What this tool can do for you:

• Help you better understand how to determine the “fairness” of a use under the U.S. Copyright Code.
• Collect, organize & archive the information you might need to support a fair use evaluation.
• Provide you with a time-stamped, PDF document for your records [example], which could prove valuable, should you ever be asked by a copyright holder to provide your fair use evaluation and the data you used to support it. [why is this important?]
• Provide access to educational materials, external copyright resources, and contact information for copyright help at local & national levels.

Looks nifty! I don’t have a reason to use it now, but it’s a great tool to remember.

The host site, Copyright Advisory Network from the ALA Office of Information Technology Policy has more great tools and information about copyright and the use of copyrighted material.

(Source: twitter.com)

Welcome to the BEN portal, the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Pathway for biological sciences education. The BEN Portal provides access to education resources from BEN Collaborators and is managed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Over 18,827 reviewed resources covering 77 biological sciences topics are available. BEN resources can help you engage student interest, shorten lesson preparation time, provide concept updates, and develop curricula that are in line with national standards for content, use of animals and humans, and student safety.

Materials can be browsed by subject, resource type, and audience (potential audiences covered include pretty much every age level you can think of). Not everything is free, but the majority seems to be.

This seems like an interesting resource, especially if you’re teaching science topics.

(Source: crln.acrl.org)

Handy list of some free online language-learning materials, reference tools, broadcasts, and other helpful links.

One of these days, I really ought to brush up on the languages I started in school. Though I’ve also wanted to learn to at least read Russian…

Use this Web service to generate a chart showing the history of a journal with a given ISSN

This is really nifty—you can see the changes in journal titles and their ISSNs, including things like title merges.

(Source: twitter.com)

The “I Know…” series of blog posts shows relatively simple tricks [malicious] websites can use to coax a browser into revealing information that it probably should not. Firewalls, anti-virus software, anti-phishing scam black lists, and even patching your browser was not going to help.

Fortunately, if you are using one of today’s latest and greatest browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, etc.), these tricks, these attack techniques, mostly don’t work anymore. The unfortunate part is that they were by no means the only way to accomplish these feats.

It is nearly impossible to follow all the activity in state and federal laws, regulations and speeches in Congress without a significant policy team or an army of lobbyists. Now you can. For free. The Sunlight Foundation’s new tool called Scout allows you to create customized keyword alerts to notify you whenever issues you care about are included in legislative or regulatory actions.

(Source: twitter.com)

Dear fellow librarians, people who are returning to education as adults are easily scared away by overly complicated messages. Think about the content, timing and delivery of your messages from your customers and potential customers perspective, not from your own perspective. If you make them feel stupid or scare them off the first time they hear about you they are unlikely to ever come back because they have plenty of other ways to get just enough information that is just good enough for their purposes. Except for the very small number who are planning to take library courses they just do not need to know what a nested Boolean search is, most especially they do not need to know it in week one of their three or four year degree.

I would say that almost everyone is scared away by overly complicated messages, especially when it comes to them needing to find information to complete a task. (There’s a reason that Google is the prominent search engine! How much simpler can you get?)

Given that library systems are rather dumb on their own, librarians have been forced to focus so much effort on absurdly long and/or specific search strategies just to make the system cough up something even remotely relevant. Which is sad and somewhat pathetic. We as a profession should be able to do better than that by now. (And why are these things being taught when the search option provided by the library doesn’t even accept them? Something is wrong there.)

(Source: twitter.com)

Why would you want to make eBooks? They are a lot easier to read on tablet computers than a PDF, so if you’re taking the time to type up a research guide or something similar in MS Word and then PDFing it for web posting, you might as well take another 15 minutes and make an eBook out of it.  But there’s also lots of government information out there that you can scrape and make into a new, more usuable product – either for benevolent or not so benevolent reasons.   For example, if you’re an academic law librarian, imagine taking your state’s Rules of Court, making them into a nice ePub, putting a cover on it saying “complements of Jane Smith Law Library, University of X College of Law” and then sending it out to all of your alumni.   Or substitute “firm librarian” for academic and “practice group” for alumni.  A more benevolent example would be to partner with your faculty members that assign statutory supplements for their classes, offer to make them and distribute through library website and save the students about 100 bucks per class.

Really, once you start looking around, you’d be surprised about how much you can transform into an eBook format.  And it’s sort of fun. When my co-worker Elmer showed me how to do it, I sort of went into a crazed “I WANT TO EBOOK THE WORLD!” mode. Hopefully you’ll keep it together a little more.