TechTips

The goal of this site is to inform and educate the students, staff, and faculty of The Ohio State University community about various emerging technologies that impact services provided by the Libraries.

TechTips: Optimizing EndNote to Access Full Text

Many researchers take advantage of bibliographic management soft to search online bibliographic databases, organize their references, images and PDFs, and to create bibliographies and figure lists. Although the a central site license provides campus access to RefWorks, many researchers instead use EndNote. Bibliograhic management tools like EndNote can not only help researchers to manage references, [...]

Posted in Discovery, Information Management, Software |

TechTips: The “Quora” Question and Answer Service

One of the hot emerging social media sites is a service called Quora. Started by former Facebook employees,  Quora is a “continually improving collection” of questions and answers that are user created, edited, and organized. Quora aggregates all the questions and associated answers while allowing users to collaborate on any of them. Yes, question and answer [...]

Posted in Discovery, Information Management, Services, Social Media |

TechTips: RockMelt: The Social Web Browser

If you are a heavy Facebook and Twitter user, you might want to hunt for an invite and try the RockMelt web browser. RockMelt works like any other browser with one big difference: it integrates Facebook and Twitter. In short, one can use the browser to browse web sites AND keep up-to-date with your friends without opening Facebook or Twitter. [...]

Posted in Communications, Discovery, Gadgets, Information Management, Mobile, Services, Social Media |

TechTips: Xmarks Browser Bookmark Sync

I use several computers and a couple different web browsers during any given day. I bookmark work related resources, articles to read, and any number of interesting sites on my Web browser. But when I use a different computer or change to a different web browser, the links I bookmarked on one aren’t available on another. While social bookmarking sites like delicious are [...]

Posted in Information Management, Services |

TechTip: Renting Scholarly Articles Through DeepDyve

I received an email  from a colleague about a month or so ago about a search engine they uncovered, called DeepDyve. DeepDyve was started in 2005 by two scientists who had previously worked on the Human Genome Project. It makes sense that the search engine searches for information spanning the life sciences, medicine, and patents. [...]

Posted in Discovery, Information Management |

TechTips: Google Wave

The folks at Google released 100,000 invites today to preview their new model of Web-based communication and collaboration, called Google Wave. Since it has been in private beta, one has to rely upon others to explain what Wave is. It has been described “as much of a real-time chat room as a platform for editing [...]

Posted in Communications, Information Management, Services |

TechTips: Augmented Reality

In the movie The Terminator, the viewer is taken frequently to the Terminator’s point-of view. We know this is Terminator’s POV because there is image digitization and the people he is chasing are more luminous than objects in the foreground and background, which suggests infra-red. In the margins of the view we see columns of [...]

Posted in Communications, Information Management, Mobile, Services |

TechTips: Managing Multiple Twitter Streams

A growing number of university organizations are now managing an online presence on Twitter. In a complex organization like OSU’s library system, there could be accounts for news and events, accounts for any number of special collections, and accounts for projects and initiatives. The larger the organization the greater the likelihood that several people will [...]

Posted in Communications, Information Management, Services |

TechTips: Geolocation and Google Scholar

There is an advanced option within Google Scholar that makes it easier to access OSU Libraries electronic and print resources. Since OSU Libraries that make their resources available via an OpenURL link resolver, Scholar automatically links to these resources as a part of search results. Scholar identifies a user’s physical location using their computer’s Internet [...]

Posted in Discovery, Information Management |

TechTips: Searching Wikipedia Using Powerset

Powerset is a discovery tool that (currently) extracts and organizes information contained  in Wikipedia and Freebase. A natural language algorithm allows the searcher to use keywords, phrases, or even simple questions.  The results page aggregates information from across multiple articles, in essence creating an enhanced Wikipedia article.For example, here is the search results for Thompson [...]

Posted in Discovery, Information Management, Services |