Thursday, June 26, 2008

LILI IT Interest Group Meeting – June 26, 2008

1) TinEye - http://tineye.com/login
Ian Benton demonstrated this tool that can be used to search for images that are identical, derived from, or similar to a given image. The search universe is several hundred million images, and is expected to grow considerably.

2) Universal Digital Library http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.web/FindMLNativeByID?repl1=UWI27188
Jill Rosenshield showed this collection of digitized texts. If you click on the link “progress report” you can see a summary of the topics and languages included. It has a particularly strong collection of Chinese texts.

3) Doodle - http://www.doodle.de/main.html
Nancy McClements demonstrated this useful scheduling tool open to everyone, not just WiscCal users. (Useful for planning meetings with colleagues off campus.) Users of this scheduling tool can be sent a link and added or removed from the schedule very easily.

4) PicLens - http://www.piclens.com/
Kelli Keclik demonstrated this promising looking image search tool. It gives a user an interface similar to the iPhone. “PicLens transforms your browser into a full-screen, 3D experience for photos and videos across the web.”

5) CoolIris - http://cooliris.com/site/ie/
Kelli also mentioned this helpful related tool that allows you to preview a webpage without having to visit the site. It is “a free browser add-on that lets you preview links and rich media without clicking or leaving your current page, so you can browse the web faster than ever. Simply mouseover your link or our Cooliris icon, and a preview window instantly appears with your content.”

6) Wikis from DoIT – Ian Benton also mentioned that staff at College were investigating a new Wiki application that will be available from DoIT via MyWebSpace soon. It has no project name(that we know of) quite yet, but the possibilities for tying into MyWebSpace are very intriguing!

7) Jott - http://jott.com/
Jim Jonas demonstrated this tool that you can use in coordination with your cell phone to “convert your voice into emails, text messages, reminders, lists and appointments.” There are several different options, but here are two of the more mind boggling: you can set up a group list of email contacts, then call Jott to interact with the list by leaving a voice message which is automatically transcribed to text and then emailed to the list of email contacts. Furthermore, you can leave a voice message with Jott that can also be automatically transformed into a calendar appointment.

8) Retrievr - http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr/
Jim also demonstrated this amazing image search tool that allows you to draw a picture, which the system will try to match up to a real photograph from Flickr.

9) Skitch - http://skitch.com/
Tom Durkin demonstrated this still-image capture and editing application, similar to Jing’s image editing capability.

10) FireShot - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5648
Jim also mentioned this FireFox add on that “creates screenshots of web pages. This plugin provides a set of editing and annotation tools, which let users quickly modify captures and insert text and graphical annotations”

Thursday, June 5, 2008

We have a twin

Catherine Stephens stumbled across this today:

Library Emerging Technologies Group
http://librariansmatter.com/blog/2007/03/29/library-emerging-technologies-group/

They say everybody has a twin. I guess ours is "down under."