Nicely organized and handy cheat sheet of search shortcuts for Google & Yahoo. Also available as a 3 page doc file and a separate html page for easy printing.
tips
Librarians’s Guide to Gaming Toolkit
Check out this new resource from ALA’: The Librarian’s Guide to Gaming: An Online Toolkit for Building Gaming @ Your Library
Libraries of all types promote the development of these literacy skills in numerous ways: information literacy classes in colleges and universities, gaming programs to promote problem solving and the development of higher order thinking skills, and services that improve technical and literary fluency. Regardless of the type of service libraries may provide, they are all important in strengthening these multiple literacies. Gaming in its various forms presents an additional service that supports and strengthens these literacies.
Includes talking points, resources, tools, tips, best practices and more.
Tons o’ Search Tips
Thanks to Kate Sheehan (Loose Cannon Librarian) for live blogging the sessions she attended today with Mary Ellen Bates at the Greenwich Library. Wow, tons of terrific search tips in these posts! Check ‘em out.
Fixing podcasts that don’t play on my mp3 player
I love my handy dandy little Archos 104 mp3 player, but there are some podcasts that just won’t play on it. In particular the wonderful library programs from OPAL just freeze up.
I contacted the Archos help desk folks who were very responsive and figured out that those podcasts were produced at a low sampling rate and for some reason this little Archos player couldn’t play them. The Archos folks promised to put it on their list of fixes. Oddly, all those podcasts play just fine on my older Archos AV 500 media player.
In the meantime I found a fix. Open the mp3 file in Audacity, change the sampling rate to 22,050 khz or 44,100 khz (“Project Rate” menu at the bottom of the work screen) and Export as MP3. The file is bigger, but it plays on my player. Yay.
And if anyone is confused by bit rates vs sampling rates, this post Bit Rate Resolution and Sampling Rate for Dummies has a nice explanation that made sense for my non-audiophile brain.
