Are Stanford students living in the clouds? Our recent Chromebook lending pilot at the Terman Engineering Library pointed out some interesting trends that involve the adoption of Google Apps and cloud computing/storage in general.
Oalla digital signage continues to innovate within the Stanford University Libraries. Since Ronnie Fields of the Stanford Green Library last posted on the topic, the Stanford Terman Engineering Library has been testing new Oalla apps created specifically for use with iPads, Android tablets and large touch screen monitors.
We've set up trial access for a new database called VoxGov (http://voxgov.com). Please take a moment to put the database through its paces and send any feedback you have to me at jrjacobs AT stanford DOT edu by April 8, 2014.
VoxGov has a powerful search and pulls together a large swath of US federal public domain government information with social media data and displays it in a visually understandable way. VoxGov also allows for bulk data access to faculty and graduate students who may need to do deeper data analysis. Bulk data access is via separate individual license and has some restrictions on use and reproduction.
Voxgov collects, organizes and archives primary sourced U.S. Federal Government information from government sites like fdsys.gov, federalregister.gov, congress.gov, and some executive agencies as well as major NGO sites like openCRS and FAS Project on Government Secrecy and combines that public domain information with 4,000 official federal government social media accounts from twitter and facebook, as well as speeches, press releases and content from over 10,000 Federal government web locations.
Conference site: http://www.ioste2013.org/
The International Organization for Science and Technology Education (IOSTE) Eurasian Regional conference was recently held in Antalya, Turkey. The organization’s goal is to advance science and technology education as well as to provide scholarly exchange and discussion on this subject. Participants were interested in learning from experiences gained from using Tablets and Mobiles in teaching and learning here at Stanford. The recent "iPads For Learning Pilot" provided most of the content that was presented in the workshop on Tablets in Science and Technology education. This workshop also resulted in invitations to visit and speak with educators in other schools and colleges, leading to a trip to Ankara where an event with over 70 teachers was organized at Maya Schools - a private school and college.
A month ago on October 24th (computer geeks know this number 1024 as 2^10), staff and friends of the Internet Archive (IA) converged at archive.org's 300 Funston Avenue offices for an annual celebration of their mission to provide access to a free, safe and open internet. IA's founder, Brewster Kahle, spoke of recent milestones such as the growth of the data set to 15 Petabytes up from just a few last year, and the launch of the TV News archive. Other highlights included the new (and largest collection) of vintage software; eliminating the 404 Error from browsers; improvements on the WayBack Machine; an expanded emulator - MESS; and the growing size of their hard copy collection arising from individual donations. Let us explore a few of these.
TV News
This service enables users to search TV news for phrases found in past broadcasts. One can quote, save, and even share search results. IA will be receiving a donation of 140,000 tapes containing 35 years of TV history, and dating back to the 1970s. This is the Marion Stokes collection of TV news.
"What happens when the record of scholarly research published in journals, books, proceedings or other documents changes? As careful as authors, reviewers, and publishers are in the publication process, corrections, updates, errata, and even retractions and withdrawals are sometimes necessary. But how can researchers find out about these important changes?" Learn more about CrossMark.
The discovery of a particular scanning defect called Bayer moiré, occured while creating image files at Stanford University Library's Map Scanning Lab and prompted a more focused study. The Bayer moiré defect affects the ability of software to lift features from maps digitally.
BrowZine is a tablet application that lets you browse, read and monitor thousands of scholarly journals available from the Stanford University Libraries.
• Browse titles by subject to easily find journals of interest
• Create a personal bookshelf of favorite journals
• Be alerted when a new issue of a journal is published
• Save articles in your personal library. BrowZine can easily be synced up with Box.com, Mendeley, Zotero, and other services to help keep all of your information together in one place.