Integrated, easy and transparent user experience!

Folks at the Brown University Library have been doing some interesting stuff. I just happened to come across this while visiting there not too long ago. But they put out a new service called Easy Borrow, which provides "a single user interface for automated requesting of returnable items from multiple shared resource systems."

It's not something of great interest to public libraries unless you are part of a consortium. But it is a wonderful new service for users of academic libraries. Users only need to log in once. The automated system repeats their search in each one of the resource systems (start with Brown's own catalog) until it finds one with a copy available. If none of the other resource sharing systems have an available copy, it then goes into their ILL system ILLiad.

Users do not have to repeat their search in different catalogs/databases. Users do not have to log into different databases because they only have one single user interface they have to deal with. Plus, they don't even have to know where their materials were borrowed from, why should they!! This has made it much easier for staff also because they do not have to repeat users' search because the system is automated so it will attempt each resource before it goes into ILLiad.

Great example of integrating technologies and resources to present a wonderful, easy and transparent user experience!!

Brown is currently sharing the code in Google Code. Eventually they will host the code themselves and continue to share it with others. I wonder if the academic communities have expressed a lot of interest in this!

Amazing Race 2008?? -- the planning of our Switzerland, France and Italy trip

We started talking about doing a "real" trip for this year. Our previous trip to Orlando, Providence and Boston in May really didnt' count because it was for Ming's graduation and conference and we had relatives with us -- not our regular "Amazing Race" style. So we are hoping we could do Amazing Race 2008 sometime in September, and I'd like to go to Switzerland. We also have to visit Nice again(which I'd love to) because Ming is working with some people on his research there. But anyway, we started uing Google Map to plan this trip. I don't know for sure yet if we'll end up having the trip but it's nice just to look at the map and think about it!!

Google Map has added some new features. Now it's easier than ever to embed a map into another website. Just copy and paste the block of code Google has ready for you and off you go! This is really cool!!


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France and Spain Trip 2007

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Amazing Race 2007 -- Leg 1 Côte d’Azur

I arrived in Nice the night of Friday May 18th. Ming was already there since he arrived two days before I did. From 19th-21th we drove from Nice through Cannes (right when the 60th Cannes Film Festival was going on), Grasse (European perfume capital), Toulon(the famous military port in France) and Marseille (with special highlight in tasting bouillabaisse).










Salad Nicoise & fried smelt (left) Nice Fish Soup (right)
The 60th Cannes Film Festival. And after 1 hour wait, I finally captured a red carpet moment! Hey I think I know one of the actors in that picture. He's a famous movie star from Taiwan and is a lead charater in this Korean film.






Grasse, visiting the Fragonard Perfume Factory. (all right, trust me, that is not an alien base!, it was just an antique equipment on display, something that they used to use to extract the essence out of flowers)






Marseilles Sea Port (left), and the famous bouillabaisse (right), which took a good 2 hours to cook!! At the price of 35 euros per person and 2 persons minumum, it "uh.....starts to be good", the lady at the Tourist Office who recommended the restaurant to us said. It indeed was very tasty, as long as I could avoid the fish's eye! ;) After the soup was done, fish were separated out to be presented to the guests.

Amazing Race 2007

6 more days and we'll be out on our Amazing Race 2007 -- our trip to Southern France and Spain. My husband calls it the Amazing Race because we are too ambitious and plan on going to many places within 18 days. Check out our entire trip which is marked out here on Google Map.


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Hubby leaves the night of May16. He's meeting his professor in Nice to supposedly have some scientific discussion over glasses of red wine (Ha!). Then I will leave here the night of May 18 next Thursday and join hubby to start the official first leg of our Race. We'll start our trip from Nice, France, and will make our way through Cote d'Azur, Marseille, spending about a week in Provence, then move on to Spain and will visit Barcelona and Valencia. Our trip will end with a highlight of the America's Cup, on board of a cruise ship observing the first race of the Louis Vuitton cup final for the cup challengers in Valencia. We have booked most hotels except 2 open nights (wing it!), and rented a car for about 1 week. This will be a great trip and I just can't wait!!! :)

What I bought on Ebay

Thing 23 -- Yeaaahhhh ! I made it !!!

powered by PictureTrail

This has been such a fun journey. Thanks very much, LCPL, for setting it up. There are certainly 'things' that I enjoyed more than others, such as blogging, web2.0 tool, flickr, librarything ... etc. A few are a little bit boring. But that's ok. In the end it was great to be able to do them all. This has been a wonderful learning experience!!

Thing 13 -- Del.icio.us more tagging!

For some reason I don't like Del.icio.us' layout very much. But I finally found my ways around after spending a little time. So here's my Del.icio.us bookmarks. Since I'm donig this from my home PC, I installed the buttons on my Firefox. They are all right. I just don't like the look of the bookmarks. Not sleek enough.
I find it interesting to see the hotlist and what others are tagging. The suggested tags function is very handy because when I bookmark things because I didn't have hand-type it. I don't find the bundle tag feature very useful. I can't seem to view bookmarks under the bundled tag together.

Thing 12 -- Rollyo

Okey dokey. I've created a Rollyo search roll for electronic gadgets on my blog. The results came back very slowly because it searches quite a few sites all at the same time. But they are pretty precise though, if you can provide a very precise search term. We are looking for another digital camera, so I entered "Nikon digital camera L12", and each entry in the result list pretty much took me right to the result page on the specific website. Not bad.
I don't like the Rollyo website itself, though. Find it hard to navigate, it took me a while to get to the places I needed.

Thing 10 -- Image Generator

No! No! This is not for me. This is for our little cute town Berwyn Heights which the Washington Post called the Jewel of P.G.!!!




And this one is for hubby!

Thing 22 -- Audiobooks

I created my NetLibrary account and downloaded an e-audiobook last November. I saved the book on my PC, never got to really listen to it. So today I launched the e-audiobook again, and logged into my NetLibrary account at the prompt, it was surprisingly easy. I "acquired" a new NetLibrary license in no time, and my e-audiobook started playing immediately.
It was the creating account part that was a little cumbersome. We had to go through the LCPL website, first use the library card to log in, then we had to create an account once we reached the NetLibrary site. I wish we didn't have to go through these many processes. However, once one has the account, then it's not too bad.

Thing 21 -- Podcasts

I tried out Podcast.net. Didn't find too many things library-related. I did find a few libraries have set up "Click a story" as podcasts, such as the one from "Thomas Ford Memorial Library Click-A-Story". I had heard about this at conferences. Maybe it's something our YS department could consider doing.
I also found something for my personal interest. We are going on our trip to France and Spain soon, and I found some great French learning podcasts. It's great!! I added it's RSS feed to my blogline account.

Thing 20 -- YouTube

Ok now that I'm on YouTube, does this mean that I'm famous?????? This was shot when we were in Mykonos, Greece, in May 2005.

Petros the Pelican

Thing 19 -- Web 2.0 Tools

I tried out Pageflakes (#1 in the category of Start Page). I think it is COOL! I have added the following "flakes" to my start page: CNN, TV Series schedule, World Clock, a To Do list, photos on Santorini that people have posted to Flickr, Potcast, Stock Portfolio, Weather Channel showing the weather in both College Park and Leesburg, a flake from my Gmail account to show my new emails, Events and maps in DC area based on the categories I specified, and an automatic search in Amazon on books about cooking (it just shows new titles on cooking randomly)
All of these!! on my start page!!!

Although right now the kind of flakes that you can add are limited, but I immediately think that this would be something that our patrons could use. Imagine, we can have flakes on book clubs, online book discussion live chat, story time events, automated search in HIP on the terms the users specified, online book discussion forum, everything about LCPL... Make them "flakes" that people can add to their start page.

Check out the hottest Flakes!! Right now people can only submit ideas on flakes and the developers are the ones who can create them. But maybe one day they'll make it easy enough that everyone can create their own flake (like a widget, I think essentially the widgets are what the flakes are).

Google announces free in-home wireless broadband service

Something definitely worth considering for the branches and even your home office! ;-) Google TiSP Beta

Installation and more!