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Posts Tagged ‘metadata’

Fun with Zotero downloading entire reference collections

2014/11/17 Leave a comment
  1. Where the Zotero address bar shows you, instead of a (blue) book or (black-and-white) manuscript icon (= journal article)  a yellow Manila folder, you can download a batch of references at once.
  2. Prerequisites:
      1. The web page with the bibliographic collection needs to feature machine-readable metadata. COinS and DOI are common standards. Try and right-click on the Manila-folder (in FireFox, currently not supported in Chrome), you may have mote than one option:  image
      2. Zotero needs to have a “translator” (see the full, automatically generated list of all Zotero translator) for this site.
    1. You could start with checking whether you can download a base bibliography for your topic from its Wikipedia article: zotero-save-collection-from-wikipedia-using-coins
      1. Limitations
        1. YMMV: Not all Wikipedia articles are marked up with machine-readable metadata (but I assume more and more, even though there is also FUD over shifting standards like microformats, microdata).
        2. The automation seems not forgiving if it runs into an error:  zotero-save-collectiion-wikipedia-usb-could-not-save-collection-error
        3. I have not seen any useful exception information during such failures (there is a Zotero debug mode, though), so trying to get overcome this obstacle is an exercise in trial and error: zotero-save-collectiion-wikipedia-usb-selected
    2. Other most useful sites (at least if you are not affiliated with an institution of higher ed) are
        1. Amazon: (I actually ran into problems in this example, not a crash, but so slow that it appeared to me the download was hanging or had failed. So this is only a scaled down attempt:)zotero-save-collection-from-amazon-actually-too-slow
        2. Google Books:zotero-save-collectiion-no-rightclick-google-books-word
        3. Google Scholar: Where authors provide their actual articles, Zotero shines even more: Here the Zotero translator is able to download also any (well, most!) attached PDF’s. zotero-save-collection-from-google-scholar-with-pdfs
Categories: service-is-library, training Tags: , , , , , ,

How to search this blog: Combining searching for tags and categories with feed display in Internet Explorer

2011/12/14 Leave a comment
  1. By adapting this mask in the address-bar: https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/YOUR-1ST-TAG+YOUR-2ND-TAG+…+YOUR-NTH-TAG/feed/?category_name=YOUR-1ST-CATEGORY+YOUR-2ND-CATEGORY+…+YOUR-NTH-CATEGORY
  2. you can combine into an AND-Search
    1. a tag-search (e.g. for the posts tagged as “FAQs”. You can find other tags from the tag-cloud in the right column of the blog; note that it is not complete, but only the most frequent tags are displayed there. Tags are a metadata collection that can flexibly grow on demand)
    2. a category_search (e.g. for “audience-is-teachers”. You can find other tags from the category-hierarchy in the right column of the blog; note that this hierarchy is complete, all categories tags are displayed here, top categories alphabetically, sub-categories alphabetically under their respective parent. Categories are a more controlled metadata collection)
  3. and the display of only the “feed”
  1. which makes for a quicker overview of large search result sets than the complete articles that a search without “ /feed” would return)
  2. and allows for subscribing to (or saving stored) searches
  3. Internet Explorer’sfeed display is
    1. compact
    2. provides a (1) cumulative overview of all tags and categories (the “ tag cloud for search results”  that is missing on WordPress.com ) within the search results which is easy to browse and drill into, for searches within search results (click to “filter by category” and tag: Internet Explorer subsumes both tags and categories of WordPress.com’s blogs under the term “category”).
    3. (2) evidence of an AND-search across tags and categories (e.g. find only FAQs that are for meant for teachers: 15 matches for the former, 15 matches for the latter, 15 matches overall)
    4. Result:wordpress-search-tag category feed ie-subsearches-marked
  4. Limitations
    1. To browse categories by view (syntax /category/[CATEGORYNAME]), you would have to travel the full path of the category hierarchy. Using “&category_name=” seems easier, especially since the view does not allow for searching within the entire category sub-branch. Each node stands by itself.
    2. Remember that this is not full-text, but metadata (“human curated”) search technology. The quality of the search results hinges on the quality of the metadata originally added to the blog posts by the author (“To err is human”, or “Garbage in, garbage out”).
    3. Worse: There is no provision for collaborative tagging on WordPress.com.
  5. more hints:
    1. “/feed” works only before ?query-string-syntax, but only after /view-syntax, like in the following examples around “Arabic”.
    2. you do NOT need to give the whole branch of categories when using the view-syntax (and also not only for the 1st and 2nd level): https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/feed/?category_name=arabic works, but so does https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/category/arabic/feed and also https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/category/study-program-is-any/all-languages/arabic/feed.
Categories: audience-is-any, blog, documentation, e-learning Tags: , ,

RSS feed XML categories are case-sensitive on IE9, if not on WordPress.com

2011/10/31 Leave a comment
  1. RSS XML categories case-sensitive IE9 not wordpress
  2. From which follows: tightly manage your metadata…..
Categories: audience-is-IT-staff, audience-is-language-learning-center-manager, audience-is-language-learning-center-staff, e-infrastructure, Glitches&Errors Tags: ,

How to efficiently find help on this blog

2011/06/10 Leave a comment
  1. Searching
    1. Full-text search: quick, even though dumb (“Computers are only machines…”). It may not return the most relevant results. wordpress-fulltext-search
    2. Human-curated search: The author adds metadata to his posts as he sees fit. The metadata vocabulary is somewhat stable from past experience, but may change (”The author is only a human.”  Smile). You effectively execute a humanly-curated search when clicking in the right column on either
      1. a tag link, e.g. wordpress-tag https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/moodle/
      2. a category link, e.g. wordpress-category
    3. Humanly-curated and Boolean AND search combined: This can be powerful in drilling down to an answer to a specific problem – provided there is one on the blog.
      1. Even though there is no easily clickable interface for this, by building URLs in the web browser address bar address-bar-multi-tag-search, combining tags or categories with the plus-sign, you can execute an AND-search against multiple tags(or categories) on WordPress.com
      2. Example: https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/moodle+erepository/ finds posts that the author related to both Moodle and eRepository. This can be especially useful for searching the FAQs: https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/faq+[add your problem-technology-tag here, e.g. Audacity]/
  2. Notifications: Subscribe to RSS-feeds to receive timely updates on the topics that matter most to you.  Both
    1. WordPress.com, providing RSS-feeds for all categories and tags (click on a tag or category link and find the wordpress-rss-linkicon, it will link to the RSS feed – Example: https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/moodle/feed/) – watch either the webpage or your browser GUI for orange RSS icons you can click on to initiate a subscription  -and also for multiple categories/tags (even though this feature is even better hidden, you need to construct a URL in your browser address bar. Example: https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/moodle+erepository/feed/). If you want to go beyond our own metadata, WordPress allows also for subscribing to your own searches via RSS: “To keep up with your favorite search results we offer an RSS feed for all search results. Simply click the Follow this search via RSS link in the side bar of any search results page to subscribe to updates in the search result”, consult the WordPress search documentation.
    2. and MS-Outlook, making RSS-subscriptions look familiar like email (of importance in certain environments), greatly facilitate this.
  3. Text-messaging: Get synchronous human help through the Moodle-Wimba Room link. wimba-room-quicklinks
Categories: blog, e-infrastructure, service-is-documenting Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Digital videos on network share

2009/02/24 Leave a comment
  • interpreting mock conference speech videos are now available in an improved format
    • small file size -> portable: videos compressed to the equivalent of 360mb/hr, which makes them easily accessible
      • wherever you can access the local network (classrooms, your office, library: I uploaded all 6 videos in 2 minutes)
      • or copy to a USB stick to take home (or, in the future, go into an Weblearn e-repository)
    • widely compatible:
    • searchable teaching material eRepository (poor man’s version):
      • filename of video contains date, speaker, language
      • catalogue of videos in the spreadsheet online_resources.xls
        • students can read,
        • instructors [if you do not have access, request it from ictservicesdesk for \\lgu.ac.uk\lgu$\multimedia%20student) can write (in green cells, to provide “metadata” to students for searching: topic, exercise types, difficulty rating), or else request write permission  from x4444
        • catalogue layout is subject to review. 17/04/2009: I updated, the metadata columns, following the example of SIMON, the “Shared Interpreting Materials Online” Database that ETI is developing:
        • title
          speaker
          date
          venue
          modality
          language( combination)
          (progression) level
          (particular) skill (trained)
    • have your students access the videos through the blog link here.
  • we could also collect recorded satellite tv in this form (see Spanish video sample from TVE in spreadsheet online_resources.xls – and probably should, especially if you want flexibility in adapting the materials pedagogically and reusing them -, both
Categories: assessments, erepository, Institution-is-London-Metropolitan-University, Interpreting, service-is-assessing, service-is-learning-materials-creation, service-is-library, Spreadsheets, Translation, Videos Tags: , , , , ,

How to enable your SMEs to collaboratively define and add metadata to learning materials

2008/03/28 Leave a comment
  1. We have been asked to manage digital assets (including web links) and enabling incorporating them as learning materials within a series of study programs.
  2. We researched a number of metadata schemas and controlled vocabularies that have been applied to language and social sciences learning materials before,
  3. and incorporated those into the below MS-Excel application, to allow for easy marking up of existing assets by SMEs – using collaborative tagging instead of the more familiar, but more easily conflicting, since mutually exclusive folder hierarchy (unidirectional-tree structure).
  4. In addition, SMEs can expand and develop the controlled vocabulary, by adding tags of their own, as you can see at the end of this demo:
Categories: e-languages, Institution-is-Aston-University, office-software, Screencasts, service-is-library, training, workshops Tags: , , , , , ,