video: Building Academic Library 2.0

An interesting video of a presentation by Meredith Farkas about Lib 2.0 in the academic environment (70 min) - gives a good overview of this stuff and how and why it can be used by the library:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_uOKFhoznI

The podcast of it is also here:
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/event_details.php?webcastid=21207&p=1&ipp=15&category=


Dana

idea: custom subject-specific web search engines

Google has a new service that allows you to create you own custom search engines - it will search whatever sites you add to it's index. We could then create customized engines (and each such search engine created gets it's own home page as well as easily generated code to embed a search box widget in a web page) by specific topic or course using only select quality, academic web resources/sites.

We could offer this, for example, as one tool within a new "faculty toolbox" - i.e., when they request it, we create with their input, a search engine using quality web resources combined with an RSS aggregated feed on the topic/discipline and even if wanted, a blog for their students to discuss stuff informally...They could then embed this search engine widget in their Angel course in the appropriate place(s).

Here is an example custom search engine on American Literature I put together in about 15 minutes:
http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=011520625995792447741%3Aqepvcta8gfy

Here is the site for the Google SE creator tool:
http://www.google.com/coop/cse/

Let me know what you think,
Dana

Free Knowledgebase/FAQ software

Ian had mentioned the idea of putting together an online knowledgebase of our canned responses - this software might be a good tool to do so.

Came across this free software for creating/managing an online Knowledgebase or FAQ site:
http://www.kbpublisher.com/

Take a look at the "Live Sites" links below the fold on the main page to see examples. Here is one that gives a good idea:
http://online.fiu.edu/faq/index.php

Dana