The Distant Librarian

Change to Google Scholar Advanced Search

Thanks to a thread on the Web4Lib list I just learned that Google Scholar has changed the way you get to the Advanced Search options.

Instead of looking for a link, you'll now hit the down arrow at the right side of the search box:

At that point you'll see the advanced search options:

New Book: Screencasting for Libraries

Greg Notess, one of the first to see the possibilities of screencasting in libraries, has just announced that his new book, Screencasting for Libraries, part of the excellent ALA Tech Set series, has now been published. I had a chance to review this title a couple of months ago and found it an excellent guide for those getting started, and it also includes some good tools and suggestions for the seasoned screencaster. 

There's a companion website that provides a couple of useful tools, but I found the section where Greg covers chapter 5, Implementation, fascinating. In chapter 5 Greg walks you through 12 different projects, using several different approaches and tools. In the companion website, you can actually see the end result of each of those projects - a wonderful (and obvious, for this subject) was to complete the learning loop.

Go check it out!

11 tools for creating digital magazines

Can't remember how I came across this one, but over at NetMagazine you'll find a great post sharing 10 tools you can use to create professional-looking digital magazines, and most without any significant cost at all! Each entry lists the pros and cons of each tool, and links to a working example you can check out. The 11th tool in my title refers to the author's own startup, woop.ie, which is only a link at the end of the article.

 

Some big changes from Techsmith

Two big announcements from Techsmith last week. First Jing Pro is being retired. Looks like the free version will stick around, but in order to use the more advanced features offered by Pro you'll have to switch over to the latest version of Snagit, which now records video. The folks who've taken the time to comment don't seem pleased with the decision to retire Jing Pro, so we'll see what the next year brings; maybe Techsmith will reconsider.

The second piece of news was alluded to above: there's a new version of Snagit out for both Windows and Mac, and it sports a host of new features, including greatly-enhanced video recording. From the Techsmith blog post:

What's new in Snagit?

• Video Capture (Windows and Mac)
  
• Video Outputs to Camtasia Studio, Screencast.com, YouTube, FTP, Facebook and Twitter (Windows and Mac)
  
• Image Outputs to Facebook, Twitter and Evernote (Windows and Mac)
  
• New Stamps (Windows and Mac)
  
• Paste from Clipboard (Windows and Mac)
  
• Centered Canvas (Windows)
  
• Updated, time saving profiles and more available to download (Windows)
  
• Easier Resizing (Windows)
  
• More Zoom Options (Windows)
  
• Spell Check (Windows)
  
• Change Canvas Color (Mac)
  
• Color Filters (Mac)
  
• Webcam Image Capture (Mac)
  

And here's a bit that I had forgotten: a single license is good across both platforms! Oh yeah, AND most of you can probably pick it up for 40% off with the educational discount.

I use Snagit every day on my Windows machine, but almost never on my MacBook, opting instead for Skitch. I'll certainly give Snagit another go on the Mac though...

 

The definitive guide to iOS screencasting

Well wouldn't you know it - just days after my last post lamenting the lack of options for capturing screencasts, a new tool called Reflection has been released that allows the iPad2 and iPhone4S to stream to any Mac running OSX Lion (pretty much just like airplay on AppleTV). It's $15 for a single-user license.

Over on Digital Inspiration, Amit does a nice job of wrapping up all your options to date, including examples of content produced via each method.

Stay tuned for some library-related iOS screencasts!

The state of screencasting on iOS devices

With more and more apps coming out that can support your library's resources (Ebrary, BookMyne, EBSCOHost, WorldCat, and possibly something from your library, to name a few), wouldn't it be nice to be able to easily record some screencasts of the app in action on your device?

Well, unless you jailbreak your iOS device (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch), at this time you're not able use an app to record a screencast of what's happening on your device. On one hand that makes sense in that it would require one app to be running on top of another (or the rest of the OS, really) in order to record it. On the other hand, the fact that newer iOS devices offer "mirroring", the ability to display the entire device to an AppleTV, shows that it's technically possible for a whole-device screencasting application to work. Over the past few weeks there have been a few posts discussing what you currently CAN do for screencasting on your iOS device, so I thought I'd round them up here.

First up, a Profhacker post from The Chronicle of Higher Education takes a look at the apps Educreations and Explain Everything. I have a copy of Explain Everything and plan to review it here soon.

The Screening Room, Screenflow's blog, has the best post on this topic, with links to other posts that prove you CAN do this by outputting to a desktop machine, but it's gonna cost you a fair amount of money.

I had posted earlier about some similar hoops you can jump through using some different technology.

Finally, if you want to use your iPad to learn more about Camtasia Studio (on your Windows or OSX machine), Amit points out that Techsmith has released an iPad app called Fast Track that consists of a series of tutorials for that product.

How are things in the Android world, anyone know?

Free And Premium Video Hosting Platforms – Best Of

Looking for somewhere to host your videos or screencasts besides YouTube? Hongkiat.com has a nice annotated list of 19 video hosting services for you to take a look at. 

Lifehacker's best screencasting and screen capture apps

Over the past several weeks, Lifehacker has listed what they believe to be the best screencasting and screen capture tools for both Windows and Mac. In each post they cover the tool's Features, Where it excels, Where it falls short, and The Competition. Here they are:

• Best Screen capture tool for Windows (I had never heard of the winner, PicPick)
• Best Screen capture tool for Mac OSX (I love Skitch, but wish it had just a few more presets and callouts) For some strange reason the Skitch website says the iOS version is "coming soon", but you can (and should) grab it for the iPad already.
• Best Screencast tool for Windows (No surprise there - remember your educational pricing!)
• Best Screencast tool for Mac OSX (also a solid win, though I was surprised Camtasia:Mac didn't even show up under the alternatives...)

The importance of sweater vests and screencasting

Over at Library Voice, Chad Boeninger pops out of hibernation with an excellent post titled How I make instructional library web videos and screencasts and how you can too. In this post Chad distills his six years of experience with screencasting by answering the following questions:

1. Why Web Video?
   
2. What type of content?
3. How much time does it take?
4. How much time is saved?
5. How long should my videos be?
6. Script or no script?
7. Which software for screencasting?
8. How do I record my voice?
9. Where do you record your videos?
10. Which resolution?
11. Why and How do you add the video of yourself in the videos?
12. To edit or not?
13. How do I know when my video is done?
14. Where should I upload?
15. But you don’t use just use YouTube, do you?
16. How do I promote my videos?
17. What else should I know?

Yes, it's a long post :-)

Tips for making mobile-friendly screencasts

Over at The Screening Room, the blog to support the Mac-only screencasting product, ScreenFlow, you'll find a recent post with some guidelines for creating screencasts optimized for the iPhone and iPad. Note though that down in the comments you'll find some corrected information, so you should probably go with those figures.

While this post talks about ScreenFlow and iOS devices, the information obviously can be applied to other tools and other devices.

Will a librarian be crowned as ScreenChamp?

Techsmith is running a contest to determine who will be crownded the first ScreenChamp, and there's a librarian in the running! There are 15 screencasts in total, covering Education, Industry, and Entertainment. What's neat about seeing them all in the same place like this is how easy it is to compare and contrast the different styles that are used, some to great effect, and others not so much. Which one's your favorite?

ScreenConnect - another remote-assistance tool

A year ago I blogged about an article I had read that looked at different tools that could be used to either create screencasts, or allow screen sharing, in support of virtual reference transactions.

Six months ago a representative from ScreenConnect sent me an email suggesting that tool would be a good addition to the list from that post. I finally got around to taking a look (can you say "swamped"), and have to agree. A full cross-platform remote-control product, ScreenConnect is a self-hosted solution, which may be a turn off for some libraries, as so many services appear to be cloud-hosted, but I guess that's how they keep the price down. 

Lots of good documentation on the site, including this page describing how ScreenConnect fits in amongst its competitors. I also like the "Charlie Brown Teacher" component of their screencast. I must admit I didn't actually use the product, but you can download a fully-functioning 30-day free trial if it looks like something you want to explore. Oh, and there's an app for that too.

Google Kills Its Other Plus, and How to Bring It Back

From the Wired article you really should read:

(Last) Wednesday, Google retired a longer-standing “plus”: the + operator, a standard bit of syntax used to force words and phrases to appear in search results. The operator was part of Google since its launch in 1997 and built into every search engine since.

Of course I won't leave Google over this, but it does give me a reason to check out DuckDuckGo... (do you continue to use it, D'Arcy?)

Holy Crap, know what else they ditched? Google Labs! Apparently this was announced in July, but I was out of the country then and totally missed it! :-( Either follow my wayback machine link above, or troll through the painfully-slow-to-load pages at the CIO Magazine website to refresh your memory on all the goodness that once was...

Link dump - iOS5, online storage, & screencasting

Here's a list of stuff I've bookmarked over the past week or so.

• From TeleRead, sad news that iOS5 kills the Stanza ebook reader. Before I really started to buy from Kobo, Stanza was my e-reader of choice. It still offers the most intuitive usability features, IMHO, but I guess Amazon decided not to show it any more love :-(
• To help ease that pain, Box.net is offering 50GB of free online storage to all iOS5 users. You need to sign up from your iOS device before December 2 to take advantage of this offer. Personally I continue to be completely satisfied with Dropbox (affiliate link), but it's always nice to have additional storage in your back pocket!
• 50 GB not enough for you? New company Backify is offering 512 GB of online storage! Lifehacker does point out some possible red flags, but wow. Hrm, I also got some security certificate warnings when I went to visit the Backify website - maybe don't store anything sensitive in there...
• The always fresh Digital Inspiration points out that you can use the free Screencast-o-matic (and the commercial Camtasia Studio) to record screencasts as animated GIFs. Why would you want to do this? As Amit says, "in certain situations, like when the recording is short (see example), an animated GIF would make more sense than a video based screencast. They load quickly, work across devices and you don’t have to hit play to watch the screencast."
• Finally, Aaron Tay has a thoughtful and in-depth post looking at tools and thoughts to consider when delivering library instruction online. One-to-one or one-to-many? Live or recorded? Screensharing or co-browsing? Definitely worth a read.

Lifehacker's Five Best Screencasting or Screen Recording Tools

No surprises in here really, as Lifehacker rounds up the five best screencasting tools as submitted by its readers. My fav, Camtasia Studio, comes out on top all around, offering both a Windows and Mac version. There seem to be a lot of folks who like the free CamStudio though, if the after-poll is to be trusted:

And in related screencasting news, Techsmith, makers of Camtasia Studio, is running a contest to crown the first ScreenChamp, with a first prize of a MacBook Pro. Details here. I thought I'd use this contest as an excuse to update my screencasts on creating persistent URLs, but am concerned about the rule that says the screencast can't contain any 3rd party trademarks, logos, insignia, location signage, photographs, artwork or sculptures without the appropriate permissions... Guess I could seek permission from the database vendors... We'll see. It'd be great if a librarian won the education category, wouldn't it? :-)