Information Today Inc. is running a sale on the following books (including The Accidental Systems Librarian) through Monday, June 10, 2013.

Information Today is offering 30% off the retail price on the following books:

• The Accidental Systems Librarian, 2nd Ed [Sale price: $20.65]
• The Embedded Librarian [Sale Price: $34.65]
• Extreme Searcher’s Internet Handbook, 4th Ed [Sale price: $17.47]
• Face2Face [Sale price: $17.47]
• UContent [Sale price: $34.65]
• LG to Negotiation [Sale price: $34.65]
• LG to Micropublishing [Sale price: $34.65]

Pick yours up today!

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Today I found the following resources and bookmarked them on Delicious.

• Vyew
  Continuous meeting rooms for real-time & anytime visual collaboration
• NewsBlur
  Personal news reader
• RSS Guard
  Very tiny RSS 0.91/0.92/0.93/1.0/2.0 and ATOM 1.0 feed reader.
• selfoss
  The multipurpose rss reader, live stream, mashup, aggregation web application
• Sensei
  Teaching coursework has never been easier, all within WordPress. With the Sensei plugin you can create courses, write lessons, and add quizzes. Set lesson and course pre-requisites, allow user registration and even charge for your course content using WooCommerce if you want.

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Today I found the following resources and bookmarked them on Delicious.

• Catincan
  Crowdfunding marketplace for open source software
• Connexions
  Connexions is a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc.
• GOKb
  GOKb will be a freely available data repository that will contain key publication information about electronic resources as it is represented within the supply chain from content publishers to suppliers to libraries.

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The post Bookmarks for April 9, 2013 appeared first on What I Learned Today....

With the release of Koha 3.6 came some improvements to the fine paying interface. This tutorial will show you those changes and how to use them in your library.

As always, if you have an idea for a video, please just let me know and I’ll add it to my list of things to record.

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Like many of you SimCity was one of the first games I ever played on the computer. I knew that a new version was coming out, but didn’t really keep up with the news about the release – until now. Apparently the newest SimCity was released about a week ago and has been making a splash in the news. Not because it’s an awesome game, but because of horrible DRM and failing servers. EA games has decided that in order to play SimCity (even in single player mode) you have to be on the Internet. While this fan refuses to support software with such insane DRM, many others did and it crashed/slowed the servers to such a point that no one could play the game.

This from ReadWrite:

Server problems wouldn’t normally hamper a video game’s launch, unless that game is developed by EA. In an effort to combat piracy – or something, it’s not quite clear – EA deployed an online-only Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology through its Origin service for SimCity, which came out on March 5. That means in order to play the game, you need to be online at all times and connected to EA’s servers, even when playing the single-player mode. When player demand starting causing the servers to fall, it also brought down nearly every player’s ability to play any aspect of the game.

To apologize EA is offering people effected a free game from their catalog – but why the heck would I want yet another game with DRM that makes it so that I can’t play games when I’m on the road? SimCity was the perfect game to play when on a train or a plane when you don’t want to pay for Wifi … in fact that’s how I still play SimCity 4.

I understand that gaming companies are worried about piracy, but this kind of DRM is not the solution. I’m sure someone will crack it eventually – but more importantly it is stopping loyal fans like me from continuing the buy in to the franchise.

Going forward, the only real solution may come from the most helpful 1-star review on Amazon, from a user named Malor who earned more than 7,700 recommendations. He noted that SimCity is not a typical game with a beginning, middle and end. It’s a toy, and you used to be able to buy that toy and play with it. But now, Malor wrote, “You don’t even get to buy your toy. Rather, you rent a toy from EA, who lets you play with it only in very limited, circumscribed ways, only on their servers.”

Malor’s final recommendation offers perhaps the best approach: ”You would be wiser to take three twenties out of your wallet, and light them on fire.” In other words, don’t waste your time or money on products with draconian DRM, no matter how intriguing they might be otherwise. Only when DRM affects sales will EA and other publishers take this situation seriously.

The post DRM or How to lose a customer appeared first on What I Learned Today....

As a trainer I like sites like this new one from Google that show you how stuff works. How Search Works goes in to a lot of detail about how search engines work. I thought it might be a useful resource for those of you who teach web searching workshops in your libraries – or just a cool site to check out if you’re the curious type!

On the site you can check out an animated explanation of search, as well as take a closer look at Google’s major search algorithms and features. A live slideshow gives you a glimpse at how Google removes spam, and complementing graphs show the spam problem and how Google is fighting it.

Search enthusiasts can also read an included 43-page document on how Google evaluates its search results.

Learn more about How Search Works at Mashable.

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How is it possible that I haven’t written about the series of videos you can watch about 20 of their projects.

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Lifehacker pointed me to this cool looking tool that I thought might interest some of you. It’s called DropTask and it lets you visualize your tasks in a sort of Ven Diagram way. I created a couple tasks in a project called ‘Blogs’:

This from Lifehacker:

DropTask is incredibly intuitive, and while it can seem a little weird at first—not to mention space-inefficient—it can be pretty handy if you’re managing larger projects. In fact, where it really shows its stuff is when you work with other people. If you sign your entire team up for DropTask, you can assign tasks or groups of tasks to different people with just a flick of the mouse, making it really easy to dole out responsibilities. Check out the video above to see it in action, or click the link below to try it out.

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Today I found the following resources and bookmarked them on Delicious.

• Linux Gems Cheat Sheet
  The contents of this file are released under the GNU General Public License. Feel free to reuse the contents of this work, as long as the resultant works give proper attribution and are made publicly available under the GNU General Public License.

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For the final video for your patrons, a quick overview of the Koha OPAC. It assumes that you offer certain features that you may or may not offer, so please review the video before sharing with your patrons. If I show things that you don’t offer then it might make sense to use any of the other individual section videos to help your patrons.

As always, if you have an idea for a video, please just let me know and I’ll add it to my list of things to record.

The post Koha 3.6 Public Catalog Overview appeared first on What I Learned Today....

Today I found the following resources and bookmarked them on Delicious.

• DropTask
  Visual Task Management for Individuals and Teams

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Today I found the following resources and bookmarked them on Delicious.

• CSS Beautifier
  Beautifies your CSS automatically so that it is consistent and easy to read

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The post Bookmarks for March 8, 2013 appeared first on What I Learned Today....

Today I found the following resources and bookmarked them on Delicious.

• BookOS
  Ebook library
• WikidPad
  wikidPad is a Wiki-like notebook for storing your thoughts, ideas, todo lists, contacts, or anything else you can think of to write down.

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The post Bookmarks for March 6, 2013 appeared first on What I Learned Today....

Today I found the following resources and bookmarked them on Delicious.

• JabRef reference manager
  JabRef is an open source bibliography reference manager. The native file format used by JabRef is BibTeX, the standard LaTeX bibliography format. JabRef runs on the Java VM (version 1.6 or newer), and should work equally well on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

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The post Bookmarks for March 4, 2013 appeared first on What I Learned Today....

Koha’s Batch Item Modification Tool is a handy way to edit multiple items at once. This tutorial will show you how to change values and remove values using this tool.

As always, if you have an idea for a video, please just let me know and I’ll add it to my list of things to record.

The post Batch Item Edits in Koha 3.6 appeared first on What I Learned Today....

I recently gave an interview on opensource.com about libraries, open source, getting involved and educating everyone I can.

Sharing is a fundamental part of the open source philosophy, and the same goes for libraries. Spreading, disseminating, and breaking down barries to gaining knowledge is a core mission of most library systems and their staff.

That that end, libraries—which are essentially hubs of knowledge and gathering places for learning and continuing daily education—may choose to implement open source tools and software.

An advocate for “open libraries”, Nicole Engard, is one of our new opensource.com community moderators, a long-time contributor, and a 2013 People’s Choice Award winner. She has a passion for libraries and wants libraries’ core operations to run on open source.

Let’s find out how some of the open source tools like Koha and Zotero are changing the future of libraries and learn more about Engard’s open source passion.

Check it out here.

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