Monday, January 26, 2009

LILI IT Interest Group Meeting Notes – January 22, 2009

After a hiatus of a couple of months, the LILI IT Interest Group is back!

Bob: 1) he notes how convenient it can be to have 2 monitors per computer. The Reference desk at Steenbock has 2 monitors now, and other computers there may get two monitors soon. 2) He notes the unbelievable convenience of a very slick free application Portable Apps http://portableapps.com/ that allows you to use the Microsoft Office applications and Open Office from a flash USB drive. 3) He notes the convenience of Google Notebook: http://www.google.com/intl/en/googlenotebook/tour1.html which he uses to share information with colleagues.

Ian: presented a demo of the ARIS Games tool: http://arisgames.org/ This tool allows you to build a geospatial game, such as geo-cache games, and scavenger hunts. The tool was built with an Engage grant and can work on mobile devices. Ian is planning on experimenting with it and wants to build a sample game for the libraries.

Karen: presented 1) an interesting tool Who’s Talkin that aggregates twitter and blog postings (from “60 of the internet’s most popular social media gateways”) into a single search engine. We tried it and it works! We searched on Steenbock Library and found a variety of postings. http://whostalkin.com/ 2) The Web Watch Transit Master online application that tracks the Madison Metro busses. http://webwatch.cityofmadison.com/webwatch/ No more waiting for a bus that will never come! 3) The TicTocs http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/ web tool that allows you to view TOCs from a variety of journal publishers. The site also provides some searching too, which makes it an interesting metasearch tool also!

Jim: presented several tools: 1) Songbird is a tool that allows you to organize your personal music collection (and play the songs too!). http://www.getsongbird.com/ 2) Open Office Extensions (OpenOffice.org, is a free cross-platform office application suite, intended as a competitor to Microsoft Office.) http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/ these tools allow you to add functionality into the OpenOffice tools, such as language dictionaries. Jim notes that there is a tool that allows you to export and import your documents to and from Google Docs, Zoho and WebDAV servers ( 2GoogleDocs http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/ooo2gd ).