Photo by cotinis - http://bit.ly/2iZfZA

Back in May I mentioned the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) and its efforts to catalog every single organism on earth. Their mission statement gives you an idea of their ambitious project:

Comprehensive, collaborative, ever-growing, and personalized, the Encyclopedia of Life is an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. Our goal is to create a constantly evolving encyclopedia that lives on the Internet, with contributions from scientists and amateurs alike. To transform the science of biology, and inspire a new generation of scientists, by aggregating all known data about every living species. And ultimately, to increase our collective understanding of life on Earth, and
safeguard the richest possible spectrum of biodiversity.

That’s nothing short of awesome. The site is chock-full of wondrous illustrations, photographs, and comprehensive information on all matter of species, with links to sites that provide additional information.

The EOL has a fantastic blog too, documenting a variety of EOL projects, interesting species, conservancy issues, and everything related to the natural world–check out the latest post (yikes!). They also have a fantastic Flickr group. The site is growing and adding new species data so there’s always something new and interesting to hold your attention.

Libraries, add EOL to your databases collection!

Bronco Stadium, finished, originally uploaded by M3MO.

The Steuckle Sky Club Center is officially open to all faculty & staff of Boise State University. The third floor is open for lunch from 11:30 to 1:00, but bring your badge otherwise you will not be granted admission to great views of downtown Boise and the river. Getting to watch football games from there will cost you big $$ though.

I’m part of SPLAT (Special Projects Library Action Team) and proud of it. But I’m prouder still of all the Idaho library denizens (240 of ’em!) who signed up for SPLAT 101 and took a stand to learn a little more about web 2.0, and came away (for the most part) better informed, better prepared, and better to able to tame the wilds of the web and its many cool tools.

Classes are still in session so the learnin’ is still happening. My section dealt with RSS feeds and it is now over, so I’m hopeful many of you will make use of these tools to improve the way you use the web for work and all things in between. So, to all of you who participated and left all those comments, I say to you: YOU ROCK!

Photo by Juushika Redgrave

Statistical data and Halloween are as sweet as the 24.5 pounds of candy Americans ate in 2007. Get your dose of delicious Halloween stats at the Facts for Figures site of of the U.S. Census Bureau. Did you know the feds eat the most candy? Yes, I made it up.

My good friend Adrien sent an e-mail about a documentary called “Playing for change” that he watched in PBS’s Bill Moyers Journal. There are some really sweet sounds in this video, but you’ll see how truly awesome and beautiful snippets of this documentary are at about the 4:00 minute mark. You’ll see what I mean.

Know what costs $5000 a second? Then check out this great video titled “The Hidden Cost of War,” beautifuly made and visually compelling. This video reminds me of another video, Epic 2014 (about Google’s scary-inmense online dominance. There’s an updated version, Epic 2015).

Both convey vast amounts of information using compelling graphics and imaginery to illustrate complex issues with ease  (wish I had this kind of finesse when creating “how to use X database” tutorials). Both videos are short, lest than a few minutes each, but their message lasts a whole lot longer.

It’s been what, a month since I added anything to this blog? If you still subscribe to this blog, bless you! Once the school semester starts my time becomes precious indeed (kids, work, repeat) so writing about cool stuff happening on the web or libraries shrinks considerably.

However, what I can do is write more concisely about stuff I see as potentially useful tools you can use in your everyday life as well as in your library; to use the web effectively to enjoy both work and everything that comes before and after it.

Let’s get to it. Widgets! Love them, use them, or don’t understand them? No problem. What you can do is sign up for Sprout to start making embeddable, stand-alone applications you can use for whatever suits your needs. Online forms, polls, interactive posters, and other things for your library are a snap when your use Sprout since everything is laid out in simple drag-and-drop functionality; you can customize every aspect of your widget, from the color of the font to the background of your panels.

I’ve written about Sprout before, and today I came across a nifty video on how to add Google forms to your Sprout. Give it a whirl and you’ll see how easy and useful this web tool can be.

I have two Twitter accounts, my own and one I made for my library. I use the library’s Twitter account to pull up the RSS feeds from my library’s blog, flickr page, LibGuides, and eventually the feed from any new books added to the catalog, all of it using TwitterFeed.

I tried showing some of my staff what I was doing with Twitter and a new update feature from LibGuides, which sends a tweet whenever a new guide is published — but in the end I ended up confusing people since only a couple of them use Twitter and fewer still knew about it.

Seriously, my intent was to do an FYI but was naturally sucked into explaining what Twitter is, how it works and how I’m using it to push library content to Twitter users, but I wasn’t making any headway. What’s funny is that the ones that knew Twitter and those who didn’t spent a few minutes loudly discussing just exactly what Twitter is, all at the same time. It was fun!

In the end I think Twitter still remains a nebulous thing. It’s like a short e-mail message that thinks it’s chat but with a blog-like mentality with more than one person following a conversation. As a web tool Twitter has an amazing array of applications that facilitate these transactions so, on the whole, Twitter’s a buffed out, synchronous communal teleprompter.

The library’s Twitter stream is happily chugging along picking up the RSS feeds from our various services. We even have a few followers even though I haven’t really advertised the account. I’m not following anyone yet (awesome as they are) since this is more of a branching out of library resources, but it’s great that we can use these web tools–the likes of Twitter, Jaiku, Identi.ca, and others–to deliver quick bits of text (140 characters) and a link to the content as soon as you “tweet” it. We’re all about saving the user’s time, right?

Twitter

LibGuides

twitterfeed

Twitter apps

Man alive! It’s been a busy August in the Cordova household. First off, I just finished co-writing a chapter (with fellow librarian Kim–thanks!) for an upcoming book on library advocacy–my first official “publication” that will sit nicely as I start my review process for tenure in the coming weeks; and spent an inordinate amount of summer putting the finishing touches to UNIV 106, the one-credit Library Research class.

I sat/presented in two panels (one on library services to millennials and the other on how we use LibraryThing in our library) and co-presented at PNLA (Pacific Northwest Library Association) on SPLAT.

And before things got too crazy, went on vacation to beautiful Redfish Lake to wash our cares away in the lake, which was surprinsingly not that cold. We stayed overnight in one of the shared cabins so we spent a whole bunch of time swimming and chasing minnows.

All in all a full and fun summer. Getting tired now…

In to the new look of Facebook, that is. I saw this above the login screen today:

However, when I clicked on the “Try it now” link and logged in, my profile didn’t really look all that different. Unless the changes are minimal? Either that or I have an extremely short attention span, which may be the cas…say, I’m hungry!

Update: after trying and trying I finally got “in!” While I did have the “Try it now” link on my browser, it didn’t take me anywhere different since it still showed the same ol’ profile and page. Then I noticed on the Facebook blog that you had to go to http://www.new.facebook.com/ to actually get the new look to work.

Why have the teaser “Try it now” in the profile if it doesn’t take you to the right URL anyhow?

So, now I’m playing with the new Facebook and finding it a little wide and spread out. Before I had a little apartment, and now I have a double-wide: