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 ).

3 comments:

ianovitch said...

Here's the url to access the "Aris Documentation" wiki. It has a step-by-step run-down on how to use the tool.

Joe said...

Hello all, My name Is Joe Hall, and I am the creator of WhosTalkin.com I wanted to stop by and say thank you for talking about WhosTalkin.com at your meeting. I think its great that a library takes such a proactive role in learning about new ways to search online. I hope that WhosTalkin.com lived up to your expectations. please feel free to contact me with any thoughts or ideas. joe@whostalkin.com

Bob Sessions said...

correction to the minutes, Steenbock Reference desk doesn't yet have two monitors, but Bob's desk does. It took about 10 seconds to get used to all the screen space. rs.