Friday, December 11, 2009

Impress Your Professor: Study

There is no regular Impress Your Professor this week - just a hearty shout of GOOD LUCK with all your finals, papers, and projects.

We'll see you all next semester.

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

YouTube Tuesday: Finals Fun

Because Finals are upon us (Good Luck to all!) we're only posting two fun videos today. Cheers!



Friday, December 4, 2009

Impress Your Professor: Digitization Without Fear

Two new Wired Campus pieces on The Chronicle of Higher Education Web site highlight recent university efforts to make their print collections more accessible to more patrons through technology.

In the first, our Washingtonian neighbor George Washington University is experimenting with an automated digitization system to determine whether a specially designed robot is faster and more cost-efficient at digitizing rare books than human page-turners. Rare Middle Eastern texts from GWU and Georgetown libraries will be the first texts digitized this way, and GWU plans to share its findings with libraries that might be considering a similar system.

Visual reproduction isn't the only form of digitization in the news this week. Audio reproduction of texts got a rare mention. Librarians at California State University-Dominguez Hills realized that the text-to-audio feature of their Kurzweil 3000 software for the visually impaired could be used to allow all students to turn texts into mp3s. Now 17 machines have been set up on campus for this purpose.

There are surely copyright concerns that will arise from all this, but it's a step in the right direction. It's nice to see people writing and thinking about technology in libraries with optimism instead of fear.

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

YouTube Tuesday: Be Professional

Librarian 2.0
What does it mean to be the new librarian?





Now With Sidearms... of books!
A cops parody