Catching up at the Beginning of the Semester, and in with the new............

So the semester began officially last week, and we are welcoming the students back to campus. We have a new roster of workshops and Refworks sessions, as well as Library Orientations.

On another note, yours truly (Lorin Fisher) am now Information Literacy Coordinator, so expect to hear more about our program and Information Literacy in general.

RSS and Refworks and Research

Did you know you can use Refworks as a feed reader? This nifty webpage from the Refworks folks explains it all. But this is really a wonderful development--now you can set up database feeds
for your searches from the databases and then use Refworks' RSS feature to import citations from those feeds.

Summer fun! and gearing up for the Semester

Summer II semester is winding down, and although we've been a bit more silent on the blog, we've been busily working towards the fall semester. The library is a part of the freshman orientation known as Paws Preview, which is coming up next week. Check out our new updated orientation video here. Also, watch for our updated orientation schedules and workshops coming soon.

Our first informational machinima

Here's a link to a short machinima semi-tutorial meant to introduce unaware Texas State University students to Second Life and show a glimpse of our online campus.

using zotero to manage citations

I am probably the last person in the world to find out about zotero, but I have downloaded it and find it extremely cool. It's an extension for firefox, and you can use it to keep citation information and other extremely useful things.......like adding notes, taking a picture of the page, even adding tags to citations. This is a list of databases/sites that work with zotero, and they don't have all possible citation styles yet. Here's also a nice youtube tutorial from zoteron which explains it pretty well.

Summer update

ah, the summer. We've been actually fairly busy with classes, and also a new instruction librarian has joined our team as well, Charles Allan. The ALA annual conference is coming soon--several librarians will be attending. Hopefully that will generate even more interesting new ideas to post about. :)

I am curious how many people use adobe premiere/premiere elements either alone or in combination with screencasting software like camtasia or captivate for tutorials or other projects. There's been a flurry of seminars and other writing on screencasting, but most of the time people seem to be focusing on the screen capture aspect of it all. We have been producing and showing a short library video for our first year student orientation for nearly 4 years, in various different incarnations---first in Premiere 5, then Captivate, then Camtasia, and now it appears possibly a combination of both. If anybody knows of a good program that can handle both screen captures and edit video well (I know Camtasia can handle video, but it doesn't really seem to be as easy to edit video in Camtasia than in Premiere Elements) I would be definitely interested to know.

Another interesting development would be to offer a workshop in basic Second Life skills in addition to our other workshops. I would venture that especially if and when students begin to attend classes in SL, that this would probably become necessary.

Interesting ACRL poster session

I got a couple of notices on several list-servs on a really cool looking virtual poster session. It's called Eye to I: Visual Literacy Meets Information Literacy and it's got lots of fabulous information on a subject which seems to be very much of the moment. Since so much of our culture's communication is conducted in visual media, it's surprising to me that this aspect of IL integration isn't mentioned more. There's alot to look at on this site--I am still plowing through the site's online posters.