I will have two talks today Friday 15th September at the EAHIL conference in Cluj-Napoca. First one about 10.50 in the conference hall for 20 min. Here’s the power point for it: Critical assessment of Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar [PPT].
At 11.30 I will have my empowerment session in the same conference hall and here’s the power point: The hunt for the perfect interface in a Googlified world [PPT].
I listened to the talk by Oliver Obst Thursday September 1 10.30-11.30 about “Use of weblogs by libraries and librarians”. He asked the audience how many knew about blogs and maybe half didn’t know anything.
He made an brief, easy explanation of how to start a blog with the blog web service Blogger owned by Google in just three steps. How to choose temple, write blog entry title and content, how you could choose fonts and font-size easily, similar to a word editor. Also showed how a set up of a blog in WordPress blog service just will take 5 minutes. Gave credits to WordPress for all plugins you can use and the category function which means you can subject index your blog entries, just like subject indexing library books. Something librarians should like, said Obst. He thought WordPress was bit better than Blogger because it’s easier to use for example the function with Categories, otherwise Blogger is easier.
He also told us what a blog is: organized chronically by date, updated somewhat regulary with relatively short entries, use unique URL called permalink for all entries, filtering the information universe for readers, self-archives, provides an RSS-link.
So what do blogs do for you according to Obst? For example they repack info and keep you alerted with what’s new.
He further showed a lot of examples on library blogs.
Pro’s with blogs according to Obst were: don’t need to know HTML or editing program, update from everywhere, helps stay current and con’s were of course information overload. He finished also to explain what RSS is and what it’s good for.
After the talk we meet outside on the steps and I got an interview.
Do you have statistics on how much library blogs is used by non-librarians?
-No, but my german Medinfo blog are used heavily by scientists because I write about OA. We don’t have many german blog sources like Medinfo.
But what do your boss say about your blogging during work?
– I can blog if it just don’t eat up my other duties. Medinfo was put up because the german medical libraries association thought we should have one.
So you think library bosses should promote librarians to blog during work to filter information?
-Yes, for library news to inform clients of what’s happening for example. Our library though have no blog. I asked my user if they wanted a blog with RSS and they didn’t know what RSS was and they said: No please, we rather want same email newsletter as before.
So how do you use your blog?
-Often I go back to my blog just finding the information I didn’t remeber. It’s like a backup memory!
Update: A then a little bird whispered in my ear: he is a boss ;-) of medical branch Library at ULB, Münster, since 1996. BTW here you find Olivers talk in PDF.
I already learnt from my travellings that England has a pub in every corner. During today’s walking tour in the city of Cluj I realized Cluj nearly have one church in every corner.
We learned about the minorities living in Cluj and Transylvania. There are a german population with about 65,000 Saxons living in Transylvania. There are also about 1,7 million Hungarians living in Romania. Our guide Rita was one of them. She is a student of archaeology. I asked Rita about the Gypsy minority which she called “Romanj”, and told her some of them go to Stockholm to beg for money in the underground. She said it was a problem all over Europe and finished the conversation. I read in my Lonely Planet book the government estimate they are about 420,000 gypsies in Romania.
She showed us the modern part with the National Theatre where the opera resides and she also showed us the older parts. Nice walk but where was that walk uphill as the conference programme promise?s: …”be prepared to walk uphill”. Though I saw in the horisont the hills. I went down to river med french Herve to see the river after the walk. Thanks Rita!
I just want to market the EAHIL workshop next year 12-15 September in Krakow: PATHWAYS TO NEW ROLES: The Education, Training and Continuing Development of the Health Library & Information Workforce. I just now Krakow for one thing: Wisla Krakow, their football team. Lonely Planet recently had a podcast about Krakow.
This evening I heard opera live for the first time and it was a great experience, though I’m more of a soccer-poetry guy. The opera was like being part of the movie Moulin Rouge. Especially I liked the harp in the orchestra but at least I just heard it once. Harp was one of my favourite instruments when I was little due to the dumb Harpo Marx, which was my childhood hero beside of Robin Hood, Ingemar Stenmark and mum. Nice food and interesting people. But still to me Opera is just another web browser ;-)
Talked to a dutch lady in the food queue and talked to french guy Herve from Intervet in Angers, France.
I already reached the limit of photos on Flickr(arrrghh!) and they want me to pay 249$ for an upgrade. I’ll sleep on it. It’s hard being a freeloader nowadays.
Upgrade: Yes, I did pay Flickr/Yahoo for that upgrade :-( Yeah, Oliver you’re right. It should be 24.95$.
Friedholm Rump from Library of the University of Veterinary Medicine in Hannover, Germany, had a talk titled “Searchin’? Got the dot com blues?”. He showed tools like Jux2, Dogpile comparison tool, Twingine etc were you can compare results from more than one engine. Because of the results in this tools he means we should use more than one engine. He suggested Ask.com and mentioned that the librarian and internet consultant Gary Price been headhunted by Ask and that’s one reason to look out for Ask. My opinion is that Ask has some great tools, for example their Smart Answers tool. He also mentioned MSN and their new Windows Live, Google of course, Yahoo, the Vivisimo meta search engine Clusty, Exalead, Gigablast but he ran out of time and did some mention of Citeulike which are one of my favourite free tools. But I don’t think he really told the audience that basically it’s an online reference manager similar to Endnoteweb and Refworks, beside of a tool for users exchanging article references for example. Unfortunately Friedholm had bad luck with the Internet connection when showing his searches live in the search engines and it’s not his fault, though I suggest he prepares with some screenshots next time. Screenshots are a librarians survival kit ;-) That’s life!
Yesterday, when getting transport to the hotel sitting in the front seat I was socializing with David Charles. First I thought he was a driver, but with that good american accent I realized he wasn’t. David Charles is an independent licensing agent for several non-profit societies in US that publish research and clinical biomedical journals. It’s about 10 publishers with about 40 e-journals. Some are high-ranked if you use the impact factor as a measure. Look at this picture:
Biological Chemistry and FASEB journal are two examples of journals. All his society publishers use the Highwire press interface. All journals are free after twelve months. David is a native New Yorker but lived in Paris for about 25 years. He’s an agent for India, Europe and US.
So, is this hidden advertising? No, David is a nice guy without a tie so of course I want to give him some publicity. And I’m not in charge of subscriptions at my library so I’m not that biassed. So, if there are other agent nice guys or women I may blog you if you contact me.
Just met Filip Kriz, librarian from Prague. He’s been interviewed by the conference newsletter Eahil Echo. With his permission I will publish some sentences from his views on the conference so far:
While rolling over the runway of tiny Cluj airport I was just wondering what is ahead. The organization of transport to our hotels went very well and the volunteers were a great relief so there was no need to have dispute with taxi drivers. The accomodation is very great with a very willing staff. Also the first-timer reception was a very good oppurtunity to informally meet new colleagues before the beginning of the conference though some of them unfortunately left quite early.
Hey, Filip, me and two swedish librarians and the president left at the end of the reception ;-)
I asked for the power point slides but they say they won’t be published before the talk ends. Why? Answer: Someone who’s not visiting the conference will read it. My opinion: Doesn’t matter if it gets published before the talk. The freeloaders or non-travellers or what you want to nickname them will even read it after the talk.
This is not Open Access in my opinion. As soon a talk is ready just put it up as I done: www.ub.umu.se/tjanste/lais/ Just read it you freeloaders or just don’t visit my talks you attendees. The most important of a conference is not talks. Just ask a researcher. It’s networking, meeting other people. You who read my power point, there maybe be some changes this evening. And I assure you I will tell you something more than just the things documented in my slides.
Still 15:52 I can’t find the slides at the website?
It’s sunny here today and yesterday also. In the evenings and mornings it’s a bit cold though. If you want to read more about Cluj-Napoca I suggest you to look at answers.com. They have more sources than just the Wikipedia.
Encylopedia Britannica says Cluj had about 700,000 inhabitants 2002. Strange they have an airport smaller than in the town I live in: Umeå with 110,000 inhabitants. As you may now Cluj is situated in Transylvania.
Nowhere North 