Earth: Mostly Harmless

CueCatLibraryThing & CueCats - Catalog your books

David mentioned his interesting LibraryThing setup to be just after Christmas and it had me intrigued. He said he had a barcode scanner hooked up. He’s using a CueCat, which as the MAKE magazine story below suggests, is now quite a popular choice among LT users due to a new import system.

For those unaware of it, the CueCat was a late-90s fad launched by a dotcom company hoping to persuade publishers to embed barcodes in magazines and newspapers in place of URLs. A CueCat user would then scan the barcode to visit a referenced website. Unfortunately for the company, the business model of giving the scanners away for free came to little, and a host of negative publicity was incited by the fact the CueCat sent individually-identifiable information along with each scan. But still, they’re eBay fodder and are by far the cheapest type of USB barcode reader to obtain. And easily hacked.

Until now I’ve always used Delicious Library in combination with my iSight to capture barcodes - which worked okay on my iMac with an external iSight and works pretty well on my MacBook.

The main benefit of using a CueCat is speed. The iSight is pretty good at recognising most barcodes, but you still have to do a fair amount of repositioning before it recognises some barcodes. It’s also difficult to get the contrast in the image high enough to tackle books with glossy covers and the like. Using LibraryThing you can scan barcodes straight in using the ‘laser’ inside the CueCat.

LibraryThing have bulk ordered CueCats, and are selling them for $15 with US shipping or $20 with international shipping. £10 seems reasonable for such a thing given that I might find other uses for it, so I’m going to give it a go.

CueCatLibraryThing & CueCats - Catalog your books:

John writes -

“LibraryThing lets you catalog your books, but the coolest part, to me, is that they have a feature that lets you repurpose the CueCat, a late-ninties barcode scanner which was hitherto useless dot com schwag. Now you can use it to scan your books into their system! Very cool.” - Link.

Related:

PalmOne Zire + CueCat = Barcode scanner? - Link.
C.R.T. Cat - Link.
Dialing from a picture frame - Link.
LEGO barcode reader - Link.

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(Via MAKE Magazine).

What I’m up to at work

Work:
A run-down of what I’m currently coding for Spoken Word. I have had limited time to put toward Spoken Word stuff recently, but I hope this will change in the next few weeks.

• A citations system: Based on Chris Putnam’s excellent bibutils will allow download of RIS, EndNote and BibTex versions of the appropriate reference for a Padova item.
• A feature for Padova called Zeitgeist: this will embed the contents of del.icio.us URI info rss feeds (which essentially contain the posting history for that URI) reformatted and put into a nice AJAX drop-down box. This allows one so see how previous del.icio.us users have tagged and commented the item you’re looking at. Adding a callback to our database will allow us to maintain an informal zeitgeist of which items are most often bookmarked. Technorati support will eventually be forthcoming.
• Much more robust and useful XML output in Padova. It will output pure Dublin Core; Fedora FoxML or Library of Congress MODS. FoXML support is pretty much done - I just need to test that records exported in Fedora actually then import successfully into Fedora. DC is a copy-and-paste job, but MODS will require a few mapping decisions.

‘The Podcast Revolution’

This is a story I wrote for publication in my University’s student newspaper. It went out in the 16th October edition of the Strathclyde Telegraph. My thanks go out once again to all my interviewees.

South Kent College has become the latest institution to issue MP3 players to students. The college is issuing iPod nanos to enable learners to download lectures and other content from the college through podcasting technology. Podcasting, for the unfamiliar, is a system of distributing audio or video via web ‘feeds’, where new content is made available automatically to feed subscribers with ‘podcatching’ software such as iTunes or Juice.

Typically, this content is then synchronised onto a music player for listening. Mark Hunter, creator of the popular tartanpodcast (http://www.tartanpodcast.com), is enthusiastic about the medium’s educational potential. “Versatility is embedded in what podcasting is - user-created content. That means that every user can create content unique to them: their tastes; their passions; their vision; their message”.

South Kent is not alone in recognising the power of podcasting: many educational institutions now have podcasting schemes. Some, like Stanford and Wisconsin-Madison University, have set up ‘iTunes U’ sites with Apple’s assistance. Others, such as the University of Western Australia have created bespoke systems: UWA’s solution is now marketed commercially as ‘Lectopia’. By all accounts, both types are extremely popular. Indeed, the Wisconsin-Madison programme was initiated as a result of student and staff demands.

The policy of institutions distributing MP3 players to students is more contentious. The first institution to do so on a large scale was Duke University in North Carolina, where media reports suggested that students and staff were failing to take full advantage of the devices. A report in Duke student paper ‘The Chronicle’ even contained a plea for the programme to be scrapped, according to Christian Science Monitor. Beginning with the current semester, Duke will instead lend the devices to students, with a fee charged to those wishing to retain players after term.

Meanwhile at Strathclyde, some academics have been pushing forward with podcasting. Kevin O’Gorman, PhD student at the School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, is creating ten video podcasts based on BBC archive material thanks to Higher Education Academy funding. The ‘Talking Hospitality’ collection takes in such themes as the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the indigenous hospitality of the Bedouin peoples. The BBC programmes were sourced through Spoken Word Services at Glasgow Caledonian University (http://www.spokenword.ac.uk).

Does this new technology pose risks to the traditional relationship between lecturer and student? Hunter sees podcasting as a way to “augment traditional learning” rather than replace it. O’Gorman concurs, seeing the mechanism as “another space for learning and teaching”. Lack of appropriate written evidence on subjects of interest led him to look elsewhere, and “constructing podcasts from BBC programmes has been a particularly rich theme”, he attests.

A wider podcasting strategy at Strathclyde is currently in development, according to Prof. James Boyle, Academic Champion for Teaching & Learning Through Technology. “Mobile devices, including the ability to work with podcasts, will have a major role in the future”, Prof. Boyle explains. He notes that Strathclyde has plans for deploying infrastructure to support technologies like podcasting: “Learning Services also recognise that their existing Streaming server (for streamed video and audio) should be extended to allow podcast downloads”.

The opportunity to be Scotland’s leader in academic podcasting is still within reach, if staff and students are willing to embrace the medium soon. Persuading them to do this shouldn’t be hard: Hunter suggests that part of the appeal of podcasting is the masses of free content for MP3 players. And who could say ‘no’ to that?

By Graeme West


9th October 2006