do work or watch a DVD), an MP3 player to listen to music, a digital camera to view pictures, or a camcorder to watch videos. You can even plug in a game console, and in fact they actually encourage this by including this information in the documentation. Equally important, the hotel provides all of the cables, since most of us don’t carry these things around."

PowerPoint Presentation on the Social Web

Gerry McKiernan has his gargantuan and very useful presentation from his Internet Librarian 2008 pre-conference session here:Not Just Facebook: Online Social Networks For Libraries. He covers major online social networks, library uses, successful case studies, and niche networks that most librarians don't know about. Check it out to learn more about this burgeoning area of web librarianship. This file is large and takes a while to download.

The Networked Student

Michael Stephens, library professor and author of Tame the Web found an interesting video on the connected student. It's a theory of education for the 21st century being used by a high school teacher, take a look at it, The Networked Student. It has a lot of implications for our work.

IMAC CD/DVD Compatibility

Dear all,
Here is a list of CDs/DVDs that will work on our IMACs at the library.
Slot-loading 8x SuperDrive (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
Writes DVD+R DL and DVD-R DL discs at up to 4x speed
Writes DVD-R and DVD+R discs at up to 8x speed
Writes DVD-RW discs at up to 6x speed and DVD+RW discs at up to 8x speed
Reads DVDs at up to 8x speed
Writes CD-R discs at up to 24x speed
Writes CD-RW discs at up to 16x speed
Reads CDs at up to 24x speed
The CD RWs allow users to rewrite documents after saving them. This is what patrons who are creating word documents will want to use in the future. Hope this helps us field the many help with homework projects we will have this year.

Podcasting Steps

Podcasting on iTunes

 

What is Podcasting?

 

Podcasting is downloading files to a computer that have video or audio content.  These can then be watched/listened to from that computer or put on an mp3 player, like an iPod.  The term combines “pod” from the iPod and “casting” from broadcasting.  It is a new way to send and receive media, just like radio and television when they were created.  This is done using the same RSS feed concept that is used in blogging.

 

1.     The podcasting section on iTunes is located on the left hand side of the application, under Library.

 

2.     To subscribe to a podcast, search the iTunes Store, or link through a website that does a podcast.  Examples.  ALD Live, This American Life.

 

3.     Podcasts will download as much as the “podcaster” allows.  They will do one at a time, or three at a time.  There is a “get all” feature when there is an option to download more than one episode of a podcast.

 

4.     Progress of the download can be tracked by clicking on download on the left hand side of the iTunes application.  This is only available when something is being downloaded.

 

5.     When a podcast is finished downloading it will have a blue dot next to the episode title to indicate that it is a new episode.  The podcast channel will also have a dot, to indicate new episodes.  The podcast button will now list the number of how many new podcasts there are.

 

6.     Double clicking plays a podcast.  Once a podcast is played the blue dot goes away and the total of new podcasts updates.

 

7.     Depending on settings iTunes will download new episodes of the podcast as they come available, or clicking refresh will manually check for new episodes.

 

8.     These can now be transferred to an iPod.  Depending on your iPods settings this can be set up to do automatically, or new episodes can be added by dragging them from the podcast screen to the iPod icon.  This icon only appears when an iPod is attached.

 

9.     It is easy to unsubscribe from a podcast.  Just click “unsubscribe at the bottom of the iTunes application.