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Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.
What are COinS?
ContextObjects in Spans (COinS) is a method to embed bibliographic information about available references into the HTML code of a web page by using a "span" element. Span elements are hidden in the HTML code and therefore internet users won't notice COinS unless they have installed a modern browser software (e.g. Firefox) and a specific extension which discovers the hidden information. COinS re-use the elements defined by the OpenURL standard, e.g. the article title is marked as "rft.atitle". This is how HTML code looks like with COinS element included:
What is WebCite®?
WebCite®, a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium, is an on-demand archiving system for webreferences (cited webpages and websites, or other kinds of Internet-accessible digital objects), which can be used by authors, editors, and publishers of scholarly papers and books, to ensure that cited webmaterial will remain available to readers in the future. If cited webreferences in journal articles, books etc. are not archived, future readers may encounter a "404 File Not Found" error when clicking on a cited URL. Try it! Archive a URL here. It's free and takes only 30 seconds.
A WebCite®-enhanced reference is a reference which contains - in addition to the original live URL (which can and probably will disappear in the future, or its content may change) - a link to an archived copy of the material, exactly as the citing author saw it when he accessed the cited material.
Really wanted to add some images to remember this site but snagit and jing weren't working......HSM
Top 5 Twitter Tools | Bumpshack.com
Top 5 Twitter Tools
Posted on: April 1st, 2009Rita Pereira
Twitter is a free social messaging utility for staying connected in real-time, where you can send messages up to 140 characters called tweets. Tweets are posted on your profile page and send out to all your followers’ timeline.
When you are only following a couple of people like close friends and family, it is easy to keep refreshing the Twitter home page for updates. But when you start following a couple hundred and also use Twitter for business, you have to use this tools to help you keep up, tweet smarter and save your precious time.
- TweetDeck – Our personal favorite! TweetDeck gives you the last 200 tweets made by Twitters you are following and organizes your @replies and Direct Messages (DMs) in different columns. You can also group people you are following into different groups/columns (family, friends…) to easily keep up with their tweets. Reply, retweet and DM with just one click!
- Twitpic – This tool allows you to share pictures on Twitter.
- TweetLater – You can easily schedule your tweets for a later time, get emails with your keyword alerts and send instant “Thank You” messages to your new followers with TweetLater. If you have more than one Twitter account, this tool is a must have.
- Twitter Timer – Follow @timer, send a DM with a number (minutes) and message and Twitter Timer will remind you to do that important task you keep forgetting. For example, DM @timer with the message 60 business meeting and it will remind you to go to your business meeting in 60 minutes.
- GroupTweet – You can send messages to a specific group of your followers with GroupTweet. This is a great tool for business groups since you can make its settings private and exchange information via tweets safely.
Twitter is hot at the moment and even celebrities are tweeting. If you have been living in a cave for the past six months and still don’t have a twitter account, you can sign up here. Don’t forget to follow BumpShack on Twitter!
michigan / 23 / 03 / 2009 / News / Home - Inside Higher Ed
Farewell to the Printed Monograph
March 23, 2009
The University of Michigan Press is announcing today that it will shift its scholarly publishing from being primarily a traditional print operation to one that is primarily digital.
Within two years, press officials expect well over 50 of the 60-plus monographs that the press publishes each year -- currently in book form -- to be released only in digital editions. Readers will still be able to use print-on-demand systems to produce versions that can be held in their hands, but the press will consider the digital monograph the norm. Many university presses are experimenting with digital publishing, but the Michigan announcement may be the most dramatic to date by a major university press.
The shift by Michigan comes at a time that university presses are struggling. With libraries' budgets constrained, many presses have for years been struggling to sell significant numbers of monographs -- which many junior professors need to publish to earn tenure -- and those difficulties have only been exacerbated by the economic downturn. The University of Missouri Press and the State University of New York Press both have announced layoffs in recent months, while Utah State University Press is facing the possibility of a complete elimination of university support.
Michigan officials say that their move reflects a belief that it's time to stop trying to make the old economics of scholarly publishing work. "I have been increasingly convinced that the business model based on printed monograph was not merely failing but broken," said Phil Pochoda, director of the Michigan press. "Why try to fight your way through this? Why try to remain in territory you know is doomed? Scholarly presses will be primarily digital in a decade. Why not seize the opportunity to do it now?"
While Pochoda acknowledged that Michigan risks offending a few authors and readers not ready for the switch, he said there is a huge upside to making the move now.
Because digital publishing is so much less expensive -- with savings both in printing and distribution -- the press expects to be able to publish more books, and to distribute them electronically to a much broader audience. Michigan officials said that they don't plan to cut the budget of the press -- but to devote resources to peer review and other costs of publishing that won't change with the new model. Significantly, they said, the press would no longer have to reject books deemed worthy from a scholarly perspective, but viewed as unable to sell.
"We will certainly be able to publish books that would not have survived economic tests," said Pochoda. "And we'll be able to give all of our books much broader distribution."
Teresa A. Sullivan, Michigan's provost, said she saw that shift in approach as particularly significant. "What we hope is that if a scholar has a wonderful but quirky idea, that book could still be published electronically by us if you don't have to worry about: Do you have to publish enough copies to break even?" Broadly, she said that she would like to move to the idea that a university press should be judged by its contribution to scholarship, not "profit or loss," which has become too central as the economics of print publishing have deteriorated.
Sullivan said that she believes university presses have been "marginalized" by their economic challenges and the realities that traditional print publications have such limited reach. (Many presses considered a few hundred copies sold a success for a monograph.) "We want to put the emphasis on dissemination. And we want acquisition editors to feel that they can take risks that maybe they couldn't take before."
The shift is not designed to save money, but to make better use of the money being spent on the press, Sullivan said. No jobs will be eliminated -- although duties will probably shift for some employees.
The university also said that all current contracts will be honored, and that some of the non-monograph publications will continue in print. For example, the University of Michigan Press is a major publisher of textbooks in English as a second language, and those publications are expected to continue in print format.
Sullivan said that Michigan has been a leader in making print-on-demand technology available, and she wants to continue an emphasis on appropriate use of technology to promote reading in a variety of formats. She also stressed that the university remained committed to rigorous peer review and scholarly oversight of publishing -- using standards identical to those of print operations.
In terms of pricing, Sullivan said that Michigan planned to develop site licenses so that libraries could gain access to all of the press's books over the course of a year for a flat rate. While details aren't firm, the idea is to be "so reasonable that maybe every public library could acquire it."
The use of the site license for university press books is also being explored by Duke University Press, which just stared e-Duke Books, which provides digital access to all the books published for a one-year period at a flat rate, based on Carnegie Classification. The Duke project, however, is not at this point replacing print versions of the books, but is providing another way to gain access.
Other presses are experimenting with making small portions of their lists or individual series available primarily in digital form. Since 2006, the Pennsylvania State University Press has released a few books a year in its romance studies series in digital, open access format. All chapters are provided in PDF format, but half are provided in a format to download and print, and half in read only. Readers may pay for print-on-demand versions.
Sanford G. Thatcher, director of the Penn State University Press and past president of the Association of American University Presses, said that if this effort succeeds, it may be expanded to other series. He said that the economics of the series are about the same as when the books were published primarily in traditional print form. But he said he sees the works in the series gaining readers. "Some scholar in China who wasn't going to buy it can call it up," he said.
Thatcher is skeptical of the site license approach for university press books. "How many libraries are going to license a small number of books," and do so in arrangements with many presses? he asked.
Nonetheless, he applauded Michigan for adopting a new model from which others may learn. "We all need experiments," he said.
Project Information Literacy: A large-scale study about early adults and their research habits
Tune in to Project Information Literacy's (PIL's) new series of short videos, the PIL InfoLit Monologues, which are about how college students conduct research in the digital age. The hope is the "public service videos" will be shown in classes, training sessions, and meetings and will spark further discussion about information literacy.
PIL InfoLit Monologue, No. 1 (2:10) is about what students say about Wikipedia. The video draws on research from PIL's Fall Discussion Groups. Project Information Literacy is a national research study, led by Alison Head and Mike Eisenberg of the University of Washington's iSchool and supported with a gift from ProQuest.
Project Information Literacy: A large-scale study about early adults and their research habits
