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Month: May 2009

Making FriendFeed Look the Way I Want It To

Published by Iris on Friday, May 8th, 2009

[Updated with a more modular version of the steps below. First, install Stylish. Then create the following three new blank styles, and populate them with the code here:

Now you can toggle things on and off at will depending on your minute-by-minute needs.]

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I interrupt your regularly scheduled library-related thinking to bring you a brief note about FriendFeed. It recently changed its look rather significantly, and a few of us felt a little claustrophobic every time we looked at it. Luckily, if you’re running Firefox you can install Stylish, which lets you modify a site’s CSS. Once you install that, you need one or more of the following:

  1. Enough knowledge of CSS to modify the site as you wish
  2. Friends who know enough CSS to do that for you
  3. The Internet, where you can find ready-made styles like this one

I know enough CSS to break things or tinker mildly with things that already exist, and I have friends who put up with my requests for help and whose code I steal mercilessly (hi Steve), and I have the Internet. So I started with this style, modified it to make it look more the way I wanted, begged for help making it look even more the way I wanted, and now have a small suite of style options (which you can copy and paste into new Stylish styles):

  1. For when I’m in friend mode, at home: this cleaned up version. (last updated 5/29/2009)
  2. For when I’m in work mode and really just want text to skim: this stripped down version that gets rid of user icons. (last updated 5/29/2009)
  3. And since I’m not a very picture-oriented person, it seems: a style that makes all posted images into teensy thumbnails that I can click on to view in their larger sizes when I want to.

I have (1) and (3) running together at home, and I have (2) and (3) running at work.

Lest you think I’m at all good at this, I should point out that my tweaks were incredibly minor. Steve Lawson did the big stuff (by which I mean shrinking images to thumbnails, highlighting direct messages, and removing user icons). You’ll also notice, if you look carefully at the code, that I just commented out portions of the original code, so you can restore that stuff and tweak it if you want.

A couple of other people really liked seeing which services were responsible for individual FriendFeed posts (like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc). If you’re like them, try this Greasemonky script (after installing Greasemonkey, of course).

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Just When I Thought Life Needed a Little Spicing Up…

Published by Iris on Thursday, May 7th, 2009

… Elsevier delivered for me. Ah, the sweet smell of fraud in the evening.

Tuesday, I heard that they’d (oops) published a fake journal under a fake imprint. Now they’ve admitted it, but not before the LSW had sunk its teeth in and decided that the upcoming zine could be hilariously renamed The Australasian Journal of Library Science (complete with some of the most pesky problems any journal could ever have… seriously, go read the thread behind that link), and that Elsevier could perhaps benefit from some customized Cod of Ethics merch.

Now we’re up to six fake journals (sorry for the registration required by that link, but it’s free), and Dorothea has contributed some less hilarious, more to-the-point commentary.

If I were writing the “scenes from next week’s show” for this particular drama, it’d include revelations that their peer review system is run via seance, or that there’s an invisible clause in their author agreements that really does sign over the authors’ souls in addition to their copyrights. But since I’m not in charge, all I can say is Stay Tuned!

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Crazy Thought

Published by Iris on Thursday, May 7th, 2009

Thinking about the things that I like about Google or about library databases in comparison with each other after my last post, I realized that library databases need crazy-easy URLs. I don’t click through 2 or 3 layers of a website to get to Google. I type “goo” into my address bar, which fills in the rest, which takes me to Google. If I could type “MLA” into the address bar and get to even something as complicated as “MLAbib.csa.com,” life would be easier. Sure beats my current option:
http://www.csa.com.ezproxy.carleton.edu/htbin/dbrng.cgi?username=carl&access=[gobbledygook]&db=mla-set-c&adv=1

If I could also set a cookie that would authenticate me from my own home computer, life would be even easier.

Still need to work on the seamless access to full text part of the equation, though.

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I Really Wish It Were Easier

Published by Iris on Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

Tipping point: reached.

Up until maybe the middle of last year, it was pretty easy not to worry too much about the problems of doing “real” library research on the free web. “The kids are doing it” was a phrase that simultaneously helped us to worry about the state of information literacy in this web-ified era and to dismiss the problem as one that “the kids” would outgrow, like braces or a lisp or chicken pox, as they became better versed in scholarly research practices.

Well, it’s not just the kids any more, folks. Enough journal publishers have opened up their indexing and abstracts to the free web that it’s now possible (especially in some fields) to actually do “real” library research on the web. And so people are doing just that. This year, our new faculty orientation session brought questions about Google-friendly access right to our door-step in a big way, and part of this rather disorganized thread on FriendFeed brought it up again.

And yes, ideally everyone could use one nice, big, easy search mechanism to do everything from the most broad to the most narrow topic and then get instant access to the full text of whatever they find. Too bad that’s impossible.

Google is more familiar and forgiving, it’s faster, and there’s a lot of good stuff in it (particularly if you’re searching for something that hasn’t had any controlled vocabulary assigned to it, yet). But currently, disciplinary databases do a better job of collocating like items based on something more robust than the author’s choice in vocabulary and PageRank. Currently, disciplinary databases do a better job of allowing scholars to leverage their disciplinary vocabulary and a better job of helping novices stumble upon key vocabulary terms. Currently, disciplinary databases are the only things that can offer relief to my students who say that there are just too many false hits in everything from Google to JSTOR (free text search may be what they’re used to, but they’re often relieved to leave it behind as soon as they’re shown controlled vocabulary).

But all that aside, neither option does the “access to full text” piece of the equation very well. Unless your library subscribes to the publisher versions of pretty much every eJournal out there (an expensive proposition) Google can’t actually help you get to whole swaths of full text, and even then you’d have to be on campus or logged in to your library’s proxy server or something. And even if researchers are in a disciplinary database, they’ll still often have to step outside of that database to get the full text, and while a link resolver is a wonderful thing, it’s still a long way from being a perfect solution to this problem. Either way this lands you at the A-Z list figuring out if we have access to the particular issue of the particular journal you want.

I wish it were easier. I wish access issues didn’t make researchers jump to the conclusion that we’re “hiding” stuff from Google, or that we’re being unnecessarily silo-ish, or that indexing is over-rated, or that you have to do “complex” searches in library databases. I also wish that we could bringing together disciplinary databases in ways that allow easy cross-searching without giving up the time-saving specificity of disciplinary focus and vocabulary.

Right now it feels like we’re balanced precariously on that tipping point with a precipice on each side.

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