The Mark of Zotero: Two-Clicks to Citation Management

Originally presented at OPAL on January 23, 2008.

The Mark of Zotero: Two-Clicks to Citation Management, a presentation made by Chris Strauber, Reference and Web Services Librarian at Wofford College.

• Streaming audio about Zotero with text chat and PowerPoint slides (playback time of 42 minutes)
• downloadable MP3 audiorecording about Zotero (13 MB; playback time of 42 minutes)
• PowerPoint slides about Zotero
• Video about the Zotero interface (runtime 5:10)
• Video about how Zotero captures citations and content (runtime 4:13)
• Video about how Zotero creates bibliographies (runtime 3:39)
• Blog post by Mark Dingemanse of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics about why he made the switch from Endnote to Zotero.

EDUCAUSE 2007 :: Bruce Schneier on Information Security: Ten Trends [Keynote]

Originally posted on EDUCAUSE Connect on October 31, 2007.

In this 43 minute podcast, we feature a keynote speech by Bruce Schneier, author and Chief Technology Officer for BT Counterpane, Inc. This speech was delivered at the EDUCAUSE 2007 Annual Conference in Seattle, Washington on October 26th, 2007. It is entitled "Bruce Schneier on Information Security: Ten Trends".

Surveying current trends in information security, it’s clear that a myriad of forces are at work. But fundamentally, security is all about economics: both attacker and defender are trying to maximize the return on their investments. Economics can both explain why security fails so often and offer new solutions for its success. For example, often the people who could protect a system are not those who suffer the costs of failure. Changing these economic incentives will do more to improve security than will more technology.

Bruce Schneier notes on his blog: "I spoke at the Educause conference this year in Seattle. There's a podcast and video of my talk available ("Ten Trends of Information Security"; I've given the talk before) as well as a podcast of an interview with me."

Talking with Talis :: Daniel Lewis on the Social and Semantic Webs

Originally posted on Talking with Talis on November 24, 2007.

In our latest Talking with Talis podcast, I talk with Daniel Lewis. We discuss some of his ideas about the 'Social Web', and the relationship between this and the ideas and technologies of the Semantic Web.

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

• APML
• FOAF
• Knowledge Media Institute
• Linking Open Data
• Microformats
• OAuth
• Open Social
• Open Socket in Facebook
• Oxford Brookes University
• Oxford Geek Nights
• Oxfordshire Semantic Web Interest Group
• Revyu.com
• Six Apart's Livejournal
• SKOS
• Wordpress
• XFN

Media Berkman :: Aaron Swartz on the Open Library Project

Aaron Swartz, co-founder of Reddit.com and Tech Lead for the Open Library project, spoke at this week’s installment of the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

Listen to the MP3 or view the MOV (time: 1:03:39)

Aaron spoke about how, thanks to new technology, the grand vision of a library containing every book in the world is now within our grasp. He discussed how the Open Library Project, a loose collection of technologists, publishers, librarians, and book-lovers, has taken up this challenge by trying to create a website collecting everything we know about books — including library records, publishers’ blurbs, full-text and scans, reviews, and more

Aaron was previously a co-founder of Reddit.com, which was purchased by Condé Nast in late 2006. He was worked on Internet specifications for RSS and RDF and was one of the early team members of the Creative Commons project. He is the author of a number of free software packages and a co-founder of Jottit.com.

+ Open Library vision
+ Aaron Swartz’s website

Berkman Fellow David Weinberger live-blogged the lunch, and you can check out his comments and summary here.

Jon Udell's Interviews With Innovators :: Beth Jefferson on BiblioCommons

Originally posted on Jon Udell's Interviews With Innovators on November 30, 2007.

This week’s ITConversations show features Beth Jefferson, founder of BiblioCommons Inc., a company that aims to reinvent and federate the online catalogs of public libraries. She’s thinking very creatively about the social forces that such a federation could marshall. The idea is not to create yet another social network. Instead, she wants to promote the social discovery — and social cataloging — of books, CDs, videos, and other kinds of library resources. Social networks pivot on interpersonal relationships. A BiblioCommons-enabled network would, in a complementary way, pivot on those resources.

How would such a network achieve meaningful scale? Beth has found some data which suggests that if you federated lots of public library catalogs, the combined user population would rival some of the web’s largest sites. Enabling those folks to connect with one another, in the context of resource collections that share common metadata, would be a big deal.

The BiblioCommons software is only now entering its first trial phase. But you can see some of what it does in Beth’s presentation at code4lib, a conference for library technologists.

Talking with Talis :: Danny Ayers on the Semantic Web

Originally posted on Talking with Talis on 14 March 2007.

In our latest Talking with Talis podcast, I talk with Semantic Web developer and evangelist, Danny Ayers. We discuss the Semantic Web and the notion of Linked Data, before touching briefly upon Metaweb's Freebase, which had just been released at the time.

Download MP3 [52 mins, 36 Mb]

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources

• Disco Semantic Web browser
• Last.fm
• Longwell
• Metaweb
• Cory Doctorow on Metacrap
• Musicbrainz
• OpenID
• PICS
• Semantic Mediawiki
• Semantic Web
• Semantic Web layercake diagram
• Semantic Wikipedia
• SWEO
• SWEO Community Projects
• Wikipedia
• Yahoo! Pipes

Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators :: Barbara Aronson

Originally posted on Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators on August 30, 2007.

In this edition of Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators, host Jon dell speaks with Barbara Aronson, program manager for the World Health Organization's Health InterNetwork Access Initiative (HINARI). Thanks to this program, qualifying hospitals, universities, and other organizations in 70 of the poorest countries receive free access to many of the best biomedical journals. Another 43 somewhat less poor countries pay token fees to access the journals, an arrangement that has drawn criticism from some open access advocates. Barbara Aronson argues that the developed world's notion of open access is too narrow, that HINARI is an important form of open access, and that it has also become a laboratory in which publishers can explore a tiered pricing model that may ultimately apply to developed countries too.

The economics of scientific publishing notwithstanding, HINARI represents a revolution in poor countries' access to current medical research. And researchers in those countries aren't just consuming the information. They're also processing it to produce new research that reflects their own very different circumstances.

Download MP3 35:41, 16.3 mb

Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators :: Timo Hannay

Originally posted on Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators on July 5, 2007.

As director of web publishing for Nature Publishing Group, Timo Hannay is applying web 2.0 principles to the realm of science. His projects include: Connotea, a social bookmarking service for scientists; Nature Network, a social network for scientists; and Nature Precedings, a site where researchers can share and discuss work prior to publication.

The social and collaborative aspects of these systems are, of course, inspired by their more general counterparts on the web: del.icio.us, Facebook and LinkedIn, the blogosophere. But while the general web provides useful models, science doesn't yet provide the same incentives to participate. Change is coming, though, and Timo Hannay and his team are doing everything they can to accelerate it.

Download MP3 46:14, 21.2 mb

Resources:

• Connotea.org
• Nature Network
• Nature Precedings
• Timo Hannay's Nature Profile
• Podcasts from Nature.com
• Nascent Blog

Talking With Talis :: A conversation with LibLime's Joshua Ferraro

Originally posted on Talking With Talis on September 26, 2007.

Joshua Ferraro President, Technology for LibLime discusses Open Source library systems in this Talking with Talis podcast. The Open Source alternative to the traditional model of library system purchase has attracted much interest over recent months. Joshua dispels a few myths and clarifies what it is like for a library to go OS.

Download MP3 [31 mins, 28Mb]

David Lankes :: "Library as Conversation" Free Library of Philadelphia President’s Forum, Philadelphia, PA

David Lankes has given a number of similar presentations to promote the idea of Libraries as Participatory Networks, a project he developed with the Information Institute of Syracuse and the American Library Association's Office for Information Technology Policy.

Thoughts on how libraries facilitate conversations. The idea is based on a simple theory: Knowledge is created through conversation; libraries are in the knowledge business; therefore, libraries are in the conversation business. Though libraries serve a vital role as community memory keeper, they often fall short of the ideal. Lankes will explain how by embracing the participatory online technologies from Web 2.0 libraries can advance not just their communities, but their positions within them. You’ll learn how adopting network concepts and software promotes the library’s most fundamental mission: knowledge creation and dissemination.

He's put up a podcast and slides of his most recent talk to the Free Library of Philadelphia President’s Forum in September 2007 and has also made the talk available as a streamed video and a Google video.