Google rolls out Knowledge Graph

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To me, this looks a lot like the innovations we’ve seen in the last year or so in Westlaw.  Google explains that they are building on the searches others have done and what they’ve found useful.  They are trying to differentiate concepts that all my have the same word.  ‘Taj Mahal’ is the given example. Does the searcher mean the building in India or the singer or the restaurant down the street?

Search on Google for Taj Mahal

You can read Google’s press release from yesterday at: Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings | Official Google Blog.

One big difference? Google is free.

Scheduling Meetings – the bane of my existance

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At least until I found Doodle. Doodle is an online tool that lets group members indicate when they are free to meet.  The organizer creates a poll with the times they have free – which makes it good to be the organizer!  Once the poll is created, the organizer sends a link to members of the group via email.  Members then click the link and indicate on the poll when they can meeting. Once everyone has voted, the poll is closed and the best time (or that there is no good time) is apparent. Easy peasy!  And free.

Digitization projects – Oxford Teams Up with the Vatican

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Maybe it is just me, but I find projects like this fascinating and so exciting. The Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford and the Vatican said on Thursday are joining forces to digitize 1.5 million pages of ancient texts and make them freely available online.

And yet, I wonder if Dan Brown is wondering what the Vatican may not be offering for digitization. ;)

3 Tools for Finding Free-to-use Images Online

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Camera Lens

Camera Lens

I was just reading this post from the Legal Productivity blog (one of my favorites) about great (and free) image editing tools to be found online. I am a novice Photoshop user and I don’t have Photoshop at home so I will be checking out the tools they suggest. It reminds me though that I find myself telling friends, family, and students I work with about 3 sites for finding images online that are freely available to use.

First, some information that I am sure you know already.  Just because an image is online doesn’t mean that anyone can copy and paste it and use it at will. I am sure you know about a leetle thing called copyright. However, anyone who creates an image can use Creative Commons to give their images a variety of licensing attributes that allow others to re-use them in a variety of ways, with some caveats.

The first site I usually check is Microsoft Office. It doesn’t require me to know anything about Creative Commons or licensing AND it doesn’t have just cheesy Clip Art. They just let others use the images there freely (thank you for this!). Personally, I use this almost exclusively for photos. I put my search term in and click on the photo box to limit to photos.  Each image has a set of keywords applied to it, so you can find other terms to search.

The second site I check is Google Images.The link here is to the Advanced Search where you can limit by usage rights. I don’t use images commercially, so I usually just change the limit to ‘free to use or share.’

And lastly, I sometimes find good images in Flickr. Again, I use the Advanced Search and I limit to Creative Commons licensed content.

Have fun making your future projects more visually appealing!

Zotero

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I once saw a tweet that referred to Zotero as the author’s ‘secret academic boyfriend.’  I don’t know that I love it with that kind of intensity, but I did have cause to be grateful for it today.  My colleague and I were discussing the WordPress workshop and I wanted to run past her the help guide for WordPress that illustrates a nifty exercise for deciding what to blog about – really, one of the harder questions that our students will have contend with.   Thankfully, I had saved it into a folder I made in  Zotero in my Firefox browser, making it a cinch to pull it up and share it with her.

Zotero is a Firefox add-on and it runs within the browser on your computer. It provides a place to organize links to resources and even upload documents. It then lets you output bibliographies in a variety of citation formats (including Blue Book). You can sync it another computer or online.  Pretty nifty.