Well, I finally figured out the Scopus thing last week. It was just something dumb I missed in the video. The issue turned out to be that I didn't realize that you could click on the word "Scopus" in the database list. I thought I had to check the box beside it. Oh well. That project is nearly finished now. I'm looking forward to actually using that for a paper the next time I have to write one. I'm hoping the citation creator works well for me. I've had good luck using the citation creator in Windows 7, though, so I'm wondering if RefWorks will just be one extra step. I missed my second post last week, because we went camping for the weekend, and I meant to post Friday afternoon before we left, but I got caught up in making sure we had everything (and then some) that we needed for the weekend. If I would have had a smart phone, I would have been fine, because I actually had two bars of cell service, but no one else had any bars. I could have blogged from where we were camping. Oh well, I'll just have to try to squeeze in an extra post this week for penance. We are getting smart phones, soon though. It's just such a huge commitment with the cost of the data plan for two of us; it's hard to make that leap.

RefWorks - more like not really workin' for me

Despite having watched Dr. Tomer's tutorial on using RefWorks with the Scopus database for our first assignment like 5 times now, I simply cannot get to a search function in the Scopus database. I've been at it for well over an hour now, hoping to get my assignment started at a reasonable time, and once again technology is not working for me. I checked the discussion boards to see if anyone posted how to actually make this happen, but I haven't found any posts that solve the problem. I did find, however, posts from people who were having the same problem as me. I'd love to continue this fruitless pursuit, but I'm off to dinner and Quizzo. Wish me luck.

Is this class going to be the end of me?

So, last week I was so proud of myself for installing all of the requirements for "Getting Started:" Xmarks, Zotero, pittcat+ toolbar, etc., and today using my shiny new Firefox 3.6.3 browser I logged into Blackboard and attempted to watch the lecture from May 18th only to be prompted to install Silverlight. That really confused me, because I thought that once I had installed it that it would work in any browser (I mean clearly I've watched stuff on Blackboard using Silverlight before). Is it something that you just have to install with every new browser rather than just downloading it onto your computer? I was given two options: "Save" or "Cancel" and instructed to restart my browser. For obvious reasons, I clicked "Save," closed out of Firefox and then logged back into Blackboard in hopes of watching my lecture only to be served with the same message that I needed to install Silverlight. "I'll show you!" I thought, so I decided to bypass Firefox (just this one time) and logged in using IE8, which I have used previously to watch lectures. Well, guess what - IE8 was "Not Responding," so that was awesome, and I must have screamed some profanities or something, because my husband came running back the hall to the office to be of assistance. Lucky for me, he IS a techie and an applications developer by profession (bite me, Silverlight), and kindly instructed me that simply saving Silverlight, which -pardon my tangent- I erroneously referred to as an "application" (it's a web application framework, duh! Oh, and thanks Wikipedia for ending our argument and proving him right), isn't enough to actually make it work. Apparently, there's this little step called "Run" that Microsoft was so kindly keeping a secret from me, and it turns out that clicking "Run" is a fairly important step. I don't know where he found the window with the Run option; all I know is that I started this adventure at exactly 3 p.m. today, and it is now 53 minutes later, and I am finally getting ready to watch my lecture...

My first post

So, who knew that going to library school would entail mandatory blogging? This feels kinda weird, because I totally don't see myself as someone who would have a blog. I am not particularly tech-savvy (my degree is in English Literature, and I made it through high school and college without ever having to step foot in a computer class). In fact, I don't think I have ever even read a blog until about 15 minutes ago when I was researching other people's blogs to see what they looked like in preparation for this assignment. Having said that, I am sort of looking forward to this Information Technologies class. I think it will be good for me, and maybe it will even help me to embrace my inner computer nerd or something. I am sure that I am going to be learning a lot this summer, and I really hope that I can keep up with everything.