Five reasons to use RefWorks

I have been experimenting with an online animation tool, called PowToon. There are lots of preset templates aimed at schools and education contexts. These can be easily edited and the whole system is web-based so you don't need to install software or anything. It is very simple; this one took me 55 minutes originally and another 5 to tweak after feedback from colleagues.

The only downsides are the logo (but I gather, like Prezi, if you upgrade you can remove the branding) and that as a Flash-file it doesn't play on iPads. There are some lovely, imaginative examples on the site. Great for introducing topics in a Primary classroom or getting kids to put together their own presentations.

Identity Management

(c) Hiro Sheridan

A plea from the a project group at JISC (the national consortium of experts on digital technologies for education and research) for help. The topic may sound a little like the first line of a William Gibson review, but they basically want your thoughts on 'how can universities help staff and students get more out of digital information sources'.

"As part of the Usability project, we’re investigating the way in which research staff and students in UK Higher Education access online academic resources such as research papers, articles and e-books.

We’ve put together a short online survey to find out more about the problems students and staff may encounter when trying to access these resources and to see what they do if they can’t access the paper they need. The survey is straightforward and shouldn’t take longer than 5 minutes to complete. The URL for the survey is https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/YJ9G2QR If you have any questions about the survey or would like to be involved in further user testing please contact Stuart Church."

Celebrating National Library Day at Bedford

Sharing 'my favourite book'

The library on the Bedford campus celebrated National Library Day. This annual event is celebrated in libraries all over the country, but none of us can remember ever doing anything to mark it at the University so Rachel Bickley, the Sport & Physical Activity librarian, took action to correct that this year.

As well as inviting people to share what they read for pleasure (instead of the torture of assignments) there were freebies and book-themed cupcakes from talented bakers in the Reader Services and Academic Liaison Librarian teams.

NLD 2014

If you'll forgive me geeking-out over library science - briefly, I promise! - we were quite tickled that the cupcakes which were decorated with Dewey Decimal classmarks disappeared the fastest. Bedford must be a hotspot for classification afficiandos.