 Okay, good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Christa Burns here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. Yes, you can call us a webinar. We won't be offended. Oh, I don't know. I won't be offended. But we cover anything that may be of interest to librarians. We do these sessions live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. But they are recorded, so if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that is no problem. You can go to our website and you can see any of the recordings of our previous sessions. Going back to when we first started doing this in January 2009. We do all sorts of things here, mixture of presentations, interviews, book reviews, mini-train sessions. Basically, if it's related to libraries, we'll put it on the show. We're not picky. We have guest speakers come in and we have Nebraska Library Commission staff sometimes do presentations. And this morning we have a mixture of that, which is typical for some of our shows. Once a month, we do a tech talk with Michael Sowers. Michael Sowers is the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission, and he's sitting here next to me. Can I just say hi? Yeah, that's right. We're not on camera. I wave just to vision it. Picture waving. And once a month, typically the last Wednesday of the month, Michael comes on and does a tech talk, tells you about tech news of the month, and usually has some sort of interview, presentation, guest speaker. Yes, we know it's not the last Wednesday of the month right now. We do some scheduling conflicts. They got bumped up a couple weeks. So we are doing our tech talk this Wednesday. And Michael has a guest on the line with us. And I'll just hand over to you, Michael, to do your introduction and explain what we're doing this morning. Okay, great. Christa, thanks a lot. Yes, welcome to the June 2013 tech talk. As part of my introduction of our guest speaker today, I'm going to share just two really short stories that got to tie this all together. I was doing an e-reader workshop last week in Hastings, Nebraska, and during we have the attendees introduce themselves, and one of the attendees introduce themselves as part of it, we ask, well, you know, why are you at this class? And she actually said as part of her answer, networking and getting to know all the librarians. And then at the end of the day, when we kind of opened up for questions and we were packing things up, she said, you know, I'm kind of a new librarian. What is one piece of advice you would give me? And I said, you're already doing it, network. I said, meet people, you know, I mean, you mentioned that in your introduction. It was great. And why I stress that is kind of leads into today's episode because about two, three months ago, I actually got an email from somebody who said, hey, you know, you guys haven't talked about Wikipedia in a while. Is there anything going on there? And I think I've at least mentioned it, but, you know, in five years we lose track. But it's been at least a while. And I immediately thought of somebody I know on Facebook by the name of Aaron Tay, who is a senior librarian in the East Services Facilitator at the National University of Singapore. Now, Aaron and I have not met, but we do pay attention and comment on each of this stuff. I do read his blog. And so, Aaron, welcome to the show. And it is, I think, 11 p.m. at night there for you. You're ahead of me. Yeah, it's 11. Yeah, it's 11. It's 5 p.m. at night. And he said, that's okay. He's a night owl. Now, I'm going to hand it over to Aaron in just a second here. But I do want to say one other thing because Aaron is just over or just under, depending on which direction you're going, halfway around the planet at the moment. We do always run tech tests with people. And we did run one with Aaron. And there were at points some audio issues because we're sending a signal around the planet here at this point. So it may happen again. Don't worry about it. We're aware that it's happening. And it should usually clears itself up within just a couple of seconds. So be a little more patient with us this time around. So, Aaron, welcome to the show. Thanks. And if you could start by just telling us a little bit about yourself, your background, and the library you work at because, you know, Singapore is not somewhere we're all that familiar with here. And if I can ever come visit, let me know. And then go right ahead and let us know what you have to say about libraries in Wikipedia. Hi, thanks. Hi, all. Thanks, Michael. You did. Thanks for having me here. My name is Aaron, and I'm a senior librarian at the National University of Singapore. We are the biggest university in Singapore. We serve about 35,000 students as well as about 5,000 faculty staff and another 5,000 research staff. And today I'm here to show you some of the things that I've discovered researching on Wikipedia. I would like to stress that most of the things that I show here were not actually created by me. But I learned from other librarians who have been sharing the tools that they've been using on their blogs and other tools. So what we're going to cover today is that I'm going to talk about, first, very briefly, about the importance of Wikipedia. I'm pretty sure most of you know why Wikipedia is important. And I'm going to talk about, on an abstract level, two ways libraries have been working with Wikipedia. And lastly, I'm going to show you two simple tools that you can probably adapt and use it today. So I'm pretty sure you know the importance of Wikipedia. There was a study in 2001 that showed that when users searched for Google on Google in the UK for single word searches, 99% of the searches would be showing Wikipedia results. Of course, this study has been disputed, and some other studies put the figure at 75%, or even at low at 60%. But without a doubt, we know that users Google, and when they Google, they tend to get Wikipedia results. But of course, even the founder of Wikipedia would say that, you know, at least for college students and university students, not to cite the encyclopedia. But in fact, most of our students in the US and Singapore, they are aware that they do not actually cite Wikipedia itself. What they do is that they use Wikipedia to get an overview of the topic. And from there, they look at the references in Wikipedia. A very recent study, a project information literacy has shown that over 82% of students, college students, I believe in the US, they go to Wikipedia to obtain background information. And over 80% don't ask librarians for help. As such, this tells us that Wikipedia is very important for college students, and I'm sure even for the general public to look for information. The problem here, of course, is that Wikipedia, even their references, they tend to have a bias where they tend to only cite free sources. And as you know, the library, whether it's a public library or an academic library, has resources on various topics or books, general articles, that are not free. So if our users, whether it's a college student or general public, relies only on Wikipedia, it will be missing out a lot of important information that is actually available in our library. So the question is, what should libraries do to connect Wikipedia to libraries? There are generally two major models. The first way is to enable users to go from Wikipedia to the library. So this is what I'm going to talk about mostly later. There are various ways of doing it, and I'll share with you at the end two ways that you can actually take it out and use it straight away from today. The other model that some libraries have done is that they try to put in Wikipedia information in the library and push users out from the library to Wikipedia. So there are actually two different models of doing it. So let me first talk generally about this study, which was actually done in 2005. So this is a very early study where the University of Washington Libraries, they have a digital initiative unit. What they did was that they began to try to integrate their digital collection into Wikipedia. So they added links on suitable Wikipedia pages to link to their resources. So their resources included things like free images as well as text. And when they did that, they thought that they were very successful in driving traffic to the site, to the digital site. Before the study began, Wikipedia as a referral was the most important child's referral. And after it inserted the links into Wikipedia, it rose to the fourth position. Only Google itself, imagegoogle.com, as well as the own library website were more important in terms of driving traffic. So they were one of the first libraries to actually experiment with putting links from article pages to their digital collection. And it proves to be a success. However, one of the major problems that they found was that at that time most of the librarians had the lack of knowledge of Wikipedia norms. And what they did was that they had, one problem was that they added a lot of links to Wikipedia articles very rapidly using unregistered accounts, which if you are familiar with the Wikipedia norms is the big no-no. And the account was actually very flagged and so on. So if you have done any amount of Wikipedia editing, and I have done some back in 2007-2008, you will know that Wikipedia is actually, the editing of Wikipedia articles is a little political and you have to be very aware of the policies as well as I guess some amount of infighting between editors. So for librarians who are not well versed with Wikipedia, if they just try to go into Wikipedia and try to edit the entries, they will face a lot of problems. More recently, there was this new project that started, the Glam-Wiki Initiative. So Glam actually stands for galleries, libraries, archives, museums. So this is actually a project which aims to help cultural institutions to share their resources with the world. So what happens is that institutions would partner with Wikipedia and experienced Wikipedia editors would help the library strategize on how to include their content into Wikipedia. So many, many libraries on this project, the more famous ones include the New York Public Library, the British Library, OCLC, the Space Nickelodeon Archive of American Arts and so on. So one of the things that they do is that they have a Wikipedia in residence. So what happens here is that a highly experienced Wikipedia editor is actually attached and signed to either a museum or a library and they would help the institutions strategize on how to actually promote their library in Wikipedia. So there are many things they can do from organizing talks to helping coordinate the editions of images or multimedia donations into Wikipedia. The British Library was actually one of the first to actually have a Wikipedia in residence. So I basically summarized very briefly a talk that was given. You can actually go and watch this talk yourself. We talked about how OCLC as well as the Space Nickelodeon Institution actually worked with Wikibidians to actually connect their data and information to Wikipedia. The other way that some libraries have been working with Wikipedia is that they actually put in data from Wikipedia into their catalogs. So this is actually an Australian Union Catalog and what they do is that they're actually using a system called Primo, and whenever a user searches for a certain item, like in this case the Golden Notebook, they will have a tab which shows Wikipedia entries and when they click it links to Wikipedia. So this is the opposite direction. They're actually pulling in information from Wikipedia to the Catalog. So this is one approach. Of course you can directly put in Wikipedia entries, you can catalogue directly Wikipedia entries into your Catalog. So this was approach done way back in 2009 by the State Library of Kansas. I believe they actually catalogue only certain amounts of Wikipedia entries into the Catalog. But of course all this is extremely time consuming. There is a new development. There is actually a web skill discovery service known as Summon, which is actually very popular with many academic libraries. A 2.0 version will be launched in fact this month. And one of the features that was included was that it would automatically, for certain topics, it would automatically put in reference information. So the reference information could include things like subscribed data, subscribed reference online books, as well as Wikipedia. So this is actually an interesting development where if a user searches the discovery system or their Catalog, they would actually see Wikipedia entries appearing which would supplement the information given by the library. So this is a very interesting approach that has been done. The main problem with all these approaches that I've actually mentioned is that they require quite a bit of investment in terms of time or in terms of money. So for example, unless your library actually bought the Summon system, which is a very expensive discovery system, you probably wouldn't be able to put information for Wikipedia. And of course you could join the GLAM initiative, but again that would require quite a lot of investment in terms of time to work with Wikipedia, especially for Wikipedia residents. But fortunately there are actually four ways where you can actually help your users move from Wikipedia to your library resources. So actually I blocked about this a couple of months ago, and in fact I guess this was a block entry that Michael was mentioning, and he actually invited me to give a brief talk about some of these tools that were available that you can implement yourself and it doesn't require a lot of technical skills. And all you have to do is pretty much follow instructions and you can instruct your users so that when they are on the Wikipedia page, they can go from the Wikipedia page to your library resources. So this creates a linkage between Wikipedia and the library. So users won't be just limited to using Wikipedia. In this blog post that I did, I actually mentioned four different methods, but for today I'm just going to show two methods. The two methods that are the most effective. So the first method involves using a bookmarklet. If you are unfamiliar with a bookmarklet, it's basically just a normal bookmark, which when the user actually clicks on it, it will carry out a certain action using JavaScript. So this is a bookmarklet. So the idea here is that when you're on a Wikipedia page, what you do is that you just click on the bookmarklet and it will use the title of the Wikipedia page and search with that title in your catalogue system or your discovery system. So if let's say you go to Google and you search for a certain topic and you land on the Wikipedia page, the next thing you do is you click on the bookmarklet, it will use whatever the title of the Wikipedia page is and throw you directly to your catalogue with the search results for that page. Here I will show you live later. Of course, a bookmarklet may not be simple to create, but fortunately for us, we have very generous librarians and there were two librarians, Barbara Annette and a very forester who actually came up with a bookmarklet that actually did this and they were generous enough to actually offer the source code and encouraged people to actually use the source code. So you can actually look at the blog post where they wrote about it and they actually shared the code, which is over here. So if you click on the link, you will see the code and what you need to do is to just change two pieces of information. This bookmarklet code is actually pretty simple to edit. You just need to change two areas. So the first thing you do of course is to just paste it on say a notepad and the first thing you need to do is that you need to change this portion. The clever thing about this bookmarklet is that it's actually connected to Google Analytics and whenever the user clicks on the bookmarklet, the Google Analytics will keep track of the number of times the bookmarklet is being used as well as the place they are on when they actually use the bookmarklet. So this gives you a measure of how successful your bookmarklet is because so this has been very useful in tracking how well used your bookmarklet is. The other thing that you would need to change is the code about the search string. So this is the search string over here. So you basically need to do a search in your library catalog or your discovery system. Look at the URL and change this. Let me show you what I mean. So for example in our case, I'm just actually doing a quick search of the catalog. So I've done a search for tests using our discovery service or our catalog and if you look at the URL, you will see that this portion is the term that you search for and this portion is the search syntax. So all you need to do is to take the part that is the search syntax. Don't include the part that is actually the search term. Go to the code and replace everything in the codes. Just replace this portion and that's it. So all you need to do is replace this portion with the search syntax and the rest will be done and of course you will want to change the Google Analytics. In this case, this is actually a DR account. So what you can do is you can actually create a free Google Analytics account if you want to track and the Google Analytics account, once you have created it, you would have a code here, a property ID, a user code. So all you need to do is to simply replace the code here with your accounts. So from now on, whenever the user uses this code, your Google Analytics account will be credited for usage. So this is very useful to tell how successful you have been in the use of bookmarks. In fact, our library actually has another bookmarker which is also very popular and we can tell it's very popular because we can see the tracking on Google Analytics. So once you have created a code, all you need to do is to actually put this, save this as a file and upload it into your server and then all you have to do is to point the user to that bookmarker for them to use. Again, if you're not very familiar with setting up bookmarkers, again, we have very generous librarians. So the University of Michigan has in fact created a web page with the actual code and the actual code for the web page and they have even put it under Creative Commons which means that if you're not familiar with what this means, basically you can actually just copy the HTML code for the whole web page. All you have to do is to make sure that this link actually points to the file that you just created and all you have to do is to just credit them and you'll be able to have a fully functioning bookmarker page. So for NUS itself, we actually created our own web page. We actually use libguides. I'm sure it's very popular in the US. We actually use libguides to actually create the web page and we have created all these bookmarkers. So all you have to do is, if you're not familiar with bookmarkers, depending on the browser, basically all you do is just bookmark it. So in my case, I'm just going to drag it to the search bar. So I will call mine Find More Bookmarker because this is the name of our search. Yours could be Library Bookmarker or whatever. So let me show you how it works in practice. So what happens is that, let's just go to Google and a very popular topic that we find is Japanese Occupation on Singapore. So this is actually a big topic in Singapore. So a lot of users will do a search like this and as you expected, the first entry option is actually Wikipedia article. So you click on the Wikipedia article, you get some information about the Japanese Occupation on Singapore. And it's pretty, it's not too bad. It's pretty decent amount of information you have here. But most of our students are quite trained. They are smart enough not to cite the articles. So what they do is they actually look at the references. But in this case, you don't see many references and the references in some cases are not very academic. I think if you look at the references, the focus has been more on three sites that they can access. But in NUS, we are actually the oldest university in Singapore, going back to 1905. So we have a lot of material on the Japanese Occupation on Singapore and if a user stops here, it's basically very limited to what he needs. The problem here is that many users, they know that the library has information on this topic, but they may be too lazy to actually go back to the library homepage and then type in a search term and then look at the results. So if they have actually installed the bookmarklet, all they have to do is simply click on the bookmarklet and what the search does is that it automatically populates the search with the title of the Wikipedia page. Of course, you could change this if you want to change, but let's just accept and click OK. And what's going to happen here is that you will do the same search in our library catalog now, Discovery Service. And you can see that we actually have a lot of information on the Japanese Occupation on Singapore including a lot of pieces, visitations, books, journal articles. We have a lot of material. We have over 6,000 or more results on this topic. So this is a very convenient way to help our users link from Wikipedia to the library collection. So this is a very new project that we recently started. We haven't really started advertising it except to internal staff, but we will be rolling this out slowly and trying to encourage users to use this. So this is the first method that I've talked about how to use the bookmarklet, how to create a bookmarklet to enable users to go from Wikipedia to your catalog results. But one of the drawbacks of a bookmarklet is that not many users would know how to create a bookmarklet. And even if they have created a bookmarklet, they may not remember to actually use it. So there is another method, even newer development, that came about. So this method is actually called John Mark of Blue. He actually came out with something called Forward to Libraries. As you can see from this slide, what happens is that what you do is that you embed in Wikipedia itself an information box. And the clever thing about this information box is that if the user clicks on resources in your library, it will actually bring you to a landing page. You can choose the library that you want, and you will search that library's catalog or search system with the term Japanese occupation of Singapore. He actually wrote a blog post that got a lot of attention from librarians around the world because it was a very simple and easy way for users to actually connect from Wikipedia to the library's catalog. They did not have to know how to install a bookmarklet because the links were already in Wikipedia itself. Let me just show you again live how it would look again if the user tried that. So let me try again. In this case, Japanese occupation of Singapore, so they landed on Wikipedia page. And from here, let's say they did not install the bookmarklet. So if you scroll down to the very bottom on external pages, you will see this library resources box and there's resources in your library and resources in other libraries. If you click on resources in your library, what's going to happen is that because this is the first time I've actually done this, you will ask you to select which library you wish to go in. So you can see that actually many libraries are already in the system all around the world. In fact, most of our visual libraries are in here. And of course the UK and the US. If your library is not included in here, you can actually request for the library to be added in. You just fill in the library name and as well as your website and John would figure out the syntax of your catalog and he would actually set it up for you. So once it's set up, it would appear under the correct country. So in this case, I'm going to set a preferred library for future searches. So I'm going to select this and of course I'm going to select Singapore. I'm going to do mine and select the National University of Singapore. So once you have done that, you will actually set a cookie in your browser so you will remember to use the National University of Singapore libraries whenever you click on that link. So let's do it again. So now I set National University of Singapore as the default library. So when I click on resource in your library, what's going to happen is that it's now going to go straight to my catalog because I've chosen the National University of Singapore. So this is a very seamless way of actually connecting between Wikipedia to your library catalog. So what is just required from you is to request that your system be placed here so that the system, the following system knows the syntax to use. And once that's done, the user can actually move directly to your catalog. And of course if let's say you have already set your default library and you want to see what other libraries have, you can click on resources in the other library and the same landing page will appear and you can see what is available in say the National Library Board which is our public library. So this is actually a pretty simple way of doing things. Essentially this requires almost a zero technical skill. You just have to make sure that you just have to request for your library to be added. The other thing of course is that most currently most Wikipedia articles do not have a library resource box. So right now we are trying to add library resource boxes into the articles and of course the good thing about this is that it is actually skills. So if let's say you added this, I've actually added this to this article and therefore every library in the world who is on the forward to library service would benefit from this. So it's kind of like a collaborative effort. So if you put it in say an article about the US Declaration of Independence, our users in Singapore would also benefit because they could also use the same link to check our library collection for articles on that topic. The interesting thing about this system is that you can actually do it for... So in this case the topic is the Japanese occupation of Singapore. So all you see is resources in your library. It's about what happens if actually you search for say a person. So I'm going to search for our founding father and so let's look at the library resource box. In this case if you look at the library resource box you'll notice that there's about Lee Kuan Yew so it's the same and there's another one for by Lee Kuan Yew. So if the Wikipedia article is about a certain person you can actually change the template such that you will actually search for items by the person. So in this case if I click on resource in your library under by Lee Kuan Yew and in this case I'm actually using again our library catalog the National Users in Singapore. So the Wikipedia library founding system actually knows the syntax and what it does is it actually searches by the author. So it's actually an author search of Mr. Lee Kuan Yew and therefore you can see articles and books by him. Of course your catalog would have to be capable of doing author searches and of course almost every library can be capable of doing so. And if you have set it up because of what you've set it up it would be capable of searching by author. So the question here of course is that you might be wondering how do you actually embed the library resource box? If you read his blog post on the forward library services he actually links to various templates so this template. So you can actually read through the syntax. It's very simple. You can do various things. For example you can actually overwrite the search. So for example if you think that the Wikipedia title which is used by default is not the best search term you can also include a library or congress number or you can enter a wave number or even a library or congress heading and it will use that instead of the Wikipedia title. Let me just show you some of it. Essentially I give you a very simplified view of how the forward to library system works but it's actually a bit more sophisticated. So it may use the Wikipedia title if all else fails to search but some Wikipedia articles have certain identifiers so all these identifiers actually exist on the Wikipedia page the service will actually use those identifiers to search if there is a library or congress subject heading or if let's say you define a library or congress heading in your library resource box it will use that instead and it does some amount of smart matching. So for example if you notice that certain Wikipedia pages it may drop certain articles and if it matches a certain library or congress subject heading it will use that library subject or congress subject heading instead and there's some amount of I understand that there's actually a pattern matching system file that John actually maintains that would actually figure out the better term to use than searching into the catalog. So when you actually click on that button it actually does quite a lot of analyzing of the right keyword to send and of course then after that the user would select the appropriate library if he hasn't yet done it before or if in my case where I've raised a third national utility of live for Singapore will use that and then it will of course query the appropriate library search with the appropriate search terms. So this is the example I gave earlier where I actually embedded for the Wikipedia article so you have two boxes one you can click on the search you can do a normal keyword search and one that actually does an auto search. And as I mentioned before you can actually look at the templates so these are the templates for you to actually insert. So one thing you might be wondering is right now there are a lot of Wikipedia articles out there so how did I decide which of the articles were more important to actually insert the template? What I basically did was that I actually analyzed the most common search terms done on our discovery system on our catalog so I looked at about a year's worth of data what people were searching for in our catalog I did those searches in Google and noticed that most of them actually the Wikipedia article actually appears first so for those Wikipedia articles that are commonly searched for in our catalog I would also assume they would do it in Google and for those articles I would prioritize and add the template to these Wikipedia articles I only started doing this about two to three months ago so I'm still tracking the inbound traffic from Wikipedia and as yet we still have not officially launched this project so we're just trying it out but even now I can see quite a few hits coming in from Wikipedia through the library resource template so if you wish to help in this project what you can do is to first of course get your library in the service so as I said before all you have to do is simply request for it so again let me just show you so you can just request so it's just a very simple form you don't have to enter anything any syntax, you just enter the library website if your library is using one of the standard catalogs and one of the standard discovery services John would be able to easily add the syntax without any input from you and once done the users would be able to select that as an option because the next thing to do once you join this is that of course you could just sit back and wait for other librarians or users to add the template of course we hope that you can help to actually add the templates to articles that are commonly searched and used by your users so if libraries around the world join and insert the template on many of the Wikipedia articles this service becomes more useful so this is a bit of a collaborative project the more librarians will help the more useful the tool becomes for all of us just remember that once you've inserted it on the Wikipedia article any library in the world on the system would become useful for every library on that service the other thing that I actually spoke to John before I actually presented on this he mentioned to me that if you wish to access in this project to be careful and mindful about adding such resources as I mentioned before Wikipedia does have some amount of its own culture and it would be best if you could slowly help to improve the article Wikipedia article and you get accepted as an editor for that article and then you could actually help by adding the box up so that would be his advice to join Wikipedia as a Wikipedia to help improve the article as well as adding the resource box so I think it's 11.45 so I did a very quick overview review of some of the tools the two main tools that I talked about was the Hope Market which you can actually get the source from the webpage, from the blog and the other one would be to join the forward to library services okay so this is basically all I have you can contact me on my email I'm errantayatgmail.com and I'm also very active on Wikipedia and of course I have a blog where I blog some of the ideas and things I found about Wikipedia okay so I'm muted that's all I have for now are there any questions alright great thanks Erin that was wonderful I had heard about some of these issues but not in so much detail so I want to thank you and we didn't actually from our end have any audio issues you came through loud and clear the whole time so that was wonderful so we do want to open up to questions from the audience I of course always have questions just ask my wife but if the folks in the audience have questions please we will always defer to you and I will do want to remind everybody that Erin threw up a lot of URLs as we are going through there Krista has been collecting them as fast and furiously as you can and we'll get all the rest of them and make sure they're in the show notes so if you miss the address to something we will make those available within a day or two on the archive page so Erin the first question I have while we give other folks a chance to type in starting with the bookmarklet feature I guess I want to have more of a potential concern as opposed to a question that maybe you can respond to in the case of a bookmarklet you do have to get that installed in a browser on a particular PC now you can do it on a lot of them but so like you would install this on your public access PCs your staff PCs how do you envision letting people know that that is there since they're probably not necessarily looking at your bookmarks bar in your browser and or how would you get them to install it on maybe their own PCs and hardly laptops or things like that right you actually put a point on probably the thing about the bookmarklet it would rely on actually teaching users to actually do it so my initial thoughts about bookmarklet was that it probably wouldn't be heavily used because you would have to take in the effort to do it but I was actually pleasantly surprised what we do is that in the National User of Singapore we actually teach information literacy classes and we actually teach them how to create use the bookmarklet that we actually design so we have an app bookmarklet a proxy bookmarklet and we actually teach users how to actually install it and they actually do it on the laptops so we were always doubtful about whether they would actually go back home and install it on your PCs but because as I said the bookmarklet actually has the Google Analytics built in and to our pleasantly surprised the usage of the bookmarklet was extremely high so it seems that users will use the bookmarklet if you can prove to them and show to them that it's popular the other thing that we do is that we actually have a short YouTube video that actually captures the stats for installing the bookmarklet which we send it out to all our channels whether it's through YouTube Twitter Facebook and again to our pleasantly surprised that video is actually the most watched video in our whole YouTube channel so basically what we do is that we actually let users know about the bookmarklet there's no way around it you have to teach users how to actually use the bookmarklet so unmuted I guess in our case our users tend to be fairly tech savvy so they may do so it may vary from audience to audience but what I can say is that I used to be doubtful about whether people would use the bookmarklet and right now I realize that if I'm doing a paper coming out showing that the bookmarklets are being used by users at least in the national use of Singapore great yeah I really was when you got to the integrates with Google Analytics I kind of like bounced in my chair I thought that was wonderful I didn't realize to do that and yeah it comes down to user education from the sounds of it so we do have a question from the audience you want to go ahead? yeah we do have a question with the FTL that you've got here right now will Wikipedia users worldwide see a link to your library, Erin's library or just users on your campus or in Singapore only how does that I guess work okay what happens here is that this is actually on Wikipedia itself so you can actually right now you can actually search for you will see the exact same thing so this is actually on the Wikipedia page it's not dependent on your IP address or whether you're in campus what happens is that when you click on the resource in your library for the very first time it will actually ask you which library to select and once you've selected the library and from that point onwards whenever you search on Wikipedia and you click on resources in your library it will remember that you're from a national university in Singapore and send you to that catalog so if you did this right now on your PC it will ask you which library to select and let's say you selected some library in the US from that point onwards whenever a user click on any box that has resources in your library it will go to that library it will remember that library I hope that was clear yeah great so basically if someone goes to this entry in Wikipedia right now they'll see that box there no matter where they are but where the link goes will vary depending on what you choose they will have to tell it where to go and to which I will throw out we took a look at the list of libraries and Omaha is a participating library in Nebraska Omaha Public Library is on the list anybody else in Nebraska we're going to encourage you to participate and actually anybody else in our audience listening to this definitely please participate so with the forward to library so we'll jump over to this side of things I'm going to ask one of those questions where I think I already know the answer but is there any way in Wikipedia to find out who or what library added the forward to a library box to a particular article it's not possible because normally we could be editor editing the page so anyone could add the resource box it could be a library, it could be a friend user and so on so I don't think there's a way to tell which library added which resource box to which article right that was the question right sure yeah I kind of figured the answer was no but maybe you need something I didn't so can I have something sure in fact I just remembered that there is a way when you set up the library to actually define an IP range and if you define the IP range and of course if the user was within the IP range and you were searching for Wikipedia that library would be automatically selected so yeah so there is actually a method for that which we didn't do it in the national use of Singapore but you could specify an IP range for let's say your region and whenever the user goes to Wikipedia and is on the IP range when he clicks on that library's email resources you wouldn't even have to select it would go straight to define IP range define library for the IP range yeah so that's okay yeah I'm just thinking about how I would use that and I'm thinking more kind of an academic where if they're on campus since you're going to know all those IP addresses just by default it chooses the campus libraries catalog and then they can always change to another one if they want to whereas a public library that might be a little harder to do but that's a great that's a great resource any other questions coming in from the audience yet no none at the moment if you have any questions type them into the questions section of your go-to webinar interface or just say unmute me I want to use my microphone and I'll do that because I've got one more question and this is kind of going to broaden it out to Wikipedia more generally than the specific tools you recommended what advice if somebody is watching this listening to the archive and thinking okay I do want to participate I do want to do this I want to get a little more involved with Wikipedia and you mentioned encouraging people to work on the articles also so I want to kind of go in that direction what if any advice or pitfalls to avoid might you suggest somebody new who's new to editing Wikipedia that they might want to watch out for or avoid well I haven't been practicing Wikipedia for a long time but I was like very active in 2007-2008 but in general I would suggest if you're editing a Wikipedia article to actually not make many changes at one time typically for any well developed Wikipedia article there are a couple of Wikipedia editors who are pretty much looking over the page so if all you do is to just add the resource box to multiple boxes in some cases you may actually get reverted I would suggest that you get very familiar with the Wikipedia policies and of course about Wikipedia is that I'm not sure how familiar you are but essentially Wikipedia there are a lot of I understand that there are a lot of very highly qualified to try to edit Wikipedia and they got pretty upset because the culture of Wikipedia is basically they do not bow to academic status so you may be a professor or you may be a librarian and they would not they would still follow the rules and they would not give you any additional respect just because you are academic or or a librarian in fact to do well in Wikipedia you pretty much have to know the rules, the policies of Wikipedia and if not you'll find yourself very frustrated as it's basically you know you need to know the rules and regulations pretty well I'm actually very out practiced because I haven't been doing it regularly since I was 7 years old unmuted okay great thank you I dabble in Wikipedia periodically on a very small focus set of articles and keep an eye on them and I would agree with all of that advice I've been in some situations myself about you know well prove you're saying this and that I've written a book on the topic I don't care, prove it anyways so yeah, familiarize yourselves with those policies I think would be a very good idea so anything else from the audience? no, not at this time so Aaron, thank you very much this was wonderful I'm glad you were willing to stay up late for our benefit and I think you've given the audience and definitely us some really good ideas as to how we can not only improve but interact with Wikipedia with the knowledge and resources that we have it's a great place to cross reference our materials we really appreciate you coming on the show and I hope that people will take this information and go out there and start working on Wikipedia and making it work for us in our libraries and our users yeah, people are using Wikipedia even if they're not using your libraries so let's get them to the library alright, thank you very much so we're going to go ahead and switch back to giving us control of the presentation for a few minutes here to give us just a sec to work out those little details alright and usually at the end of Tech Talk I just spent a couple of minutes talking about some news and since I think the last Tech Talk was only like two or three weeks ago instead of a full month ago I don't have a lot but just a couple of things I want to point out one kind of e-reader announcement one announcement of a side project working out with Encompass Live and a tool that I just started playing with yesterday that I think is really cool the first one I'm going to pull up here is just a little bit of news the Barnes & Noel Nook for desktop so like you have a Kindle for desktop a Kindle app or read on your Kindle Nook have the same thing they're actually suspending their support for the PC and Mac desktop reader and what they're really encouraging people to do is to read through their web reader and I guess the only issue here that raises concern to me is basically the web reader doesn't work if you're not online a lot of people don't read books on their laptops to begin with or their computer screens but it is possible you might be using that software to read while you're offline on your laptop and that's something where you would need a connection for it to work so just something maybe to be aware of if you're a Nook user and or have patrons that are Nook users the news with Encompass Live we have actually been working with the Internet Archive to start to get not only all of our videos that are on YouTube and our website but also archived into the Internet Archive the first 200 plus episodes are up and on this page and we're still tweaking it we're some of the early episodes we're having some technical issues but one of the benefits here is it's kind of a permanent archive and they offer each one in multiple video versions things like that so just kind of something we had a gentleman from the Internet Archive on quite a while ago and this is kind of the results of that it's taken a little while but we are working on it so just wanted to let people know about that and the other one is a tool where I actually forgot to set something up here so I'm going to work kind of see how well this goes here this is an online tool that allows you to remove the background from an image so like say you have a picture of someone and there's the trees behind them and you want to remove all the trees but leave the person and I'm going to look really quick here I'm going to kind of bring that up full screen and see if there's a great sample pictures none of these might work that well let's use the bird which one is the bird down left there okay the two can there we go so I'm going to drag that into this service and it's going to load up and I'm using Chrome her I found it works really well in Chrome I had some issues in Firefox and it refused to work in Internet Explorer at all so let's see if it even works for me here but the idea is you can kind of see it with the scribbles on the right here you kind of scribble green over the thing you want to keep and you kind of scribble red on the things you want to get rid of and it actually does a pretty darn good job and at the moment of course it looks like it's not going to work for me so it's called clipping magic at clippingmagic.com and it's a neat little tool it takes a little practice to get used to it but I did some quick and dirty samples yesterday and it actually worked pretty darn well so if you're into graphics and like me something like Photoshop is overkill or way too complicated or you can't afford it this is a neat little free tool online that when it works actually does a pretty good job it'd be great to get creative with things on your flyers or signs or posters I think you're putting up in the library about events and stuff yep so I guess you're just going to have to trust me on this one because this is where I got stuck a couple of times yesterday so it's free you get what you pay for but when it does work I thought it did a pretty good job so I'm not going to belabor that point and I'm going to end this month's tech talk and switch it on over to Krista. Alright great thank you Michael thank you Erin thank you everyone for attending this morning it was definitely a very useful lots of learning going on Oh yeah lots of learning exploring will be going on I think when people get done here experimenting so thank you for attending this morning it has been recorded, it's being recorded we'll be posted up later today, tomorrow all the links will be there and then Erin will be sending me possibly his PowerPoint slides and we can get those up we'll get all that up for you in our archives that we have so I'll wrap it up for this morning I hope you'll join us next week we're going to be talking about ebooks big pop topic of course and specifically using ebooks in schools how you can do it, what you can do show and actually one of the speakers is on with us Julie Erickson is actually watching today she just texted in, yeah ebooks South Dakota State Library Julie Erickson and Joan Appel from there will be on with us talking about what's going on in South Dakota with the ebooks and their schools and how they're trying to deal with it and the services they're using the platform choices so big set issues there so that definitely will be useful do anybody can see what South Dakota is doing and take their information and use it in your school and library so sign up for that and join us next week also we are on as you can see here and Cup of Slime is on Facebook so if you are a big Facebook user there it goes like us on Facebook you'll get announcements of when our shows are coming up and now I do a reminder as I did here you can see join us right now for Encompass this, that's actually last week's where's one for that oops anyway we're trying to do reminders and let people know when the recordings are available things like that so you can go on here and follow us on Facebook and see what you're doing if you are a Facebook user other than that I think we'll wrap it up for this morning there we are alright a little delay on my laptop here so thank you very much and we will see you next time on Encompass Live bye bye