OUseful.Info, the blog…

So it feels as if I haven’t been posting that much on this blog over the last few weeks, but I have been blogging elsewhere, 2-3 times a week, in fact, on:

- the Arcadia Project Blog;

- the Arcadia Mashups Blog.

Here’s a quick round up of some of the more notable posts that you can find over there that I would, in the normal course of events, have probably posted here on OUseful.info:

• Do Libraries Cater for Today’s Researchers and Research Students?, a quick response to a new interim project report from the British Library reporting on a longitudinal study about the information related behaviour of research students; [Arcadia Project]
• Open Library Training Materials and Custom Search Engines, in which I describe a simple Google Custom Search Engine that searches over all the UK HEI Library websites. If you’re looking for infoskills/Library training resources, this might be a handy way of finding them… [Arcadia Mashups]
• Getting Started With Yahoo Pipes: Merging RSS Feeds, an quick guide to creating your first Yahoo Pipe [Arcadia Mashups]
• Stack Request Delivery Slots: the Cambridge University Library has many of its borrowable books on closed stacks, which means you have to request the books and then they are fetched for you. Might it be an idea to allow bookable collection slots, so you can request an item for a future date? [Arcadia Project]
• BookServer – Like URIPlay, but for Books…? and LibraryDNS, cf. RadioDNS: Books that Can Phone Home, where I pinch a couple of ideas from online video (content negotiation) and digital radio (linking radioplay back to the web) and start to apply them to books; see also What If? Livescribe Book Support for one possible way of relating written notes to (e)books; [Arcadia Project]
• The Library’s Role in Organising “Course Knowledge”, or how the Library might be the natural place for all manner of content recommendation services to learners; also relates to Looking Out for “Linked Course Data, where I have a poke around various bits of the Cambridge university website looking for unique identifers that can be used to pivot around; [Arcadia Project]
• JISC MOSAIC Competition Entries – Imaginings Around the Use of Library Loans Data, a brief review of the JISC MOSAIC (Library loans data) competition entries;
• ‘Get Current URL’ Bookmarklet Pattern and ‘Get Selection’ Bookmarklet Pattern, in which I describe a couple of bookmarkelt patterns that have generic reuse value; each post includes a bookmarklet generator to help you create your own bookmarklets [Arcadia Mashups]
• Visual Links – Sharing Links With QR Codes, or what might a library catalogue look like if we added a QR code to it; also includes a demo of Cambridge Library short link service that could provide the first step in making it easier to scribble down a book reference [Arcadia Mashups]

They’re all Library related, so if that’s your thang, maybe worth a read…?