Library Planet
ToC
- Liu, Xiaoming: microsoft live book search with fulltext download
- Pace, Andrew: Midwinter, Day One: Uphill
- Pattern, Dave: The Library Predict-o-matic 3000
- Bloggers at the OCLC Symposium
- The Tag Cloud from the OCLC Symposium
- Michael's book
- Pictures of Traces...of People, Places and Things
- Why teens (heart) MySpace
- Harder, Geoff: links for 2007-01-19
- More Polling Questions
- Howard Rheingold
- On a Culture of Participation
- Who's Watching Your Space
- Tags for OCLC Symposium
- New Media and Social Memory
- T minus 30 to Symposium
- social networking 101
- Casual Friday: The ALA Midwinter + Music Video Edition
- March on Washington
- OITP Advisory Committee Meeting
- Five minutes to midnight …
- LITA Town Meeting
- Eaton, Alf: dvd::rip
- cRANKy
- Jeff Han on TED Talks
- Come join the Bloggers
- Cluetrain Manifesto Theses #51
- Criticism of LC
- Roy Tennant’s Top Tech Trends
- Libraries and Web 2.0: "Are You On Board?"
- Schneider on Planning & IT
- welcome!
- TTW Mailbox: An Aussie Librarian Responds to Maplewood
- Open thread
- City Lights Bookstore in North Carolina
- Reese, Terry: MarcEdit 5.0.2574.28817 Update
- Google Doesn't "Get" Librarians...Again.
- Standards: libraries, research and learning
- Off the grid
- Microsoft’s Grava
- Murray, Peter: Building an Institutional Repository Interface Using EJB3 and JBoss Seam
- Upgrade to ATOM
- Blog Salon Room Number - 3028
- Harder, Geoff: links for 2007-01-18
- Salo, Dorothea: For the record
- del.icio.us: Petition for guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results
- code4lib: Accomodation Sharing Notices
- Real progress this week
- 2.0 Projects and Scalability another perspective
- OOXML, DTD’s and Caching
- Isn’t it great how people can learn new stuff
- QOTD: getting in the flow
- Intentional data, and book sales
- Web scale
- Justifying your place on the shelves
- Emergent knowledge and intentional data
- Library history
- London displayed
- QOTD: second life
- Standards for D2D
- Library blogging
- Nelsonville catalog
- Airplane reading: smelling the wine
- Open source interconnections
- Circulation and the collective collection again
- GROW: Building a High-quality Civil Engineering Learning Object Repository and Portal
- Wiki or Won’t He? A Tale of Public Sector Wikis
- Video Streaming of Events
- RDA: A New International Standard
- Search Engines: Is Google Building on Shaky Foundations?
- Essential Law for Information Professionals
- Ambient Findability
- Teach Beyond Your Reach
- Creative Commons Licences in Higher and Further Education: Do We Care?
- From Nought to a Thousand: The HUSCAP Project
- Considering a Marketing and Communications Approach for an Institutional Repository
- e-Books for the Future: Here but Hiding?
- At the Event:
- Holiday Violence
- Happy Holidays
- One Goat Down, One Goat To Go
- Great White Solstice
- Let The Silence Roar
- Sweet jQuery
- PES Films
- Apache 2.2.x on Mac OS X
- Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics
- New Year’s Fireworks
- Resource Description and Access (RDA): Cataloging Rules for the 20th Century
- The Online Library Catalog: Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained?
- The Patchwork Mandate
- Digital Preservation in a National Context: Questions and Views of an Outsider
- Conference Report: CORDRA at Work
- In Brief: WebPA: Online Peer Moderated Marking System for UK Higher Education
- In Brief: Web-based Construction and Sharing of Computer Models and Model Components
- Current and Future Status of D-Lib Magazine
- Copyright, Publishing, and Scholarship: The "Zwolle Group" Initiative for the Advancement of Higher Education
- Distinguishing Content from Carrier: The RDA/ONIX Framework for Resource Categorization
- All You Need Is a Complete Working Application of FRBR to Music, and Love
- FRBR Implementers at ALA Midwinter Friday?
- MySQL FRBR question on message board
- MacCall, From Tablets to FRBR
- Ranganathan, The Five Laws of Library Science
- ALA Midwinter FRBRosity
- Delsey, CONSER and RDA
- Another one on Renear and Choi
- Coyle and Hillmann, RDA: Cataloging Rules for the 20th Century
- Giasson, Music ontology
- Overheard in the Seattle Public Library
- OJAX Federated Search Service Software
- WebDAV
- NetFlix & Video Downloads
- Steal This Idea: Top 10 Things You Probably Didn’t Know Your Library Offered
- Datema, Jay: NetConnect Spring 2007 podcast episode 2
- Is the new Statistics Board the right model for free data?
- Don't miss your opportunity to be part of Google's first Code Jam Latin America!
- Reese, Terry: MarcEdit "rosettastone"
- Opensearch browser search plugin thingy tips (works for onebiglibrary.net)
- Cohen, Dan: The Hindle Fellowship in the History of Technology [ma.gnolia]
- Quiz Time
- code4lib: Code4Lib 2007 T-Shirt Contest
- Millions on the streets with a New World View
- Public Libraries & DRM at Wired
- Giarlo, Michael: Persistent URL Tools
- More On Student Publishing
- Salo, Dorothea: Pluralistic ignorance
- Social Networking is Hot
- Category:Fictional barbers and hairdressers
- Heading to ALA Midwinter
- Eponymous hairstyles
- Serials Review interview with Ellen Duranceau
- speaking community into being?
- Prospecting for ORE
- Humanities Virtual Browsery at MIT
- Blog Salon - ALA Midwinter
- Call to Koha Users
- See You in Seattle
- The Semester Begins with Assistance
- PURL Spam
- UNCF/Google Scholarship
- Howard Rheingold Interview
- Unordered list of “top tech trends”
- Five Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Me
- Repositories and OpenID
- D-Lib Magazine
- Link Evaluator
- A Big Mess at Kohl's (or Corporations, Customers and the Cluetrain)
- I’ve been Meme’d!
- Size Matters
- Behind the Features
- HTML email and Outlook 2007
- MBR Fix and AutoPatcher
- Grandpa Maximon
- Podcast Seminar by Apple
- MLK day and new book pile contest
- How OS costs hold back local authorities housing associations: the view from the ground
- Library Geeks 010 - King Day 2.0
- Advisory Panel on PSI notes Free Our Data campaign again
- NLM's PubMed Central
- Resource for the Research Paper
- What Art Garfunkel Reads
- Library Decides Not to Close to Thwart Rowdiness
- Caption This Photo
- Upcoming Presentations
- Moving Site
- LIS753 Student Blogs Spring 2007
- Thomas Dowling’s Top Tech Trends
- Westlaw Stress Toy
- It’s Trend Time Again
- What Browsers Do People Use to Read My Blog?
- Footnote.com
- Sarah Houghton-Jan’s Top Technology Trends
- National Gallery of American Art
- Online Stores I Like
- Windows Media Player 11 and MMS
- Some thoughts on the iPhone
- OLAC Newsletter
- Monticello Does Anime
- The Library 2.0 Gang talk about changing library buildings
- Real-time quotes for free
- American Libraries and Public Libraries Get Some Well Deserved Press
- What iPhone is telling us
- Card-carrying columnist
- Library predictions for 2007
- Not something you see every day - or ever....
- More from Gather.com
- Code4Lib Scholarship for Women!!
- ALT-C 2007 deadline reminder
- UK Schools Minister sets out his vision for educational ICT
- Messaging, Vlogging and Guest Editors
- Why making statistics free can save lives
- Note to self w/r/to RMagick: RTFM
- January Issue of Computers in Libraries
- 2007 - long after the day after the day it began
- More on Tableless design
- and now for something completely different...
- MIT Catalog
- The CONSER Standard Record and RDA
- Not exactly Magic Windows, but close enough
January 20, 2007
planet code4lib![image]()
Liu, Xiaoming: microsoft live book search with fulltext download
I just have a chance of looking at Microsoft live book search demo , it's still a small collection, so search results can be confusing. However an entire book can be downloaded from as a PDF file, such as this one:
http://www./download/writingsofcharle01dickuoft/writingsofcha...
I guess this is part of deal of Open Contents Alliance. Google Print doesn't really allow download of a full book.
Pace, Andrew: Midwinter, Day One: Uphill
http://blogs.ala.org/pace.php?title=day_one_uphill
I don't remember the hills in Seattle being so steep. I'm still on East Coast time and sitting in the bar of the Renaissance Madison Hotel on a dying battery, trying to summarize today's events. (No, I'm not sitting in a bar at breakfast time Saturday, when this entry posted to the blog!)
The bulk of the day was spent at RMG's annual "ILS vendor" panel. I know, you're thinking, "How many of them are left?" Truth be told, the panel in its 18th year is made up primarily of nontraditional system vendors, though they are still well represented.
This year's panel included: Paul Cope (Auto-Graphics), Beth Jefferson (BiblioCommons), Matti Shem Tov (Ex Libris), Bastian Zwaan (MediaLab), Bill Shickling (Polaris), Jane Burke (Serials Solutions), Pat Sommers (SirsiDynix), Annette Murphy (TLC), Vinod Chachra (VTLS), and Todd Miller (WebFeat).
Anyone who knows me knows I am a firm believer in knowing one's history, but I will admit that there was a little too much history at the start of this session--a few too many jokes about being in the business since the dark ages. Sometimes these jokes can make the players look like sages; taken to extremes, it can make them look out of touch.
Things got more interesting when host Rob McGee asked the representatives of SirsiDynix, Ex Libris, and Serials Solutions to talk about recent changes in ownership of their companies (the so-called "elephant in the room"), the details of which have already been covered in previous HP posts. Kudos to Matti Shem Tov for schooling the audience on the difference between venture capital and private equity. It was somewhat entertaining to watch vendors draw a line in the sand between investor-owned and founder-owned companies. While a sense of nostalgia might make libraries favor the latter, I think that longing for the past would be quickly traded for functionality, customer service, or even some robust product development.
The session really got some traction (as it usually does) when a few bold statements were made. A lengthy discussion about the return on investment (ROI) for library automation ranged from discussion of focusing on needs of end-users to yours truly being asked on the spot to comment on Endeca's ROI for NCSU Libraries.
"If libraries are not successful, then none of us on this panel are successful." -Patrick Sommers, SirsiDynix
The panel took on the feel of a focus group as the room debated remote storage, RFID technology, faceted classification, library architecture, and the future of discovery and delivery in library automation systems. The mix of panel participants and the nice mix of vendors and librarians in the room kept the conversation lively but civil.
What was missing? The hills. All these vendors have hills to climb to stay relevant in the industry, just as libraries have hills to climb to remain relevant in the eyes of patrons. Focus groups are good. A panel of technologists trying to solve some of the problems defined in this session would also be interesting.
Pattern, Dave: The Library Predict-o-matic 3000
Were you caught on the hop by the merger of Sirsi and Dynix?
Did the Ex Libris acquisition of Endeavor take you by surprise?
Were you amazed by the breaking news that LibraryThing is going to buy out Talis?
If the answer to any of the above is "yes", then you need the…
It's all good
Bloggers at the OCLC Symposium
Thanks to James (Government documents) for sharing your power strip with us. We blogged hard, as you can see from the stream-of-consciousness posts, eh?! 
The Tag Cloud from the OCLC Symposium
Michael's book
Get the ALA TechSource book at 1/2 price at the OCLC Booth in the exhibit hall this evening. If you're not at the conference, but you'd like the book at half-price this evening--I will check and see if we can honor your request here. Leave me a comment and I'll try to work it out. Geolocation issues cannot stop knowledge transfer.
Pictures of Traces...of People, Places and Things
Marc Smith from a sociological point of view...Microsoft Research is all over the world. The Community Technologies group. Why are we able to engage in ordered behavior--and when are we not? And why?
Everywhere you go, you leave footprints in computational media. They are aggregatable.
William White? Data Collection aggregation.
Scaffolds for collective action:E-mail, chat, buddy lists, IM, usenet, web boards, forums, ebay, blogs, wikis, MUDs, MOOs, Graphical Worlds, MMORPGs, Mapster, Kazaa, Gnutella
MoSoSo: Mobile Social Software. Everything is available, in your pocket. it's thing that has sensors. It's based on collective action.
Computer-Mediated Collective Action: it's hard to get things done with multiple people. (MS Word by yourself, you get some goodness. eBay by yourself--don't get much out of it!)
Variety of systems to make collective action in public. (Delicious, Digg, Slashdot)
Wikimapia--Annotating everything. You stood there for awhile. Your computer noticed, for you. (You were not aware of this...)Books:Evolution of Cooperation. Bob Axelrod.Governing the Commons. Elanor Osterman.Study of How We Present Ourselves in the Physical World. Goffman.The Bible of Social Network Theory.Tufte's Visual Explanations(His own book,.)Garret Harden, Wellman.
Information foraging and what's left behind...(ants at work by Deborah Gordan.) "What do ants do in their spare time?" Ants leave trails.
Relationships for usenet communities. usenet still not dead yet--good place to look for relationship spaces, traces.
Social networks: not new. Reciprosity--networks and and association. Largely available because of computational ability. Social Network theory is not Social Network Service.*Ties* are as old as the internet. You can have lots of flavors of ties. "me too" is okay to say, now.
SNA Resources: INSNA.
We can see patterns of behaviors over time...answers and answer person. Footprints in cyberspace...we're leaving the artifacts behind and analyzable.
Egos, Alters, Out Degrees.Answer person signatures (only replies), Discussion People (starts conversations).We can see the patterns people leave behind--and can be correlated with how important the information/information quality is.
Pervasive Inscription Revolution: "We are all authors now" phenomenon. Each of us will leave behind 3-5 terabytes behind. Silt up and storing information.
We are building digital mirrors back for digital lifestyles.SNARF: Social relationship and Network Finder. (Unread mail, the people you've replied to...the patterns. The computer already knows who your friends are. It can tell, by who you've replied to.)
Information visualizations: tree map.
Mobile Social Networks. No longer temple/warehouse of information. No it's easier to get information OUTSIDE the temple. The temple is a part of every street corner. (Alice note: What does that do for a library? Makes me think my kiosk idea is not as corny as it sounded...)
Spotme.com and you can register, you carry a device in your pocket.
Ntag.com beams information about you to others--and writes your report for you.
YOu can scan barcodes on objects and then. Working with King County library system. YOu're in a bookstore, you click the barcode and you've reserved the book and they'll mail it to you.
Slam can watch you roller-blade in the park. And next it can tell you your heart rate and how fast you were going. Annotate, rank and review.
Libraries are not necessarily Librarians. He mentioned "warehouses of dead trees."The future of libraries may be in doubt.But the future of librarians should be clear: the need for information guides is ever greater.
Made the comparison to professional photographer.
QUESTIONS.Q. SNARC in production?
A. In release to Web form. (In other words, no.)
Q. Could he speak to the community of internet users?
A. Tools show practical advantages, patterns. Relevance. Recency is not Relevance and that's ADD when you mistake the two.
Q. Issues of Privacy and Surveillance?
A. Accelerate our rendez-vous with regret. He wants his team to bleed instead of users. But software can be domesticated...and the Model T Ford did not have a cupholder. We do have choices about exposure and control. the walls have melted away--people who are not in this room, are in this room. Social order and rules are in flux. But we'll live through it.
Tag Cloud shows who is in the room. (I took a photo and will post it ASAP. We'll link to the Office of Research Tag Cloud generator soon.)
January 19, 2007
It's all good
Why teens (heart) MySpace
Dissertation on shifting natures of public life for American youth. Why have social networks become so popular with teens these days?
100 years ago--as of age 14, youth were already part of the working world. (Exceptions were those that could afford to go to High School.)
Head of Households--Labor Unions lobbied congress for compulsary education for minors. High school *myth* for sports teams and proms--schooling system for age segregation.
By 1950s, teens were a particular target demographic. 1941 saw the term "teenager" enter the language, from marketing language/segmentation.
Today we have a highly structured teenage life. Super structured life in regulated environment. After-school activities galore. (No latch-key kids...) Kids stay up all night doing homework--the one reprieve they have with unstructured time is Online.
The reactions of strangers let you know where you are, in the larger context and status. You have to learn what the social cues and norms are. You learn social rules by engaging with strangers--young people are doing the same thing online.
Two populations:1. those who hold control over them (parents, teachers)2. those who want to prey on them (marketers, predators)
If these are the only adults you interact with, you don't learn the social cues and norms. Social life has changed dramatically.
Jane Jacobs. Death and life of the Great American City.
Friendster--geeks (bloggers), freaks (burningman), and queers (mostly gay men). Fakester genocide. Musicians and people goofing around (salt, pepper profiles) joined. Friendster kicked off the people not using the system "as they intended it to be used."
MySpace copied Friendster except didn't kick off non-dating profiles. Bands became really popular on MySpace. Bands have fans--fans go on the band profile and use it in unique and interesting ways. Music is the glue of teenage culture in the US. This became a way for teens to learn about new music, a currency.
People realized how to customize their myspace profile: a copy-paste society. Find the right code on someone else's page. Taps into
Teenagers usually Google for MySpace. And then click the first link.
Teens copied a lot of phishing schemes, ads. But it was very powerful to be able to identify your friends. You list a lot of friends who may or may not be actual friends. You're writing your community into being. I want to engage in this world of 900 people--built on the relationship or potential relationship with people.
People get on, and have their own micro-world. Painful, 20-year old version of a yearbook. Comments on myspace created conversation. But people started using myspace comments for casual conversation-but they're being witnessed in the public arena.
Breakups on myspace! Does so publicly on myspace. "I'm going to make sure everyone sees what I said." Making the conversation accountable. See what's being said and by who.
Niche groups throughout myspace with separate patterns. Unique to myspace. Trying to figure out status and boundaries.
Issues:* Persistence* Searchability* Replicability* Invisible audiences
What happens when every single thing I do, is recorded? Privacy as in, I get to control the community. Concerns over privacy. You're going to stop talking, when a powerful adult comes into your life. (We adults don't experience this...)
Teens have lost their hangout space. In the US, mobile phones are used as a leash for teens. But other places (Japan), you can use your phone as a location device--you can know who your friends are, in what geographic area. What kinds of interactions will you find valuable. Teenagers as part of adult society...when they're segregated out, how do we teach teenagers about how to be a part of our society? (Because regulation and strict guidelines/structures don't work.)
QUESTION.Q. How do rural kids use this?
A. (Look at written stuff.) Pew says more than 90% of teens have access to the internet. Social/economic status plays a part. For people with home access, it's to solidify relationships. For people with only public access (libraries and schools), they have been written out of the equation. *Kids are not able to use the social tools in the very environment where they are meant to gain access --aka the library banning and blocking environment*
In an urban environment, kids will be lined up at an Apple Store, in order to get on MySpace.
planet code4lib![image]()
Harder, Geoff: links for 2007-01-19
-
Blurbomat | How to Turn an Ordinary Photo Into an Extraordinary Photo
(tags: photoshop tutorial howto photography) -
EDUCAUSE REVIEW | If the Academic Library Ceased to Exist,
(tags: academic libraries) -
iJigg.com | Popular Music
iJigg is the place for you to find those rare addictive tunes from musicians worldwide. As an iJigg member, you can submit music, rate music and chime in on conversations.
(tags: music web2.0 audio digg) -
No Direction, Period. Bob Dylan
(tags: funny video bobdylan)
It's all good
More Polling Questions
Do you regularly read blogs?
58% Yes42% No
Do YOU publish a blog?
31% Yes69% No
Do you participate in sites such as Facebook, MySpace or Flickr?
36% Yes64% No
Do you regularly participate in a long-running mailing list, BBS, forum, wiki, chat room, online community?
86% Yes14% No
Howard Rheingold
Cyberspace is Social. Participation. Howard has given this presentation in 2nd Life twice, but this is his first time to give it in First life.
He tells the story of his daughter growing up when search engines first start got started. The concern about accuracy and authoritative...the locus of responsibility shifted. Now it's up to the reader, to determine. The reader determines who the author is--and what his/her identity is. It's a new critical reading skill.
Teachers and administrators did not see these new critical thinking skills as critical to education. In fact they were threatened. Now it's happening mostly after school and on weekends, instead of in the classroom! (Alice's note: Is this backwards or what?)
Fuss over Pornography on the internet. Telecommunications Act of 1996. Communications Decency Act. Moral panic and concerns for children. Howard testified at the ACLU trial. His daughter provided an affidavit about online experience.
Described that online communities could make their own rules and have discourse. DOPA. The attempts to put forth legislation for internet protection won't stop.
Cartoon: "Well I don't think you should be eating fast food, but if you're going to try it--well, try it in a safe environment."
Children appreciate when their parents try to ask about their online lives. You're trying to teach your kids how to be citizens in the democracy.
Opportunity today: make use of the natural enthusiasm for cultural production and consumption. Digital natives use the media available to them, about issues they care of. They can organize with participatory media...
In Madrid, bloggers and texters threw the election. People sent each other text messages--to go show up in protest. (Smart Mobs.) Now President--last minute get-out-the-vote campaign. Oh My News.
Oh My News called for street demonstrations.
Public Voice--media production with civic engagement. Phil Agre: How to write for a Web zine. (Public voice vs. private voice.)
15-20,000 students in LA to organize a school walkout for demonstrating against immigration.
Youth are not passive media consumers. They seek, create, modify digital media online. Digital natives have learned how to learn: they carry the equipment, the internet is not new technology but a stable feature of life.
Kids need guidance in learning how to use participatory media and apply it to political democracy. Many kids feel like government is detached and removed from daily life. But when they found out legislation might connect in their daily lives, they figured it out. Quick!
How do kids learn today? Reading and discussing texts. Voice is important--a unique style of personal expression. Energetic involvement in identity formation. Online media fits something for adolescent needs: self-expression and trying on identities. Youth can move that private voice dialogue into a public voice discussion.
Public voice is the fundamental participle of public opinion. American democracy is a bit messy in the public sphere. Phil Agre again: The Practical Republic.
Participatory media can give powerful experiences to young people. Communities, movements, markets and civilizations start through communication media. The tech. power of many to many communications enables collection action.
We are human because we are social networkers. (Early man organized against predators.) We now have capabilities to do natural activities of humans, amplified. Humans on nodes can learn, organize and transact at rates never before possible.
Teaching students about participatory media: he has students blog about a particular topic, and use persuasive speech.
Participatory Media Literacy.
We need to study what civic engagement means today, and how students can use their skills for communities, as well as self-expression.
QUESTIONS.Q. What are the top 2 things you recommend for librarians to do, and to stop doing?
A. Opportunity to LISTEN. What do those kids care about? (skateboard, immigration law, etc.) They can use the media that they're becoming fluent in, to advocate on issues they care about.
DOPA Act is not law. You don't have to do it!
Q. How can I teach digital literacy skills when I block MySpace and YouTube?
A. You don't have to block those sites. It's not law. It may or may not be passed...
On a Culture of Participation
Device question.In your professional opinion, do you think your patrons are more comfortable when asking questions/requesting information from a librarian in person or online? 1% In person 20% Online 15% Doesn't matter, either one 39% Do not feel patrons generally talk to librarians
Culture of Participation story.Control is an issue--we can't control conversations.
Cluetrain Manifesto. We need to be human when we talk with each other. Human conversations dominate.
Another book to read: Wikinomics.
Michael is explaining the self-tagging exercise. Send in your tags in the comments section, if you like. We'll include you in our tabulations!
It's all about Experience, Play and Discovery.Check out the cover of this month's
Does your library have a blog? ? % Yes at my public library ? % Yes at my public library ? % Yes at my public library ? % Yes at my academic library ? % Yes at my school library ? % Yes at my special or other library 54 % No, we don't have a blog at our library
Who's Watching Your Space
Symposium is starting! The room is packed...The agenda:*Social networks*Cooperation*Privacy and trust*Participant behaviors(and what you think...)
Little known facts about Michael Stephens: He likes to take photos of abandoned buildings, and used to work at a video store before he went to library school!
Facts about Howard Rheingold: He is credited with inventing the term, "Virtual Communities." He attended Reed College.
Facts about danah boyd: She was declared the High Priestess of Social Friend Networking.
Facts about Marc Smith: Co-editor of Communities in Cyberspace.
Tags for OCLC Symposium
Tags we'd ask you to use, for the Symposium when you post/link, etc:
OCLC_symposiumALA_MW_2007MW2007ala2007
Whoo Hoo the room is filling up!
hangingtogether.org
New Media and Social Memory
While nobody I talked to had heard of this event until about one week before it happened, “New Media and Social Memory” at the UC Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive (my former employer) drew an impressive crowd into BAM/PFA’s museum theater. Small wonder – Richard Rinehard had assembled a star-studded cast to muse [...]
It's all good
T minus 30 to Symposium
Hang gang! We are about half an hour away from the OCLC Symposium, here at the Sheraton Metropolitan Ballroom in Seattle. To me, the Symposium is what officially transitions us from "pre-ALA" into full-blown conference mode.Can I tell you, I love the ALA conferences. It's always so fun to see everyone, to make new friends, to flip through a fresh box of crisp new brochures, to hear what new ideas are brewing out there in libraryland.I've been off working on a Special Project the past couple of months, which means you haven't heard as much from me lately! Never fear, there will be lots of information forthcoming. We're in the middle of the research phase of the project now, working with Leo Burnett. When I have data to share, you can be sure IAG readers will be one of the first audiences to hear it!So back at the Symposium, we're getting all kinds of social-y things cranked up. When you arrive, you'll be issued a *clicker* so you can register your vote with audience participation questions. Then we also have a cool little social/self-tagging exercise planned, as well. Here's how it will work:As each person comes in, they receive a badge with descriptive tags on it. It includes things like "Gamer, Blogger, traveler, Photographer, Artist, Millenial, GenXer, Boomer, mac, PC,MySpace, 2.0, Techie, Cataloger, Administrator, ReferenceAcademic, Public, Special, School." So then once everyone self tags by highlighting relevant terms (a good conversation starter, in and of itself...) then we'll gather up everyone's tags and see who's in the room--and do a tag cloud display. So it gets into issues we're exploring at the session itself: social networking, privacy, personal information in a public space and the exchange that happens...Another fun bit that I am quite excited about! We have a videographer who is randomly filming the event--the pre, during and after. We'll edit it for coolness and then mount to YouTube. It's not exactly the stellar time of storytelling I was hoping for, for OCLC's first foray onto YouTube. But hey, I'll take something over nothing!Had dinner at the Flying Fish last night. Highly recommend it, especially the not-on-the-menu vegetarian meal. Absolutely gorgeous food.Okay, people are starting to arrive so I will post this and continue to post during the event. We have wifi in the ballroom, so other people will also be posting. We have some power strips around the perimeter, so you will be able to plug in when you need to!
library technology issues![image]()
social networking 101
I'm currently participating in an OCLC sponsored session on social networking. Michael Stephens (at podium) spoke on the opportunities available to libraries thru social networking tools. The real-time surveys conducted during the session (using TurningPoint devices) indicated that the application of these tools in libraries is disappointing. At this moment, Howard Rheingold is speaking on social
MaisonBisson.com![image]()
Casual Friday: The ALA Midwinter + Music Video Edition
The above circulated a while ago, but I post it today to recognize this special ALA Midwinter edition of Casual Fridays. And while I'm not suggesting libraries will or should become 21st century dance halls, Lichen's title, “1.0 -> 2.0, the video” has some resonance here.
And on the theme of music videos that tell stories comes Miranda's Yo Te Dire, which I like both because it's funny and because I'm instantly attracted to foreign pop culture.
miranda, music videos, yo te dire, cascada, every time we touch, music, video, ala midwinter, libraries, lib20, library 2.0
inkdroid![image]()
March on Washington
MARCH ON WASHINGTON TO END THE WAR
Begins: Sat, 27 Jan 2007 at 11:00 AM
Ends: Sat, 27 Jan 2007 at 2:00 PM
Location:
Mall between 3rd and 7th Streets
Washington, DC 20002
USA
Link: more info
Mark your calendars, and let me know if you need a place to stay...
LITA Blog
OITP Advisory Committee Meeting
Welcome, Intro, General Update
* OITP is busy & being approached to do more work
* ALA Presidential Candidate visits:
– Davenport — Information Technology Policy is an area ALA will need to focus upon (she said more & I like her candidacy)
– Rettig — Technology is pervasive in the association and he would encourage conversations across the [...]
hangingtogether.org
Five minutes to midnight …
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was founded by a group of Manhattan Project scientists who subsequently became concerned about the danger of nuclear war. The Bulletin’s iconic Doomsday Clock is a graphical representation of how close mankind is to extinguishing itself – at least in the opinion of The Bulletin. The end of civilization [...]
LITA Blog
LITA Town Meeting
LITA President-Elect Mark Beatty invites LITA members to the LITA Town Meeting, to be held on Monday, January 22, 2007, from 8–10 a.m. in Room 606 of the Washington State Convention & Trade Center in Seattle.
Recent years’ Town Meeetings have focused on gathering input for the LITA Strategic Plan, which was approved by the [...]
planet code4lib![image]()
Eaton, Alf: dvd::rip
dvd::rip is fantastic for ripping DVDs in Linux, particularly the way it automates calculations and generates previews.
See also: Sofa Cinema, the Guardian-branded version of LOVEFiLM.
La-La-Librarian
cRANKy
I saw this on ResearchBuzz and thought it was pretty funny: cRANKy I haven’t played with it much but if I were over 50, I don’t know how much I would want to use a search engine called “cranky” even if they were trying to be clever with the word rank. I’d love to know [...]
Jeff Han on TED Talks
Drooling…looks sooo cool: Jeff Han
It looks like so much fun…as someone who paints and draws, this would be a dream for me to own…imagine the possibilities! I have no words…just WOW.
LITA Blog
Come join the Bloggers
If you are a blogger at ALA Midwinter (and why wouldn’t you be?) come join the rest of your clan at the official ALA Blogger’s Table, sponsored by LITA.
ALA Office
6th Floor of the Convention Center
far left back of the room
Look for the Ninjas
Tags: LITA, bloggers, blogging, blogs, ALA, midwinter2007
Tame The Web: Libraries and Technology
Cluetrain Manifesto Theses #51
Just thinking about the Cluetrain and library managers/administrators this morning.
Command-and-control management styles both derive from and reinforce bureaucracy, power tripping and an overall culture of paranoia.
Is your library steeped in a culture of paranoia?
Catalogablog
Criticism of LC
The Library of Congress Professional Guild has posted 2 papers.
LITA Blog
Roy Tennant’s Top Tech Trends
Since I’m late to the game I will steal borrow a couple of trends that my esteemed colleagues have already noted and throw in one of my own.
New Catalog Possibilities - Starting with NCSU’s Endeca-powered catalog, there has been a definite trend of moving to systems not marketed by the typical (and now smaller) set [...]
Tame The Web: Libraries and Technology
Libraries and Web 2.0: "Are You On Board?"
Originally uploaded by crr29061.
Via Dr. Curtis Rogers: Beaufort County Library has puit up a page about Web 2.0 for library users. http://www.bcgov.net/bftlib/web.htm
Take a look. (WOW! He just posted another cool use of Flickr for historical photos at Pickens Library.)
Schneider on Planning & IT
For some tips and strategies on dealing with librarians, IT and this 2.0 world, don't miss Karen Schneider's most wonderful post at TechSource "IT & Sympathy."
http://www.techsource.ala.org/blog/2007/01/it-and-sympathy.html
First, if they haven't told you what they're up to, sit down with your IT people and ask what their schedule is, and where your needs for new stuff fit in. It would be wise for IT to do this proactively, but they may not think this way, and you can help them get there. You may find out that IT has some pretty important stuff on the docket, pretty far down Maslow's hierarchy, that you weren't aware of because it's not visible or sexy—from some essential upgrade to the network to disaster planning.
Second, do some IT planning on your own. New technology deserves a fair chance at succeeding, and you play a role in its success. Where do you want your department to be six, twelve, eighteen, or twenty-four months from now? Get it all out on paper, from the most fundamental (upgrade all computers in the public areas) to the most blue-sky (we're going to open a library branch in Second Life and sell tee-shirts).
welcome!
Originally uploaded by mstephens7.
Things are bustling at the convention center! I'll be hanging out with the OCLC folk at their booth in the exhibit hall after the symposium. If you are attending, please say hi. (and don't miss the DDR at the ALA TechSource booth!)
See you there!
TTW Mailbox: An Aussie Librarian Responds to Maplewood
An Aussie Librarian writes:
I was dismayed to read your post 'Lock the Doors' regarding the library who have decided to close for part of the day, due to youth violence and inappropriate behaviour. I am glad that the community is taking a role to keep the library open. These types of problems with youth are by no means limited to the USA and we have experienced very similar here in Australia. We have a success story You may want to share with readers of TTW.
One of our public libraries, West Torrens Library Service, recently won an award for Innovation in Libraries with their Youth Strategy program. It's taken them 2 years to implement and see real change. I hope that even a quick glance over their paper (link below) highlights some interesting and useful ideas. I don't want to offer this as a 'solution' to Maplewood's problems (or other troubled libraries!) especially as I have only seen their situation based on what I have read. I just thought this might be of interest to library staff who want to find out how other libraries are handling these situations, and want to consider and discuss lots of alternatives, including quite radical ones.
You can read their submission paper here (1698 kb):
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">http://www.lga.sa.gov.au/webdata/resources/files/Jim_Crawford_Award_Nomination_2006_-_West_Torrens_-_From_Seige_to_Soujourn.pdf
And incase you are interested, the full list of nominations for the Library Innovation Awards are available here: http://www.lga.sa.gov.au/site/page.cfm?u=1152 so you can see they were up against some strong competition.
Thanks Aussie for the link. The report outlines what the folks did to work with the young people, establish ground rules and move forward. There are some wonderful illustrations of the signage developed with the librarians and teens as well. It reminds me of the rules of the Library Loft at PLCMC. If your library is dealing with similar issues, this might be good reading for a staff meeting or planning/action group.
The FRBR Blog![image]()
Open thread
Blogs with thousands of readers and dozens of people posting comments on each entry sometimes have "open threads," empty posts where readers can start whatever sort of discussion they want in the comments. I thought I'd try it here, so if you want to say something, go ahead! If you ...
LibraryThing
City Lights Bookstore in North Carolina
City Lights in Sylva, North CarolinaWe've just added City Lights Bookstore of Sylva, North Carolina (map) to our local bookstore program.City Lights is a great illustration of what we're trying to do—help local, mostly (but not necessary) independent bookstores and the LibraryThing members who love them. City Lights describes Sylva as:
... a small Main Street town nestled between the Great Smokies and the Balsams, two mountain ranges in the highest part of the southern Appalachians. Our goal is to share the literature of the Appalachian region with the world and the world of good books with our community.
If you're in the area, go ahead and edit your profile to have availability and pricing information shown on all work pages.Thanks to Chris Wilcox of City Lights for finding out about us and sending us a data file out of the blue. (We like it when the data comes to us! )For more information on our bookstore program check out Thingology for the XML format. We are also now accepting standard Booksense data feeds, a simple tab-delimited format booksellers upload to Booksense.
planet code4lib![image]()
Reese, Terry: MarcEdit 5.0.2574.28817 Update
I’ve posted a new update to MarcEdit 5. The update includes the following changes:
- Added a Sort by Title to the MarcEditor and rearranged the sort commands
I’d been asked by a few folks to add the ability to sort a results set by title — this new function allows that. To make this work, I’ve had to include a new option in the Program options. On the ”Other” tab, I added a tag for title. This was done so that users not working with MARC21 can set the appropriate title tag. 
The value must always include a 3 digit tag + subfield in the following format: 245$a. The program will utilize the filing characters when sorting the title. This isn’t the fastest function in the world since the program has to maintained a linked list between the sorted title and metadata — but for files around 20 MB and smaller — this should work fine. - Added title sorting to the Selected MARC records and Delete Selected MARC records. This will allow title sorting here as well.
- MARCJoin — stupid error — if the file was left empty, it would throw an error.
- Swap Field Function — Updated swap field function to allow for wildcards.
- Work on the delimited text wizard
- Various bug fixes with the UI.
The program can be downloaded from: MarcEdit50_Setup.exe
–TR
Library Stuff
Google Doesn't "Get" Librarians...Again.
According to CNET, Google is now talking openly with book publishers. Which means one thing. They will probably start a blog for the book publishing industry. Well, they did it for librarians, just in time for ALA Midwinter.I'm not a fan of the Google Librarian Center for one important reason: The history between the engine and the profession. Before the book scanning project, Google ignored librarians. As soon as they needed something from us (our books), they started the PR push. Take a look at the timeline. Google shows up at their first ALA conference during the exact time when they were being pushed around for scanning books. Librarians are being used (Brainwashed?) by Google all over again and they don't even realize it. This is one reason why I'm so excited to do my "Research is Hard" presentation in April to a local library system in NY.Here's something else that is interesting and yet more proof that Google doesn't "get" librarians. Yesterday, when I looked at the Librarian Central Blog, I was a bit perturbed that they used an image of three books in their banner.
Today, I looked again and it's an image of a library building. Someone must have said something to them and it was changed. 
Am I the only one who finds this odd? Isn't this a big deal? If they understood librarians (and not just cared about us for our books), they would put a "sexier" image up there.Postscript: Due to the discussions last week on Merediths blog, I should say that my opinion is my own and may or may not be different than those of my publisher and/or employer.
Lorcan Dempsey's weblog
Standards: libraries, research and learning
I came across the helpful JISC Standards Catalogue while checking something for a presentation. It is in the form of a Wiki maintained by UKOLN and provides descriptive information about standards of interest to the educational community.
Off the grid
I have been in Seattle since yesterday at some pre-ALA meetings, and will be here for the next few days. I will probably not be posting much, if anything, for a while.
I am writing this courtesy of a wireless connection in the Seattle Public Library. This is my first time in this landmark building and now I need to go and look around some!
ebyblog![image]()
Microsoft’s Grava
News to me but it looks like MS is coming out with a tool to help build e-learning modules (learning objects) named Grava.
“Grava” is the codename to a new set of tools from Microsoft’s Education Product Group that will allow the education community to create and assemble materials that will increase discovery and allow learners to go at their own pace and learning style. Grava tools are slated for release in the Fall of 2007.
There’s not much information on the site and I’m a little worried that there’s no mention of any of the standards such as IMS, common cartridge, etc. Hopefully it’s not just another format like most MS offerings though right now there doesn’t seem to be a decent spec anyone wants to support anyways. It’s really an area that could be improved.
There’s some screenshots of the interface.
planet code4lib![image]()
Murray, Peter: Building an Institutional Repository Interface Using EJB3 and JBoss Seam
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This tour is designed to show the overall architecture of a FEDORA digital object repository application within the JBoss Seam framework while at the same time pointing out individual design decisions and extension points that are specific to the Ohio Digital Resource Commons application. Geared towards software developers, a familiarity with Java Servlet programming is assumed, although not required. Knowledge of JBoss Seam, Hibernate/Java Persistence API, EJB3 and Java EE would be helpful but not required; brief explanations of core concepts of these technologies are included in this tour.
The tour is based on revision 709 of /drc/trunk and was last updated on 18-Jan-2007.
This tour will also be incorporated into a presentation at Open Repositories 2007 on Tuesday afternoon.
Directory Layout ¶
The source directory tree has four major components: ‘lib’, ‘resources’, ’src’, and ‘view’.
lib - libraries required by the application. The lib directory contains all of the JAR libraries required by the application. Its contents is a mix of the Seam-generated skeleton (pretty much everything at the top level of the ‘lib’ directory) and JAR libraries that are specific to the DRC application (in subdirectories of ‘lib’ named for the library in use). For instance, the ‘commons-codec-1.3′ and the ‘hibernate-all’ and the ‘jboss-seam’ JAR files were all brought into the project via ’seam-gen’ while ‘lib/commons-net-1.4.1/commons-net-1.4.1.jar’ library was added specifically for this project. A convention has been established whereby new libraries added to the project appear as entries in the lib.properties file which is used by series of directives in the build.xml file to setup the classpaths for compiling and for building the EJB JAR. This is done to make the testing and transition of new libraries into the application more explicit and easily testable. Note that the newly included library directory also includes a copy of any license file associated with that library; this is not only a requirement to use some libraries but is also a good practice to show the lineage of some of the lesser known libraries. (For an example of what is required, see the changes to build.xml and to lib.properties in order to bring the Apache Commons Net library into the application.)
resources - configuration files and miscellaneous stuff. The resources directory holds the various configuration files required by the application plus other files used for testing and demonstration. Much of this was generated by the Seam-generated skeleton as well. Some key files here are the import.sql file (SQL statements that are used to preload the RDBMS used by Hibernate as the mocked up repository system) and the test-datastreams directory which has sample files for each of the media types.
src - Java source code. The src directory contains all of the Java source code for the application. Everything exists in a package called ‘edu.ohiolink.drc’ with subpackages for classes handling actions from the view component of the MVC, entity beans (sometimes known as Data Access Objects — or DAOs — I think), exception classes (more on this below), classes for working with FEDORA (not currently used), media type handler classes (more on this below), unit test classes (not currently used), and utility classes.
view - XHTML templates, CSS files, and other web interface needs. The view directory holds all of the files for the “view” aspect of the Model-View-Controller paradigm. More information about the view components is below.
Entity Classes ¶
The entity beans package has three primary entity beans defined: Item.java, Datastream.java, and Description.java. (The FedoraServer.java entity bean is not used at this time.) Item.java is the primary bean that represents an object in the repository. Datastream.java and Description.java are component beans that only exist in the lifecycle of an Item.java bean; Datastream.java holds a representation of a FEDORA object datastream and Description.java holds a representation of a Dublin Core datastream for that object.
The Datastream and Description objects are annotated with @Embedded in the Item.java source; this is Hibernate’s way of saying that these objects do not stand on their own. Item.java also has numerous methods marked with a @javax.persistence.Transient annotation meaning that this is information not stored in the backing Hibernate database; these methods are for the various content handlers, which will be outlined below.
Mock Repository ¶
As currently configured, the entity beans pull their information from a static RDBMS using Hibernate rather than from an underlying FEDORA digital object repository. (You’ll need to go back to revision 691 to see how far we got with the FEDORA integration into JBoss Seam before we switched our development focus to the presentation ‘view’ aspects of the application.) As currently configured, Hibernate uses an embedded Hypersonic SQL database for its datastore. As part of the application deploy process, the Java EE container will instantiate a Hypersonic database and preload it with the contents of the import.sql file. (The import.sql file contains just three sample records at the moment: one each for a text file, a PDF file, and a graphic file.)
All of the data for a repository object is contained in a single table record. Hibernate manages the process for us of reading that record out of the database and creating the three corresponding Java objects: Item, Datastream and Description. (Hibernate could also handle the process of updating the underlying table record if we were to change a value in one of the Java objects.) The mapping of table column to Java object field is handled by the @Column(name=”xx”) annotations in the entity beans.
For Datastream, what is stored in the database is not the datastream content itself but rather a filename that points to the location of the datastream file. The file path in this field can either be absolute (meaning a complete path starting from the root directory of the filesystem) or a relative path. In the case of the latter, the path is relative to the deployed application’s WAR directory (something like “…/jboss-4.0.5.GA/server/default/deploy/drc.ear/drc.war/” for instance). Note that the getter/setter methods for the contentLocation are private — the rest of the application does not need to know the location of the datastreams; this will also be true when the DRC application is connected to a FEDORA digital object repository. The method marked public instead is getContent, and the implementation of getContent hides the complexity of the fact that the datastream is coming from a disk file rather than a FEDORA repository call. For the three records/repository-objects currently defined in ‘import.sql’ there are three corresponding demo datastreams in the test-datastreams directory.
In all likelihood, this representation of the FEDORA repository will be too simple for us to move forward much further. In particular, the current notion of one datastream per repository object is too simplistic. The Datastream embedded object will likely need to be broken out into a separate table and as a corresponding distinct Java applet. (We may reach the same point soon for the Description object as well.)
By using the Entity Beans as a buffer between the business logic and the view components of the rest of the application, I hope we can minimize/localize the changes required in the future in order to replace the mock repository with a real underlying FEDORA repository.
View Templates ¶
The preferred view technology for JBoss Seam is Facelets, an implementation of Java Server Faces that does not require the use of Java Server Pages (JSP). Although the ‘.xhtml’ pages in the view directory bear a passing resemblance to JSP, behind the scenes they are radically different. Of note for us is the clean templating system used to generate pages. The home.xhtml file has a reference to the template.xhtml file in the ‘layout’ directory. If you read through the template.xhtml file, you can see where the Facelets engine will pull in other .xhtml files in addition to the content within the <ui:define name=”body”> tag of home.xhtml.
Content Handlers ¶
The paradigm of handling different media types within the DRC application is guided in large part by the notion of disseminators for FEDORA objects and the Digital Library Federation Aquifer Asset Actions experiments. The underlying concept is to push the media-specific content handling into the digital object repository and to have the presentation interface consume those content handlers as it is preparing the end-user presentation.
For instance, the DRC will need to handle content models for PDFs, images, video, and so forth. Furthermore, how a video datastream from the Digital Video Collection is offered to the user may be different than how a video datastream from a thesis is offered to the user. Rather than embedding the complexity of making those interface decisions into the front-end DRC application, this model of content handlers pushes that complexity closer to the objects themselves by encoding those behaviors a disseminators of the object. What the presentation layer gets from the object is a chunk of XHTML that it inserts into the dynamically generated HTML page at the right place.
There is work beginning on a framework for FEDORA disseminators at /BaseDisseminator/trunk in the source code repository; that work has been put on hold at the moment in favor of focusing on the presentation interface. In order to prepare for the time when the presentation behaviors are encoded as FEDORA object disseminators, the current presentation layer makes use of Content Handlers for each of the media types. The Handler interface defines the methods required by each handler and the TextHandler class, the ImageHandler class, and the PdfHandler class implement the methods for the three media types already defined.
Of these, TextHandler class is the most complete, so I’ll use it as an example.
- The getRawDatastream method takes the datastream and sends it back to the browser with the HTTP headers that cause a File-Save dialog box to open.
- The getFullDisplay method returns a chunk of XHTML that presents the full metadata in a manner that can be included in a full metadata display screen.
- The getRecordDisplay method (currently unwritten) returns a chuck of XHTML used to represent the object in a list of records that resulted from a user’s search or browse request.
- The getThumbnail method (currently unwritten) returns a static graphic thumbnail rendition of the datastream (e.g. a cover page, a key video frame, etc.).
By making these content handlers distinct classes, it is anticipated that the rendering code for each of these methods can be more easily moved to FEDORA object disseminators with minimal impact to the surrounding DRC interface application.
Exception Handling ¶
The DRC application follows the practice suggested by Barry Ruzek in Effective Java Exceptions (found via this link on The Server Side). The article can be summarized as:
One type of exception is a contingency, which means that a process was executed that cannot succeed because of a known problem (the example he uses is that of a checking account, where the account has insufficient funds, or a check has a stop payment issued.) These problems should be handled by way of a distinct mechanism, and the code should expect to manage them.
The other type of exception is a fault, such as the IOException. A fault is typically not something that is or should be expected, and therefore handling faults should probably not be part of a normal process.
With these two classes of exception in mind, it’s easy to see what should be checked and should be unchecked: the contingencies should be checked (and descend from Exception) and the faults should be unchecked (and descend from Error).
All unchecked exceptions generated by the application are subclasses of DrcBaseAppException. (DrcBaseApplication itself is a subclass of RuntimeException.) For an example, see NoHandlerException. By setting up all of the applications exceptions to derive from this point, we have one place where logging of troubleshooting information can take place (although this part of the application has not been set up yet). Except when there is good reason to do otherwise, this pattern should be maintained.
At this point, no checked (or contingency) exceptions specific to the DRC have been defined. When they are needed, though, they will follow the same basic structure with a base exception derived from Exception.
DRC, ejb3, fedora dr, icor2007, java, programming, seam
ebyblog![image]()
Upgrade to ATOM
As I recent posted there was a debate over Netscape’s decision to remove the DTD’s for older RSS types (0.9 and 0.91).
One of the outcomes of this decision is that the feed validator will now give a warning if the DTD is linked to. The recommendation is to either upgrade to something else (RSS2.0, ATOM, etc) or remove the doctype and try validating again without it.
If you happen to be using one of those versions, now might be the time to upgrade to ATOM. Many tools already output it and you’ll likely only need to change the templates to point to the ATOM feed instead of the RSS one. If you run Wordpress then there is a nice plugin that will change all feed links to output ATOM 1.0.
If your OPAC has RSS but you can’t edit the templates, maybe now is the time to ask for the ability.
It's all good
Blog Salon Room Number - 3028
The Blog Salon will be in room 3028, the OCLC Blue Suite, Saturday beginning around 8pm. The Sheraton is under construction so you come in at street level and need to go up to the ballroom level (2) to get an elevator.
Hope to see lots of you there...
January 18, 2007
planet code4lib![image]()
Harder, Geoff: links for 2007-01-18
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WIRED Blogs: Public Libraries, Private DRM
“In the end, it’s just another entry for the DRM nightmare file.”
Enjoying Technology’s Conveniences But Not Escaping Its Watchful Eyes - washingtonpost.com
Welcome to the 21st century.
(tags: lis592 privacy)
Doomsday Clock Now Gauges Climate Change - Examiner.com
Scientist Stephen Hawking described climate change Wednesday as a greater threat to the planet than terrorism.
(tags: environment climatechange politics)
Salo, Dorothea: For the record
Bruce D’Arcus explains faculty publication defaults. Correcting a few details (and chanting “charitable reading, charitable reading, charitable reading” to myself like a mantra):
- My job is not to encourage faculty to publish in OA journals, though I’m certainly happy when they do and I plug OA journals when possible. I encourage them to self-archive in MPOW’s institutional repository, the running of which is my job. (Maybe I don’t talk about my job enough on CavLec? Nah, that can’t be it.)
- Open access versus prestige of publication venue is rather less an issue for self-archiving than for “gold-OA” publication. Many extremely high-prestige journals permit self-archiving, and there are ways to protect one’s self-archiving rights (such as author’s addenda) that do not require careful choice of publication venue.
- With respect, I believe I adequately understand the roots of faculty inertia regarding open access, though I haven’t always used that understanding as well as I ought. I live with faculty inertia every day of my working life. I have read and continue to read everything I can get my hands on about faculty scholarly-communication behavior, and I regularly interact with faculty at my institution, and librarians both at my institution and worldwide. I myself am subject to some of the same publication pressures as faculty. In other words: I get it. Really.
You wouldn’t believe some of the stories I’ve heard about this. The best one, perhaps, concerns a prominent scholar in a field that generally knows better who huffed, “I wrote them, so of course I own the copyright!” about his entire research output, and could not be convinced otherwise even by copyright statements on the printed works themselves. Do I believe the story? Heck yes, I do.
It’s not typical, though. Typical is genial cluelessness and unwillingness to investigate, much less read publishing agreements. I’ve run into one hell of a lot of typical. In fairness, copyright is complicated and not fun. Confusion is perfectly understandable. Deliberate incuriosity is not.
In other news, Harnad asks a question I’d quite like to see answered. While I still think Eysenbach’s exploratory study was extremely well-designed, the weaknesses Harnad zeroes in on are genuine, exacerbated by the not-universal circumstance of PNAS serving its journal from its own website (as opposed to a journal aggregator or portal), and by the short length of time covered in the study.
There’s a lot of room for more work in this area; plenty of interesting variables to test. I’m happy to see the productivity of this exchange.
del.icio.us: Petition for guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results
code4lib: Accomodation Sharing Notices
I currently have a room booked at the Georgia Centre and am looking for another
woman to share it with to keep expenses down. Please email klong [at] sfu [dot] ca.
Library Web Chic
Real progress this week
This week has been stellar for me because I was able to make progress on getting some new software properly installed and testing new things. First, I was able to install Solr for the preconference workshop at code4lib. I tried doing the install before Christmas and had nothing but problems. So I went back [...]
2.0 Projects and Scalability another perspective
Over at Library 2.0 An Academic Perspective, Laura Cohen has a post commenting on my recent article in Computers in Libraries. She worries about the scale of 2.0 projects and how libraries can share what they’ve done so that we aren’t always reinventing the wheel. The project of remaking the Libraries site at UH [...]
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OOXML, DTD’s and Caching
A few items that may be of interest:
First if you happen to write an application that caches sites or content then you may be interested in the exception in the DMCA. Over at PlagiarismToday they go over what constitutes a legitimate service and why there isn’t a loophole for spammers.
Recently Netscape removed earlier RSS DTD’s from their site. This apparently broke multiple RSS readers that depending on requesting the DTD for every RSS feed that referenced it. There’s a debate over at the Netscape Blog on whether DTD’s should be available forever, cached or requested. Some interesting comments.
Lastly, some problems with Microsoft’s Office format standards are cropping up and their finding it less and less open. Groklaw has a nice overview of some of the contradictions and Rob Weir has a nice post about one problem that relates to embedding legacy formats that are not in the standard.
Library Web Chic
Isn’t it great how people can learn new stuff
Some days I just have to be amused with the capacity of people to learn new stuff and surprise others. Particularly when their learning new stuff helps them to solve problems other people are having. Case in point, for the last week I’ve been super annoyed that since I upgrade my Firefox the link [...]
Lorcan Dempsey's weblog
QOTD: getting in the flow
Niall Kennedy argues that 'search is not a zero switch cost'. Even if a strong competitor emerges for Google they will have to do quite a bit of work given the steps Google has taken to embed itself in various user flows:
Google is spending billions to integrate its search products into the Apple operating system, new Dell PCs, MySpace, Firefox, and more. Google commands about a 50% share of the U.S. toolbar search market according to comScore. Google powers search on sites with lots of pages such as newspaper, university, and personal websites. A developer platform further diversifies these sources of traffic, turning the long tail of search origination into site revenue. [Search is not a zero cost switch]
I think that this is an interesting observation in itself. It also makes me think about service categories. I have been writing about 'getting into the flow' and 'disclosure' from a library point of view for a while. Increasingly, I think that libraries will recognize that this is a category of service which needs to be resourced, in staff, systems and other ways.
Related entries:
- Distributing the library catalog experience
- Discovery and disclosure
- Boffyflow and spike
- Traffic flow
- In the flow
Intentional data, and book sales
I wrote about intentional data the other day. Here is a small example I have just come across. Tim O'Reilly is talking about Asterisk, an open source PBX solution. he wonders why it is not more discussed.
It seems a bit like the early days of things like Perl and Linux, when they were happening under the radar, known to all the hands-on practitioners in the industry, but not covered much by the mainstream press.
Book sales are similar too :-) For the 15 months since it was published, Asterisk: The Future of Telephony has been #12 on our list of O'Reilly bestsellers. So like Perl and Linux before it, Asterisk is getting uptake ahead of its recognition by the mainstream. [O'Reilly Radar]
Sales data tells a story.
Related entry:
Web scale
I like the expression web-scale. It is used heavily by Amazon and others in discussion of their 'platform' services like S3 and EC2. Here is a description of EC2, Amazon's on-demand computing infrastructure:
Call it "utility computing" or "Web-scale computing" or "on-demand infrastructure." Whatever the case, Amazon is hoping that its new EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud–why not just S4?) Web service (in the larger sense, as both an interface and an on demand platform) will turn into a big business. In effect, Amazon is leveraging its massive infrastructure investment, providing it as a publically facing service for a variety of applications, first with S3 and now adding the server component. [» Inside Amazon’s EC2 | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com]
Here is an example from Amazon:
Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. [Amazon.com: Amazon S3, Amazon Simple Storage Service, Unlimited Online Storage: Amazon Web Services]
In an interesting analysis of the current position of Google, Rick Skrenta uses it:
Google has won both the online search and advertising markets. They hold a considerable technological lead, both with algorithms as well as their astonishing web-scale computing platform. Beyond this, however, network effects around their industry position and brand will prevent any competitor from capturing market share from them -- even if it were possible to match their technology platform. [Skrentablog]
'Web-scale' refers to how major web presences architect systems and services to scale as use grows. But it also seems evocative in a broader way of the general attributes of the large gravitational hubs which are such a feature of the current web (eBay, Amazon, Google, WikiPedia, ...).
Incidentally, Skrenta makes the arresting claim that Google has become the Web's 'start page'. He argues that Google is dominant in the third age of computing in the way that IBM and Microsoft were in the first two. Worth a read.
Most businesses on the net get 70% of their traffic from Google. These business are not competitors with Google, they are its partners, and have an interest in driving Google's success. Google has made partners of us all. [Winner-Take-All: Google and the Third Age of Computing (Skrentablog)]
Justifying your place on the shelves
The Washington Post is carrying a story on collection development at Fairfax County Public Library. Collection development? Well, the hook is more their 'data driven' policy on discards.
"We're being very ruthless," said Sam Clay, director of the 21-branch system since 1982. "A book is not forever. If you have 40 feet of shelf space taken up by books on tulips and you find that only one is checked out, that's a cost."
That is the new reality for the Fairfax system and the future for other libraries. As books on tape, DVDs, computers and other electronic equipment crowd into branches, there is less room for plain old books.
So librarians are making hard decisions and struggling with a new issue: whether the data-driven library of the future should cater to popular tastes or set a cultural standard, even as the demand for the classics wanes. [Hello, Grisham -- So Long, Hemingway? - washingtonpost.com]
Diane Kresh from neighboring Arlington is also quoted:
Arlington County's library director, Diane Kresh, said she's "paying a lot of attention to what our customers want." But if they aren't checking out Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," she's not only keeping it, she's promoting it through a new program that gives forgotten classics prominent display. "Part of my philosophy is that you collect for the ages," Kresh said. "The library has a responsibility to provide a core collection for the cultural education of its community."[Hello, Grisham -- So Long, Hemingway? - washingtonpost.com]
As my colleague Brian Lavoie noted recently, many questions come back to economics, the analysis of how people make decisions. He cites some principles of economics and the first two are very relevent here: 1. People face trade-offs (in an environment of scarce resources expansion in one area requires retrenchment in another), and 2. The cost of something is what you give up to get it (opportunity costs described by Brian in this way "the cost of choosing to undertake one activity includes not just the cost of carrying it out, but also the benefits foregone by not choosing something else").
This article nicely underlines just these issues. There is a tradeoff between retaining stock and providing materials which boost circulation. And if circulation is a key indicator of success, and support, then this is important. And, in an environment where space resources are scarce, what is the opportunity cost in terms of space utilization or meeting other demands if one does not move materials from the shelves?
This is another example of how the opportunity costs of existing widely distributed print collections are an issue. It also poses in an interesting way the question about what responsibility to the cultural record public libraries have, and how it should should be exercised in changing times.
One direction is towards more shared systems of discovery, delivery and inventory management where the costs of managing lower used collections may be shared and where a collective approach to stewarding materials can be taken. Of course, this raises issues of structure, organization and .... economics.
Incidentally, I spoke at a staff day in Arlington a few weeks ago. I had a very enjoyable half-day in the library talking with Diane and a very engaged staff. I learned a lot talking to folks, which is why, in general, I prefer speaking to smaller library groups than to the larger conferences.
Washington Post article via Peter Brantley, who takes up his new post as Executive Director of the DLF in February.
Related entries:Related entries:
- Research Reserve
- Circulation and the collective collection again
- Storage and logistics
- Discovery, delivery and distributed inventory management
- Scoping collective collections
- QOTD: the opportunity cost of managing print collections
- Space
- Library logistics again
Emergent knowledge and intentional data
I have written about 'intentional' data on and off, data recording user preferences or choices. Such data has a variety of uses in our domain: we are all familiar with Amazon's 'people who bought this also bought this' feature. One of the major lessons of Google is to show how important such data is to improving the retrieval experience. The page rank algorithm uses 'intentional' data (the choices made by people in linking to other sites) to inform the order in which results are returned. One of the reasons I like FictionFinder is that it uses holdings data to rank results to similar effect. In this case, purchasing choices made by libraries influences the ranking and it works well. And we are familiar with the use of citation data in broader scholarly discussion and assessment.
In general, consumer sites on the web make major use of such data, and it is especially valuable when they can connect it to individial identities. They use it to build up user profiles, to do rating and comparisons across sites, to recommend, and so on. Of course this is increasingly important in an environment of abundant choice and scarce attention: they are investing more effort in 'consumption management'. We are all familiar with the benefits, and the irritations, of organizations who want to build a deeper understanding of what we do and make us offers based on that.
Libraries have a lot of data about users and usage. And there are now some initiatives which are looking at sharing it. However, in general, libraries do not have a data-driven understanding of individual users' behaviors, or of systemwide performance of particular information resources. This is likely to change in coming years given the value of such data. So, we are seeing the growth in interest in sharing database usage data. And technical agreements and business incentives for third party providers will support this development. And, of course, libraries want to preserve the privacy of learning and research choices.
We are also seeing more research into the usefulness of usage data, and I am thinking in particular here of the Mesure project:
The project's major objective is enriching the toolkit used for the assessment of the impact of scholarly communication items, and hence of scholars, with metrics that derive from usage data. The project will start with the creation of a semantic model of scholarly communication, and an associated large-scale semantic store that relates a range of scholarly bibliographic, citation and usage data obtained from a variety of sources. Next, an investigation into the definition and validation of usage-based metrics will be conducted on the basis of this comprehensive collection. Finally, the defined metrics will be cross-validated, resulting in the formulation of guidelines and recommendations for future applications of metrics derived from scholarly usage data. [MEtrics from Scholarly Usage of Resources - Los Alamos National Laboratory]
In the context of this discussion, I was interested recently to come across a paper on 'Emergent Knowledge' by Chunka Mui [available for fee on Amazon]. As more of what we do moves into a network environment, so does the amount of data that we shed grow. Data about behaviors and choices, and other data. Mui talks about how this data can be gathered and mined to create 'emergent knowledge'. He presents this taxonomy of emergent knowledge:
- Identity. People and objects increasingly reveal their identity to systems and services enabling better tracking and profiling. We are familar with the use of transaction data where we can connect connect identities and track behaviors.
- Location. Connecting identies to locations is generating value in many service areas. Geo positioning and geo locator services are growing.
- Health and diagnostics. Remote monitoring and diagnostics.
- Preferences. The ability to connect identities (of people and objects) through transactions, and potentially at particular locations, provides many opportunities to mine data as discussed above.
- Quality of service. Mui gives the example of how the Hartford Insurance Company actually analyses the recordings it has of telephone transactions, connecting that with outcome and process information to create a cycle of learning and improvement. (Think virtual reference ...).
Much of what I am talking about above relates to Identities and Preferences in this taxonomy. And incidentally this type of application is one more reason why it would be good to be able better to unambiguously identify the range of resources of interest to libraries.
I am prompted to caricature those portentous lines of Eliot from The Rock often raised in library conversation (where is the knowledge we have lost in information, etc). We might well ask ourselves where is the data we have lost in information management, and the knowledge we have forsaken thereby.
Related entries:
- Circulating intentional data
- Making data work harder - intentionally
- The simple search box and the rich texture of suggestion
- Aggregate intentions
Library history
If you have $495 to spend, or £261.25, you can acquire The Cambridge history of libraries in Britain and Ireland. The publisher claims that this is "The most comprehensive history of libraries from their beginnings to the digital age".
Three volumes, 2072 pages, 4.99 lbs.
I would be interested in reviewing the third volume if somebody is looking for a reviewer .....
London displayed
The British Library has an exhibition on London and its maps. There is a 'curator's blog'. And there I read:
Just a quick note to let you know about a fantastic new Google Earth layer based on London: A Life in Maps that a colleague in our web team has put together. You can download about 10 maps from the exhibition & view them as image overlays in Google Earth. [London: A Life in Maps Blog: Google Earth layer]
Pretty fancy. They also use Google Maps to help organize a virtual exhibition.
And there is more. I enjoyed the video journeys through London, hung around a very nice conceit::
The story-line for each journey, portrayed through cabbies' voice-overs, is based on the idea of ‘appearances'. Appearances are the occasions when trainee taxi-drivers are tested by an examiner. [Videos]
I particularly enjoyed the trip through South East London, where we lived for a while, starting out from one of our favorite places, The Horniman Museum (pictured), and finishing up at the British Library. En Route it passes, alongside much else, the notable Peckham Library [wikipedia], the Imperial War Museum, and a wall plaque for Charles Babbage. There are accompanying learning activities and a book.
I have not seen the physical exhibition at the British Library: this is an imaginative and engaging set of web presences which makes me want to see it.
Coda 1. The blog also talks about the importance of immigration to London and the role of maps in illustrating social issues and conditions. It points to a feature in the Guardian some time ago which uses maps to illustrate London's ethnic diversity (it claims that London is the world's most diverse city). Somthing that is on display in the video cab journies.
Coda 2. I mentioned another National Library exhibition a while ago, that of the National Library of Ireland on the life and works of W.B.Yeats. That was an engrossing exhibition with a meagre web presence. The Horniman Museum was founded by tea merchant Frederic Horniman [wikipedia]. And of course, his daughter, Annie Horniman [Wikipedia] [fuller biographical history from collection description of the Annie Horniman Papers at the John Rylands Library on the Genesis website] was a friend of Yeats and, importantly, financially supported the establishment of the Abbey Theatre.
QOTD: second life
Given the general interest in Second Life I was interested in this one of Michael Cairns' predictions for 2007.
EBay will buy Linden Labs (Second Life). Within six months they will integrate Ebay selling tools into SecondLife enabling virtual store fronts, sales assistance and virtual trading. Will launch program with major retailers and create first Second Life mega-mall in cooperation with Westfield. Ebay also launches SecondLife media placement agency to handle all media inventory on SecondLife. [PersonaNonData: Predictions for 2007]
Follow the link for his full list.
Standards for D2D
JISC, ALPSP, Crossref, and The Publishers' Association sponsored a conference - Discovery and access - standards and the information chain - in December. The proceedings are now available, as is a summary.
This is really an excellent set of presentations from knowledgeable presenters, and they all repay reading.
I was interested to see 'disclosure' used as a category by several folks: it is increasingly of general interest. I was also interested to see the phrase 'evidence-based librarianship' used in the context of Sushi and Counter. Issues of metadata and identifiers were identified as crucial, across the range of resources that we need to manage (institutions, people, and collections, for example, as well as information objects).
Here are some things that especially caught my eye, although, again, all the presentations are interesting.
- Mark Bide has a useful introduction looking at flows of data between libraries and publishers
- Hugh Look has a nice slide showing the overwhelming acronymic density of our current environment.
- Robert Bley of Ex Libris has an interesting discussion about ERM and its relationship to other parts of the library systems environment.
- Frances Shipsey talks about versioning issues with eprints and journal articles.
- James Culling talks about issues of managing knowledge bases.
Library blogging
Walt does a nice job describing Michael Sauer's Blogging and RSS: a librarians guide (here and here). I too was pleased to receive a copy over the holiday period. I should not have been so formal in my interview responses ;-)
As I say in the book, I tend to cycle through blogs. I will follow something closely and then not for a while. So talking about 'favorites' is a little misleading. Here are the ones that seem to be on the top of the list at the moment. Of course, I read my colleagues' blogs all the time and do not list them here ....
General IT
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog
Contrarian views.
Software as services
Discussion about on demand solutions.
Niall Kennedy's Weblog
RSS flavor; general technology commentary.
Hitwise intelligence
Fascinating.
Guardian unlimited technology blog
Useful gathering.
Libraries and related
Catalogablog
Industrious linking.
eFoundations
Wide interests; inevitably interesting.
Planet Code4Lib
This is cheating I suppose. A useful aggregation from the Dan Chudnov Media Empire.
A librarian's guide to etiquette
Worth the occasional look for a smile
Acrlog
Although this is the ACRL blog it has very individual voice. Interesting to see the recent overhaul and the addition of links to C&RL abstracts. Again, how unfortunate it is that C&RL is unavailable on the web (see here and here).
Quædam cuiusdam
Posts all too rare.
Nelsonville catalog
Mentioning Koha the other day reminded me that I have used the Nelsonville Public Library catalog in a couple of recent presentations. It serves Athens County in South East Ohio and uses Koha.
See the entry for this title: The art of Richard Diebenkorn.
They provide access to Amazon search inside the book, reviews and details. They also link out to Oplin (a state-wide public library network), to Worldcat, and to Google Scholar. Interestingly they label these local databases, other libraries and other databases respectively.
They don't geographically limit the Worldcat search (here is a search for that book across Ohio). Of course, once one begins to compose different pieces like this one runs into interesting implementation choices.
I liked their virtual shelves - even if there are not yet very many. And I liked the way that they show the status (checked out, in transit, ...), due date, and last seen date of an item.
Results can be ranked in various ways (I wonder how they measure popularity?), and they allow you to refine searches through the emerging convention of a left hand stack of searchable attributes (places, branches, authors, topics, series, ...).
For those with new year resolve, they have some canned searches on the home page.
Get organized: http://search.athenscounty.lib.oh.us/search?q=organize&op=and&op=and&op=and&limit=collection-code%3ANF
A final note. They have RSS feeds for searches through opensearch and search strings are human hackable. They show the search syntax on top of searches: it would be interesting to know whether people are constructing more complex searches or whether people are embedding links in other environments.
Here is the opensearch search for Sarah Jessica Parker, a native of Nelsonville. You can subscribe in whatever environment you manage your feeds.
Airplane reading: smelling the wine
A busy week with a trip at the end meant little posting. Here is a note on travel reading.
- I received When red is black by Qiu Xiaolong over Christmas and finished it on the way back from New York City yesterday evening. Chen, the detective with literary interests is reflecting on the emergence of marketing, and its non-existence within the socialist state economy.
There was no need or room for marketing. For many years, Chinese people cited a proverb: if the wine smells really wonderful, customers will come in spite of the length of the lane. Such an approach was not applicable in today's business world. [When red is black. New York: Soho Press inc., 2004. p. 140]Might have some relevance for libraries?
- There was some discussion of faculty reading and publishing habits at the meeting I was at. To what extent, it was asked, do folks in particular subject areas actually read the journal literature? And are there changes in the reliance on refereed output in tenure and promotion discussion? In this context I was interested to read in an advert in the Economist for academic staff at the Tanaka Business School, Imperial College, that "only applicants who have published in top international journals will be considered".
- The Atlantic had a nice piece about music on the web by Michael Hirschorn. It looks at a variety of ways in which Pandora, Last.fm, Hype Machine, iLike and other applications enhance his experience.:
I’d long felt a profound sense of loss over the demise of the Mancunian band the Stone Roses, whose eponymous 1989 album raised rave-y Britpop to the level of sacrament. So I keyed in Stone Roses, expecting to hear the similar- sounding Charlatans UK or Kasabian, a current Roses-ish group. Instead, I was kicked back Neutral Milk Hotel, an Athens, Georgia–based collective centered around an artist named Jeff Mangum. NMH’s 1998 In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a wildly over-the-top cult masterpiece, an operatic song cycle that probes the mystical import of the fate of Anne Frank and other tragedies. Take my word: it sounds only marginally like anything by the Stone Roses. But both albums are on my mental top-ten-of-all-time list, and I had flattered myself that only I saw the cosmic linkages between the two albums’ mystico-religious sound washes, rave-ups, and idiosyncratic lyricism. Having it recommended to me was a goosebump-inducing moment—and a neat demonstration for me of why social media is sweeping the Web: There are other people out there who feel this as deeply as I do! Maybe we can all get together and achieve a higher unity! [The Digital-Music Mosh Pit] - It was nice that I could look up the Atlantic article on the web when I got in. Checking my feeds, I also came across a very nice post by Anil Dash about how his iTunes collection got corrupted leaving him only with the raw files themselves - "but all of the metadata is blown away -- playlists, play counts, ratings, and all my little tweaks to song and album titles".
I'm surprised by how much grief this causes me. As it turns out, my experience of these songs is determined by the record of how I've lived with them -- without the information about how I've listened to them, and how often, and what I thought of them, they're just not my songs. It makes sense, at some level; Art without curation or creation without witness leaves a work mute. But as geeks, a lot of us wouldn't even necessarily see this as data loss -- the original files, after all, is still there.There's a lesson here for the prophets of abundance, and for all of us who see formerly valuable things becoming commodities. We might be able to replace the raw materials with their abundant, or even free, counterparts. But if our emotional experiences are lost along the way, the perfect digital copies are worthless, too. [Anil Dash: This ain't a blog, it's an arms race.]I was reminded of my earlier discussion of Benjamin, the personal collection and aura.
- Both the Economist and the Atlantic carried adverts from Cisco talking about the 'human network': The Economist ad had a picture of Thiksey, Ladekh. It started with "On the human network, a remote village is included. In a place where books don't usually exist, the Library of Congress can". The ads are a bit corny, but I thought it interesting that they could reasonably talk about the network as a place which overlays actual places worldwide, with a variety of intersections
Open source interconnections
I was interested to come across Equinox Systems this morning:
Created by the same team who planted the seed of Evergreen and grew it into a full-featured library automation system, Equinox Software is the only choice for the experience and expertise you need from your Evergreen development, support and integration team. Drawing on proven real-world experience, Equinox Software knows what it takes to succeed in today's libraries. Every library is different. Only Evergreen is built with the flexibility to support them all, and only Equinox Software is built to support Evergreen. [Equinox · Home]
Eqiunox joins LibLime in supporting open source library systems. Interestingly, I notice that LibLime supports both Koha- and Evergreen-based options. And I also notice that Koha Zoom is based on Zebra, the mature text retrieval engine from IndexData. Of course, IndexData itself provides support for a range of its own open source software offerings.
It will be interesting to see how this sector develops over the next few years given recent changes in the environment.
Circulation and the collective collection again
I stumbled upon the pages at Swarthmore College Library devoted to WH Auden's spell as a teacher there earlier today. There are a few nice pages pointing to his use of the library.
Auden was a great poet and a provocative professor, but he was not always the ideal library patron. His sometimes indecipherable scrawl probably provided an interesting challenge for those who attempted to parse his library call slips. ....view some of Auden's other library requests. [W.H. Auden @ Swarthmore]
An interesting use of patron data!
This reminded me that when I visited Bryn Mawr earlier this year I was interested to discover that the three colleges (Swarthmore, Haverford, Bryn Mawr) had extensive retrospective data about the use of their collections. Their experience is also instructive in that they have progressively moved to managing their 'collective collection' in more coordinated ways. They produced a very interesting report several years ago examining what a shared resource would mean in practice. They looked at faculty preferences and behaviors; the comparative uniqueness and use of their collections; space, growth and logistics issues. It is a very interesting read.
Library Buildings and the Building of a Collaborative Research Collection at the Tri-College Library Consortium. Report to The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Judy Luther, Linda Bills, Amy McColl, Norm Medeiros, Amy Morrison, Eric Pumroy, and Peggy Seiden. April 2003.
One important step they have taken is to consolidate the catalog across the three libraries: Tripod: Tri-college Library Catalog. As one might expect this has resulted in more flow of library materials between the colleges as the slide below shows.
Clearly, given the wider context of these institutions and their geographic proximity, these libraries are better placed to move in this direction than others. And the report provides a useful reminder of some of the issues to be addressed, in particular faculty preferences for local access. That said, it is an interesting example of a trend that may become more general in certain environments over time as shared discovery and delivery environments encourage shared collection development, and perhaps shared inventory management also.
Related entries:
- Research Reserve
- Storage and logistics
- Discovery, delivery and distributed inventory management
- Scoping collective collections
- QOTD: the opportunity cost of managing print collections
- Space
- Library logistics again
Ariadne Web Magazine
GROW: Building a High-quality Civil Engineering Learning Object Repository and Portal
Yan Han provides a general overview of the Geotechnical, Rock and Water Digital Library (GROW), a learning object repository and peer-reviewed civil engineering Web portal.
Wiki or Won’t He? A Tale of Public Sector Wikis
Marieke Guy revisits a topic receiving considerable attention these days and reflects on wiki use by public organisations.
Video Streaming of Events
Greg Tourte and Emma Tonkin describe the set-up and use of video streaming technology at the IWMW 2006 event.
RDA: A New International Standard
Ann Chapman describes work on the new cataloguing code, Resource Description and Access (RDA), based on the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR).
Search Engines: Is Google Building on Shaky Foundations?
Phil Bradley takes an in-depth look at Google and its competition and wonders if things are looking slightly worrying for the search giant.
Essential Law for Information Professionals
Phil Bradley takes an in-depth look at Google and its competition and wonders if things are looking slightly worrying for the search giant.
Ambient Findability
Emma Tonkin reviews a book with interesting content despite a few rough edges.
Teach Beyond Your Reach
Lina Coelho looks at this instructor's guide to developing and running successful distance learning classes, workshops, training sessions and more.
Creative Commons Licences in Higher and Further Education: Do We Care?
Naomi Korn and Charles Oppenheim discuss the history and merits of using Creative Commons licences while questioning whether these licences are indeed a panacea.
From Nought to a Thousand: The HUSCAP Project
SUZUKI Masako and SUGITA Shigeki describe Hokkaido University's efforts to populate its institutional repository with journal articles.
Considering a Marketing and Communications Approach for an Institutional Repository
Heleen Gierveld proposes a market-oriented approach to increase the rate of deposit to an institutional repository.
e-Books for the Future: Here but Hiding?
Brian Whalley outlines some developments in e-book technologies and links them to existing ways of presenting textbook information.
At the Event:
This issue contains reports on a workshop on e-research, digital repositories and portals, DC 2006, a one-day workshop reporting on the latest developments in e-Collaboration technology and applications as well as the residential CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group Annual Conference.
MaisonBisson.com![image]()
Holiday Violence
By the end of it, all the wrapping paper and other material affects of the holidays really do take on air of violence. Well, at least they do in PES's Kaboom.
And if you're amused by that, you might want to see how it was made.
PES, eatpes, holidays, kaboom, video
Happy Holidays
tree, holidays, liquor, nips, happy holidays
One Goat Down, One Goat To Go
Cliffy got excited about the Gävle Goat when his pal Derek emailed him about it all. Derek was in town, or something like that, and got caught up in the frenzy first hand: “Last year some other guy was a bit smarter, hitting it with a flaming arrow from a bow, and he wasn’t caught. It went up in flames!”
The goat, of course, is a 40 year holiday tradition. Somebody -- either the Southern Merchants Association or the Natural Science Club, or both -- builds the goat each year, and somebody else burns or otherwise damages it. Of the 66 goats built in those 40 years, 35 have been destroyed (a survival rate of only 47%). While all the reports of the goat say “officially, the city does not support the burning,” it's easy to get the idea that they're crossing their fingers behind their back about it.
Anyway, Stefan's been keeping score this year, and contributed the photo above. One reveler made an attempt on the Southern Merchants' goat on December 15th, but flame retardants from Fiber ProTector stood up to claims and prevented the spread of the fire. When asked if the goat would burn this year, Mats Lorensson, sales manager for Fiber ProTector, replied: “It's not possible. We have made tests using petrol, oil, everything. It's not possible to burn the goat.”
Claims like that, of course, just increase the reward for besting the challenge.
Cliffy is rooting and scheming on it, as is most of the population of Sweden. Meanwhile, somebody else realized that of the two goats in Gävle, only one was supposedly fireproofed and on December 21st burned the smaller Natural Science Club goat. With one goat down, and one goat to go, but less than 24 hours before Christmas, we have to wonder what the score will be tomorrow morning.
gavle goat, gävle goat, goat, yule goat, gävle, sweden, gävle sweden, tradition, burn the goat
Great White Solstice
While northern-hemisphere inhabitants are enjoying their first day of winter, our cousins in the southern hemisphere are just beginning summer. And in South Africa's Shark Bay, near Gansbaai, the great whites are departing for other waters.
The great whites make their way to Shark Bay annually between September and January, though they are not hunting, and, as Rob Mousley reports, they “ignore bait slicks (and bathers), swimming through them without any reaction--in contrast to their behaviour at other locations such as Dyer Island” [link added].
Thomas P. Peschak and Michael C. Scholl began using kayaks to join the sharks in shallow waters (sometimes as shallow as 2 meters) where their research vessel couldn't go. Testing showed the sharks cared little -- “the sharks would circle the kayak and look at it, but they never tested it with their teeth.”
Michael is quite happy now to paddle with the sharks especially as the sea kayaks seem a minimally invasive platform from which to do so. Individual sharks sometimes circle the kayak, and will occasionally lift their heads out of the water to take a better look, but subsequently ignore the kayak altogether allowing the researcher to follow closely behind.
When asked what a paddler should do if a shark is sighted, Michael said, “First and foremost, enjoy the moment!”
Andre Hartmann, commercial fisherman and de facto shark tour guide enjoys grabbing their fins. From Jean-Michel Cousteau's Ocean Adventures:
Jean-Michel and Andre snorkel near the surface, a very vulnerable position because great whites tend to feed from the sea floor up. An enormous great white advances, and the divers are careful not to provoke it. There is a waiting game. Eventually, the shark allows the divers to touch it. Then, amazingly, unlike its terrifying man-eating reputation, the great white allows the divers, one at a time, to grip its dorsal fin and be taken for a ride through the clear blue waters.
Hat tip to Joe and Flickr for bringing all this to me.
great white shark, sharks, photo, shark bay, kayak
Let The Silence Roar
Okay, before anybody inquires if I've gone into boat sales or brings up the BisonBoom story again, I need to ask for your understanding. It's not that I've been spending my days trying to pick out just the right shade of red for my new Corvette (really I'm not, it's the Lotus I like), or that I've been moving to sunny California to take up my new job at Google (a year ago I would have been twitching with excitement, now I'm more likely to agree with this). No, my relative quiet can be partly attributed to the fact that the award has made WPopac a part of my day job, but in saying that I don't want to suggest that I previously spent my daytime hours surfing the web and blogging =-).
Amidst the silence a few things have been happening, and I'll soon be better able to talk about them. In the meantime, there are some clues out there, but what do they lead to?
For now I'm headed to Seattle for Midwinter. It's a bit of a birthday for WPopac, as I introduced it in a presentation there last year. I especially like conferences for their role in spreading ideas like wind distributes pollen, which is my way of saying don't hesitate to say hi or invite me to a drink if you spot me (I'll be easier to spot now, I'm the one next to Lichen)
WPopac, lib20 library 2.0, libraries, quietude, silence
Sweet jQuery
Matty discovered jQuery at The Ajax Experience, and his enthusiasm has rubbed off on me.
jQuery makes coding JavaScript fun again. Well, at least it makes it possible to write code and content separately. And that means that sweet AJAXy pages can be made more easily, and it sort of forces designers to make them accessible from the start.
Resources:
jQuery: JavaScript Library
Getting Started with jQuery
Visual jQuery 1.0 (Automated)
jQuery: Plugins
ajax, javascript, jquery, matt batchelder
PES Films
I've been loving the PES films I found via this Design Observer post, and despite featuring his films for Christmas day and new year's eve, there's still a lot to see.
Animated peanut butter is about as cool as it gets, even if I can sympathize with the peanut here in Drowning Nut.
Casual Friday extras that tickle my inner 12-year-old: Roof Sex, Beasty Boy, Pee-Nut, and Prank Call.
PES, drowning nut, eatPES, peanut, video
Apache 2.2.x on Mac OS X
I'm lazy, that's all I can say to explain why I hadn't put any serious thought into upgrading from the 1.3.x version of Apache that ships with Mac OS X to the much more feature rich 2.0.x or 2.2.x. But today I found reason enough to switch my development to 2.2.3, and I went looking to the community for information about the switch.
A post in Marc Liyanage's forums made it clear how easy config/compile was. Minutes later I was up and running and fiddling with the new features.
Mac OS X, apache, apache 2.2.3, mac, web server
Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics
Thanks to MetaFilter for pointing this out, and Matty, for putting it to good use.
Yes, you really can use this to make authoritative looking reports on anything.
esolutions, lies, statistics, data, pirates, ninjas, bullshit
New Year’s Fireworks
PES offers these fireworks for any occasion, but when better to celebrate than the new year?
And thinking of that, if all these clocks are correct, the new year has already started in GMT, which means I'm probably a few drinks behind and need to catch up.
PES, eatpes, video, new year, fireworks, celebration
D-Lib Magazine
Resource Description and Access (RDA): Cataloging Rules for the 20th Century
"There is evidence that many individuals and organizations in the library world do not support the work taking place to develop a next generation of the library cataloging rules. The authors describe the tensions existing between those advocating an incremental change to cataloging process and others who desire a bolder library entry into the digital era." Opinion piece by Karen Coyle, kcoyle.net, and Diane Hillmann, Cornell University.
The Online Library Catalog: Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained?
"This think piece tells why the online library catalog fell from grace and why new directions pertaining to cataloging simplification and primary sources will not attract people back to the online catalog. It proposes an alternative direction that has greater likelihood of regaining the online catalog's lofty status and longtime users. Such a direction will require paradigm shifts in library cataloging and in the design and development of online library catalogs that heed catalog users' longtime demands for improvements to the searching experience. Our failure to respond accordingly may permanently exile scholarly and scientific information to a netherworld where no one searches while less reliable, accurate, and objective sources of information thrive in a paradise where people prefer to search for information." Opinion piece by Karen Markey, University of Michigan.
The Patchwork Mandate
"This article is written mainly for repository managers who are at a loss as to what policies they (or their universities or research institutions) ought to deploy in order to ensure that most, if not all, of the institution's scholarly output is deposited in the institution's repository. In essence, there are only two pure policies: requiring (mandating) researchers to deposit, and relying on voluntary (spontaneous) participation, with or without encouragement. This short article describes a third policy that provides a transitional path between the two." Opinion piece by Arthur Sale, University of Tasmania.
Digital Preservation in a National Context: Questions and Views of an Outsider
"This article draws attention to technical opportunities which, if pursued, would significantly accelerate National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP) progress towards objectives called for by the U.S. Congress. It also identifies concerns about apparent content scope limitations of the NDIIPP plan." Opinion piece by H.M. Gladney, HMG Consulting.
Conference Report: CORDRA at Work
In Brief: WebPA: Online Peer Moderated Marking System for UK Higher Education
In Brief: Web-based Construction and Sharing of Computer Models and Model Components
Current and Future Status of D-Lib Magazine
"We have resisted both subscription fees and author charges, to enable both wide readership and no impediment to the submission of articles, and have supported the magazine since its inception over ten years ago through a combination of government grants, from both DARPA and NSF, and, more recently, contributions by CNRI. As of this issue, a combined January/February issue, we are moving to a bi-monthly publication schedule in order to help reduce costs. We plan to stay with this bi-monthly schedule through mid-year, at which point we will critically evaluate the options available to us, including the possibility of returning to a monthly publication schedule if funding permits. In the meantime, we will continue our funding efforts as well as continue to look at alternate modes of support." Editorial by Laurence Lannom, CNRI.
Copyright, Publishing, and Scholarship: The "Zwolle Group" Initiative for the Advancement of Higher Education
"Readers and other researchers are often constrained in their ability to access and use...new works by the limitations and controls that can result from copyright protection....How faculty authors, working with their universities and publishers, make decisions about the management of the copyright can have profound consequences for the ability of researchers, students, libraries, and other users to obtain, read, disseminate, and learn from scholarly works and the information they embody...In the 1990s many of the stakeholders in these developments began to witness immediate and complicated implications for research related to copyright law. These developments prompted SURF Foundation, the higher education and research partnership organization for network services and information and communications technology based in the Netherlands, to initiate an international copyright project. SURF Foundation was seeking a cooperative approach to these often contentious issues. The initiative became known as the "Zwolle Group," and it has now completed five years of developing and sharing guidance for faculty authors, publishers, librarians, and other stakeholders who are seeking to improve their management of copyright issues." Article by Kenneth D. Crews, Indiana University School of Law-Indianapolis, and Gerard van Westrienen, SURF Foundation.
Distinguishing Content from Carrier: The RDA/ONIX Framework for Resource Categorization
"Discussions in October 2005 between the Joint Steering Committee for Revision of AACR (JSC) and representatives of the publishing industry in the UK identified the categorization of resources by content and carrier as being of mutual interest with substantial potential benefit to be gained through cooperation. A joint initiative was subsequently funded by the organizations sponsoring the development of RDA and ONIX, with additional support from the British Library. The initiative aimed to develop a framework for categorizing resources in all media that could support the needs of libraries and the publishing industry, and would facilitate the transfer and use of resource description data across the two communities." Article by Gorden Dunsire, University of Strathclyde.
The FRBR Blog![image]()
All You Need Is a Complete Working Application of FRBR to Music, and Love
Who Owns the Work?, a post on the Titles Varies Slightly blog, is a short piece pointing out the interesting job FRBR will have of dealing with the Beatles album Love, which uses parts of 130 different songs to make new remixes and mashups.
"Revolution Number Nine" would be hard to ...
FRBR Implementers at ALA Midwinter Friday?
Jonathan Rochkind noticed this schedule for the ALA Midwinter conference that starts this week lists the "FRBR Implementers Group" as meeting on Friday 19 January at 10:30 AM. It's not listed on the ALA Midwinter wiki, though. If you know anything about it, please post a comment.
MySQL FRBR question on message board
Here's something you don't see every day, but you probably will see more frequently: someone asks a question about a database (MySQL in this case) and query optimization, and in the code snippets you can see that the project uses FRBR. MySQL query Optimization Without Indexes is posted by someone ...
MacCall, From Tablets to FRBR
Steven MacCall, a prof at the library school at the University of Alabama, has posted slides from a lecture in his Information of Organization class: Historical Overview of Information Organization, AKA The 'From Tablets to FRBR' Lecture (requires Flash). It's lecture three in his course and it looks like his ...
Ranganathan, The Five Laws of Library Science
S.R. Ranganathan's 1931 masterpiece The Five Laws of Library Science is available online as 10 PDFs at the dLIST open access archive at the University of Arizona. You should read it.
The five laws are:
Books are for use.
Every person his [or her] book.
Every book its reader.
Save the ...
ALA Midwinter FRBRosity
The 2007 American Library Association Midwinter Meeting starts next week. The calendar of events lists one FRBR-related discussion, on Sunday 21 January: "FRBR: Will It Positively Impact Acquisitions? If So, How, and What Will It Take to Get There?" I hope someone blogs it and reports on what's said; if ...
Delsey, CONSER and RDA
Two days ago Tom Delsey gave this to the Joint Steering Committee for the Revision of AACR: Analysis of the Proposed CONSER Standard Record vis à vis RDA, CONSER being the Cooperative Online Serials Program. It says, "The following is an analysis of recommendations on cataloguing rules, rule interpretations, and ...
Another one on Renear and Choi
A chap who just goes by "Steve" posted Abstractness, FRBR on the Circulatable blog, in which he comments on that paper by Renear and Choi that people have been pondering.
Coyle and Hillmann, RDA: Cataloging Rules for the 20th Century
Karen Coyle and Diane Hillmann have a paper in the January/February 2007 issue of D-Lib Magazine: Resource Description and Access (RDA): Cataloging Rules for the 20th Century. It's caused some lively discussion on blogs and maliing lists, including this thread from the NGC4LIB mailing list; both Coyle and Hillmann are ...
Giasson, Music ontology
Frédérick Giasson posted Major Revision (1.01) of the Music Ontology on his blog on Saturday. If you're interested in FRBR as applied to music, or the knottier questions of aggregate works, have a dekko.
The ontology took a major shift by its deep integration with the FRBR (Functional Requirements ...
One Big Library. - dchud shelf-readin', taking notes and naming names.![image]()
Overheard in the Seattle Public Library
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Or, more to the point, in the pale green men's bathroom on the deep red fourth floor:
"Don't let the colored walls lure you into a false sense of security."
Fine advice, it seems. I'm enjoying looking at this building from outside of it, and I feel utterly unnerved when I'm inside of it.
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Catalogablog
OJAX Federated Search Service Software
An exciting announcement about OJAX, an open-source federated search tool.
OJAX federated search service software is now in Beta release and available for download. Version 0.7 has improved performance, stability and user feedback, as well as additional features such as RSS/Atom feed support. (Atom feeds of stored searches alert users when new content matching their interests is harvested.)OJAX illustrates how federated search services can respond to new user expectations generated by Web 2.0:
Features of OJAX:
Further information, demo and download.
Two alternative packages are available:
--Dr Judith Wusteman
WebDAV
I'm wondering why Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) is not more common. It seems pretty simple and has MS support, yet I never have heard of it being used. Or am I just missing it?
The WebDAV protocol's aim was to make the World Wide Web a readable and writable medium, in line with Tim Berners-Lee's original vision. It provides functionality to create, change and move documents on a remote server (typically a web server or "web share"). This is useful, among other things, for authoring the documents which a web server serves, but can also be used for general web-based file storage that can be accessed from anywhere. Important features in WebDAV protocol include locking (overwrite prevention), properties (creation, removal, and querying of information about author, modified date, etc.), name space management (ability to copy and move Web pages within a server's namespace) and collections (creation, removal, and listing of resources). Most modern operating systems provide built-in support for WebDAV. With the right client and a fast network, it can be almost as easy to use files on a WebDAV server as those stored in local directories.
Tame The Web: Libraries and Technology
NetFlix & Video Downloads
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/netflix/hands-on-the-netflix-download-video-service-thumbs-up-229533.php
Fascinating "hands on" report of the new NetFlix video download service. Sadly, it's not for Macs yet but I'm glad to be reading about it. I'm fascinated to see how all these services -- NetFlix, amazon, iTunes -- will change the AV area of many public libraries over the next few years.
Steal This Idea: Top 10 Things You Probably Didn’t Know Your Library Offered
Hey Library Bloggers! Need some inspiration? Try a post like this on for size:
http://www.libraryforlife.org/blogs/lifeline/?p=2651
Including:
5. Children’s toys and games! Yep, that’s right. The Children’s Services Department offers more than books! You can find everything from dinosaurs and zoo animals to games like Sorry and Life. (And did you know you don’t even have to come in to benefit from our children’s area? You can call up to hear a story read over the phone, or visit the Children’s Department website to explore TumbleBooks, which are online children’s books with audio and pictures.)
4. Your family! This is true in two ways. First, we have something for every age group, ranging from board books for little kids to Bi-Folkal Re-Motivation Kits designed for people who work with seniors. Second, we have a Local & Family History Department that can help you find out more about your family! (If you can’t make it in, you can still find books about the area and family history databases at the Local History website.)
3. Videogaming! SJCPL’s Teen area (found in the Magazines, Newspapers & Fiction Department) works with people from the Sights & Sounds and Publicity Departments to stage gaming tournaments. The last one attracted more than 125 participants from around the Midwest. Come by and see what all the fun’s about!
2. iPods! (And audiobooks to go with them.) You can rent iPods to play your own music and audiobooks…You can rent audiobooks to play on your own iPod…Or you can rent both! (Call the Sights & Sounds Department at 282-4609 to find out more!)
planet code4lib![image]()
Datema, Jay: NetConnect Spring 2007 podcast episode 2
This is the second episode of the Open Libraries podcast, and I was pleased to have the opportunity to talk to some of the authors of the Spring netConnect supplement, entitled Digitize This!
The issue covers how libraries can start to digitize their unique collections. K. Matthew Dames and Jil Hurst-Wahl wrote an article about copyright and practical considerations in getting started. They join me, along with Lotfi Belkhir, CEO of Kirtas Technologies, to discuss the important issue of digitization quality.
One of the issues that has surfaced recently is exactly what libraries are receiving from the Google Book Search project. As the project grows beyond the initial five libraries into more university and Spanish libraries, many of the implications have become more visible.
The print issue of NetConnect is bundled with the January 15th issue of Library Journal, or you can read the articles online.
Recommended Books:
Kevin
Knowledge Diplomacy
Jill
Business as Unusual
Lotfi
Free Culture
Negotiating China
The Fabric of the Cosmos
Software
SuperDuper
Google Documents
Arabic OCR
0 Music and Intro
1:59 Kevin Dames on his weblog Copycense
2:48 Jill Hurst-Wahl on Digitization 101
4:16 Jill and Kevin on their article
4:34 SLA Digitization Workshop
5:24 Western NY Project
6:45 Digitization Expo
7:43 Lotfi Belkhir
9:00 Books to Bytes
9:26 Cornell and Microsoft Digitization
11:00 Scanning vs Digitization
11:48 Google Scanning
15:22 Michael Keller’s OCLC presentation
16:14 Google and the Public Domain
17:52 Author’s Guild sues Google
21:13 Quality Issues
24:10 MBooks
26:56 Public Library digitization
27:14 Incorporating Google Books into the catalog
28:49 CDL contract
30:22 Microsoft Book Search
31:15 Double Fold
39:20 Print on Demand and Digitization
39:25 Books@Google
43:14 History on a Postcard
45:33 iPRES conference
45:46 LOCKSS
46:45 OAIS
This is the second episode of the Open Libraries podcast, and I was pleased to have the opportunity to talk to some of the authors of the Spring netConnect supplement, entitled Digitize This!
The issue covers how libraries can start to digitize their unique collections. K. Matthew Dames and Jil Hurst-Wahl wrote an article about copyright and practical considerations in getting started. They join me, along with Lotfi Belkhir, CEO of Kirtas Technologies, to discuss the important issue of digitization quality.
One of the issues that has surfaced recently is exactly what libraries are receiving from the Google Book Search project. As the project grows beyond the initial five libraries into more university and Spanish libraries, many of the implications have become more visible.
The print issue of NetConnect is bundled with the January 15th issue of Library Journal, or you can read the articles online.
Recommended Books:
Kevin
Knowledge Diplomacy
Jill
Business as Unusual
Lotfi
Free Culture
Negotiating China
The Fabric of the Cosmos
Software
SuperDuper
Google Documents
Arabic OCR
0 Music and Intro
1:59 Kevin Dames on his weblog Copycense
2:48 Jill Hurst-Wahl on Digitization 101
4:16 Jill and Kevin on their article
4:34 SLA Digitization Workshop
5:24 Western NY Project
6:45 Digitization Expo
7:43 Lotfi Belkhir
9:00 Books to Bytes
9:26 Cornell and Microsoft Digitization
11:00 Scanning vs Digitization
11:48 Google Scanning
15:22 Michael Keller's OCLC presentation
16:14 Google and the Public Domain
17:52 Author's Guild sues Google
21:13 Quality Issues
24:10 MBooks
26:56 Public Library digitization
27:14 Incorporating Google Books into the catalog
28:49 CDL contract
30:22 Microsoft Book Search
31:15 Double Fold
39:20 Print on Demand and Digitization
39:25 Books@Google
43:14 History on a Postcard
45:33 iPRES conference
45:46 LOCKSS
46:45 OAIS
Free Our Data: the blog
Is the new Statistics Board the right model for free data?
In this week’s Guardian Technology, Michael Cross examines what the proposed changes to the structure and oversight for the Office for National Statistics means for data access.
In Statistics are free - now let’s work on the rest of the data, he notes
national statistics are an important example of public sector information being posted free on [...]
Official Google Blog
Don't miss your opportunity to be part of Google's first Code Jam Latin America!
Posted by Berthier Ribeiro-Neto, Engineering Site Director
There are only 5 days left until registration closes for Google Code Jam Latin America 2007. So far over 4,000 competitors have signed up for a chance to showcase their programming skills and win an all expenses paid trip to Google's Brazil engineering office, where they will compete for R$75,000 (Brazilian reales) in cash and prizes. The finals will be held on March 1. Latin Americans have registered in large numbers from Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Chile, Venezuela and Ecuador as well as many other countries.The top 50 finalists will be flown to Belo Horizonte to show us what they've got. Think you've got what it takes to Code Jam? Click here to register!
planet code4lib![image]()
Reese, Terry: MarcEdit "rosettastone"
I’ll likely change the name, but I’ve been creating a simple SOAP service that will be able to migrate metadata directly between 7 known metadata formats — or user defined formats, in addition to the ability to harvest OAI to MARC, MARCXML or user defined. I’m note sure how useful something like this could be for folks since this is really being designed as a tool for interactive metadata translation, but we’ll see soon. At this point, I don’t have the service on a public server, but I’ve posted a sample of the development WSDL file HERE (btw, don’t use it — it doesn’t link to anything) for those that are interested.
Calling the service from within C# is pretty easy. I’m thinking that it will be easy within Java or languages that allow binary data types via a soap response. For languages like Ruby, which doesn’t if you utilize the actionwebservice gem, I’ll likely create an XML only translation api. The binary data type gets utilized when passing MARC data to and from the webservices. Anyway, here’s an example of how it will be called using C#:
private void button1_Click(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
localhost.MarcEdit objMarc = new WindowsApplication14.localhost.MarcEdit();
string xmlData = "";
byte[] marcData;
System.IO.FileStream objStream = new System.IO.FileStream(@"c:documents and settingsreesetMy Documentsbookrecord.mrc", System.IO.FileMode.Open, System.IO.FileAccess.Read);
marcData = new byte[objStream.Length];
objStream.Read(marcData, 0, System.Convert.ToInt32(objStream.Length));
objStream.Close();
xmlData = objMarc.MARC2XML(marcData, localhost.XML_TYPES.oaidc);
this.richTextBox1.Text = xmlData;
}
private void button2_Click(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
localhost.MarcEdit objMarc = new WindowsApplication14.localhost.MarcEdit();
byte[] marcData = null;
//string marcData = "";
marcData = objMarc.OAI2MARC("http://digitalcollections.library.oregonstate.edu/cgi-bin/oai.exe", "bracero", "", "", localhost.XML_TYPES.oaidc, localhost.CHAR_SET.MARC8);
//xmlData = objMarc.MARC2XML(marcData, localhost.XML_TYPES.oaidc);
this.richTextBox1.Text = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString(marcData, 0, marcData.Length);
}
private void button3_Click(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
localhost.MarcEdit objMarc = new WindowsApplication14.localhost.MarcEdit();
//byte[] marcData = null;
string marcData = "";
marcData = objMarc.OAI2MARCXML("http://digitalcollections.library.oregonstate.edu/cgi-bin/oai.exe", "bracero", "", "", localhost.XML_TYPES.oaidc);
//xmlData = objMarc.MARC2XML(marcData, localhost.XML_TYPES.oaidc);
this.richTextBox1.Text = marcData;
}
}
–TR
One Big Library. - dchud shelf-readin', taking notes and naming names.![image]()
Opensearch browser search plugin thingy tips (works for onebiglibrary.net)
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I spent an unexpected amount of time during a meeting today trying to get a little search interface I wrote to properly support opensearch autodiscovery and to get the "you can install this search in firefox 2 and ie7" thingy working. Then I just did the same for this blog's opensearch interface. In case you want to do the same (get browsers to autodiscover and two-click install search plugins for your opensearch targets), here are some hints. Note, though, that they might be firefox2-specific.
- Follow the Firefox troubleshooting tips. All of them, they all matter, it seems.
- I might have just started from an old version, but the drupal opensearch module wasn't emitting the opensearch description element Url with text/html info as indicated as required in the troubleshooting tips.
- The "Unable to install your search plugin thingy" error message is confoundingly unhelpful. To get useful debugging info in firefox2, go to "about:config" and enable browser.search.log (just double-click it). Then open Tools > Error Console and clear it before each time you attempt to install the search plugin. Read the output closely and go from there until the error message goes away and it works. Then you probably want to go back to about:config and disable browser.search.log again.
Here's the thing: getting opensearch-based search plugins for your browser can be a huge win for the visibility and usefulness of your resources to your user community. It's easy and it's great to have your stuff right there, an easy query away all the time. But if you want to make it easily auto-discovered, you have to get all the details exactly right *for* them.
That said, I'm not 100% certain it works in ie7. If anybody has it handy, tell me if it works for you?
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planet code4lib![image]()
Cohen, Dan: The Hindle Fellowship in the History of Technology [ma.gnolia]
Those with a recent doctorate in the history of technology or a related field might be interested in applying for this fellowship, which provides $10,000 for the purpose of preparing a dissertation for publication. The deadline is April 1, 2007.
Tags: None assigned
Library Stuff
Quiz Time
Not library-related. On what TV show did the song, How to Save a Life (by the Fray) first appear? The first commenter to guess correctly gets a prize. It's not what you're thinking.Update - Thanks for taking part. In looking at the comments, I decided to do some research. According to Wikipedia, the song first appeared on Grey's Anatomy on March 19th, 2006, in an episode called "Superstition". I didn't see that one, so I can't say whether this is true or not. Then, on April 25th, 2006, it appeared on Scrubs in an episode called, "My lunch", which I did see. This is the episode that I am thinking of.So, what to do? I'm going to give prizes to both Arnold, who was the first to say Grey's Anatomy and Howard, who was the first to say Scrubs. Guys, send me your contact info.Now I'm just curious. Does anyone have the DVD for Season 2 of GA? Load up that show and let us know if the song appears. Looking at the synoposis, it would fit.
planet code4lib![image]()
code4lib: Code4Lib 2007 T-Shirt Contest
We have started accepting t-shirt designs for this year's Code4Lib conference t-shirt. Now is a chance to submit your idea! We'll stop accepting submissions on Friday, Jan. 19th. Some time after that voting will begin. As designs are received they will be included on this page (to hopefully encourage even more entries).
Click to view the last one on its html page
Wikicompany
Millions on the streets with a New World View
[Note: this an almost verbatim copy of my 911blogger forum message here]
Let me first say that this blog article is an excellent controlled demolition of the official neo-con newspeak, which gets so much airtime on CNN and all the other ‘news’ traitors.
I don’t think we are ever going to get millions on the street in [...]
Tame The Web: Libraries and Technology
Public Libraries & DRM at Wired
http://blog.wired.com/music/2007/01/library_media_l.html
Some frank words about Overdrive and the mess that is DRM:
The point of libraries is to make content freely available for the common good, I thought, so these restrictions are a little weird. Physical library cards don't require a certain type of wallet; why should the electronic ones only work on Windows? I asked Chris Pasco-Pranger, a "willfully unemployed librarian" (his words), to explain the system, and he had some choice words for the OverDrive system.
Here's how he responded (edited for clarity and length):
"Any patron of a member library can download titles (eBooks, audio, etc.) available from Overdrive to a home PC for a specified loan period. Typically, one approaches the service through a Public Library's website, for example at Brooklyn Public Library --> eBooks, eVideo & eAudio in the left navbar --> Search the Digital Media Catalog. You can add titles to a cart and then checkout using your library card number. A DRM scheme is applied, so you can only play a given title during the lending period, you can't burn it to disc, etc.
"The biggest problem (by far) with Overdrive ('Our strategic technology partners include Microsoft Corporation, Adobe Systems, Inc., and Mobipocket.') is its lack of support for Macs/iPods. Read the FAQ and weep. Of course, Overdrive would say that it's Apple that doesn't support THEM, because, y'know, Overdrive is SO much bigger of a deal than the iPod. Oh, the DRM headaches...
planet code4lib![image]()
Giarlo, Michael: Persistent URL Tools
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I’ve posted a couple new tools during the past couple days. One is an update of Devon Smith’s LinkPURL extension for Firefox 2.0.
The other is an ultra-lightweight Wordpress plugin that embeds a linkpurl link tag for auto-discovery (so bookmarking agents can detect and grab the persistent URL rather than the impersistent URL up in the addressbar).
Based on a discussion in #code4lib earlier today, I realize that there are a lot of important questions, not to mention serious doubts, about persistent identifiers. I flip-flop on their utility myself, so I found the discussion very useful. (Thanks, edsu!) Maybe I’ll write a post or two about persistent identifiers to flesh my thoughts out.
Tame The Web: Libraries and Technology
More On Student Publishing
A Dominican student writes:
I was sent this information:
The journal Libri has a special award for student created papers. See http://www.librijournal.org/award.html. The prize is $500 plus a subscription to Libri plus publication of your paper in Libri. Guidelines for authors can be found at http://www.librijournal.org/authorinst.html. Deadline for the contest is the end of May 2007.
I had a discussion with someone about how many wonderful writers we know at Dominican. Grad school students should be encouraged to publish, especially those interested in working in academic libraries. Thanks for wanting to help students publish!
I agree. I was so impressed with student research papers last semester. Here's to more students publishing!
planet code4lib![image]()
Salo, Dorothea: Pluralistic ignorance
Um, would you believe that I got over a dozen responses to my request for beta-readers for my faculty self-archiving presentation?
I did. And I owe a few of them email, as well as apologies for not sending email faster.
Thanks, all; I think what I’ll do is just post the silly thing and let all read it who will. It may be a little while, though, as I’m in the middle of some ASIST 2007 proposals and there’s some red-hot stuff for the repository coming my way shortly.
The interest, and the manner of communication of that interest, honestly reminds me of the no-talking zone around dropping out of graduate school. Yes, how did you do it? folks want to know—not because I’m anything particularly special, but because I’m the only one talking. Other folks who could speak with equal or greater authority—don’t.
Well, seems to me at least some repository-rats are quiet lest they find out they’re doing it wrong. Lest the more supercilious and accusatory elements in this particular field (and yes, open access has them, and no, at my very worst I don’t even come close to the real nasties) use ’em as whipping-posts. Easier to nod and smile and assume everybody else knows what they’re doing and you’re the only one who doesn’t, and try to pick up scraps of knowledge from around the edges.
There’s a term in sociology for this, I believe: “pluralistic ignorance.” And I won’t have any truck with it. We don’t know what we’re doing. I sure don’t. That sort of wisdom comes from experience, and none of us—none of us!—has enough yet.
So sure, I’ll post that presentation; what can it hurt? And even more daringly, I’ll talk about copyright clearance, because I’ve gotten several timid private queries about it. I don’t know that what I’m doing is the Right Thing. The process was designed by whatever poor few synapses serve me as common sense.
I don’t do copyright clearance on everything that goes into the repository. (Gasp.) If I’m asked to, I do it. If I’m personally depositing something on behalf of another party, I do it. If the author deposits—I don’t, because the author warranted to us (via license) that s/he had appropriate rights to deposit. If s/he was incorrect and I am so informed, I’ll withdraw the item and shake my finger sternly at its depositor.
So when I do have to clear stuff, here’s what I do. First, I figure out what I’ve got. Preprint, postprint, publisher PDF? (I treat scans from print as publisher PDFs.) Journal article, book chapter, conference paper?
If it’s a book chapter or conference paper, I check Books in Print for the book or proceedings. If the item is still in print, no go unless the author can show me a publishing agreement allowing self-archiving. If it’s not, I feel comfortable adding the submission, on the assumption either that the contract included rights reversion to the author, or the conference proceeding had such a limited print run that nobody’s going to woof, or that there was no formal conference proceeding published (as is not uncommon). I do check conference websites for proceedings information if I can’t find it in Books in Print; now and again I’ve seen conferences selling proceedings electronically, and in that case I can’t really consider them out of print.
If it’s a journal article, the first stop is the invaluable SHERPA/ROMEO. If I can find the journal or its publisher, I check the item against the policy and act accordingly (including all that fiddly stuff like links and credits, which I am telling you is incredibly obnoxious to deal with, because no two publishers want the same verbiage). If the publisher allows deposit of their PDF, I always grab it with thanks, even if it’s not what the author gave me—if I have both pre/postprint and publisher PDF, I’ll deposit both, with clear labels on the files.
If SHERPA/ROMEO comes up dry (as it often does), the next stop is the journal’s website if any. The “For Authors” section often (though not always) includes a copy of the standard author agreement. If it’s self-archiving–friendly, I’ll deposit the article. Failing that, there may be a permissions page I can use to request permission to archive the article, or contact information for someone I can ask to send me a copy of the standard author agreement.
If I can’t find the journal or its descendant anywhere (rare, but has happened!), or its website doesn’t offer any guidance (can someone tell me why law reviews are especially awful about this?), it’s a “how likely am I to get sued for this?” judgment call. I can’t tell you how to do this. I do it on a case-by-case basis (and I leave law reviews strictly alone, thanks!).
I never did get a publisher-policy wiki started, but not for lack of thinking it’s a good idea. SHERPA/ROMEO, awesome though it is, is remarkably far from complete, and it doesn’t help at all with grey-lit-style publication venues. (Maybe it’s a DC thing, but now and then I get stuff from think-tanks and not-quite-government agencies and whatnot.)
Here’s to reducing the amount of pluralistic ignorance in the world. Cheers, and if I’m doing something wrong, let me know.
January 17, 2007
It's all good
Social Networking is Hot
Three hundred and forty seven people have registered to hear Howard Rheingold, Marc Smith and danah boyd speak on social networks, identity formation, and social networking sites at the OCLC Symposium on Friday afternoon, just before ALA MidWinter officially begins. Our moderator, Michael Stephens, is there already, without his suit jacket, but with all his marbles. It's all good.
But what if you aren't getting to Seattle until late Friday? Well, you'll miss the live Symposium but the video of it will be on the OCLC web site in a few weeks...but even better! There's another session you can attend on social networking! Hot!! (I've been talking to Michael S a fair bit. Can you tell?)
Our colleague Jasmine de Gaia is hosting a session on Saturday, 8:00 - 10:00 am, Sheraton Seattle, Metropolitan B Room. It's called Social Networking: Best Practices for Libraries and has three terrific people lined up to talk about library social networking experiences: Jenny Levine, David Lee King (who's got a great series on "inviting participation" on his blog) and Lisa Hinchliffe. There are 192 people registered for this session already.
Totally hot!!! Really.
(I say this, knowing I risk a snarky remark from the Annoyed Librarian.)
Wikipedia Blog
Category:Fictional barbers and hairdressers
Category:Fictional barbers and hairdressers
Library Web Chic
Heading to ALA Midwinter
I’m off to ALA Midwinter on Friday. As you can see below I have a relatively full schedule. However, this is some built-in time for some fun and hopefully some writing!
Wikipedia Blog
Eponymous hairstyles
La-La-Librarian
Serials Review interview with Ellen Duranceau
For those that subscribe or have access to Serials Review, I interviewed a colleague of mine back in June, who I very much respect and admire, Ellen Finnie Duranceau. Ellen was recently promoted at the MIT Libraries to a new role as our [...]
It's all good
speaking community into being?
I've been away taking care of personal stuff. But on one of the plane rides to or from all of that, I had the pleasure of reading danah boyd's Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: writing community into being on social network sites. I admit that this has been on my reading list since I saw her post on many2many back in early December, but I made a point to read this now so that I'd (hopefully) have something intelligent to say to her when we meet later this weekend at ALA-Midwinter (btw: so looking forward to seeing folks in person!).This doesn't happen to me a lot, I promise, but I think I have an intellectual crush (don't worry, it's very professional) on danah boyd. And when I meet her, I might, if I'm not too shy, ask her what she thinks (if anything) of the distinction between speaking and writing, and if she thinks the format of our communication makes any difference in the formation of social connections in online communities. I thought of this after reading her paper, and then Richard Powers' essay How to Speak a Book (NYT Book Review Jan 07, 2007). Will speaking our communities into being be another bridge between real-time and virtual connection? Side note: the thought of switching to speak from write terrifies me. But maybe that's a sign that I am getting older and set in my tappity tap ways. Maybe. I guess we'll see...
eFoundations![image]()
Prospecting for ORE
At the end of last week, I attended the first meeting of the - deep breath - Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange Technical Committee (that's OAI ORE TC from now on!). As you can see from that page,...
La-La-Librarian
Humanities Virtual Browsery at MIT
Another cool new project at work is the brand new Humanities Virtual Browsery. If you took a look at the RSS feeds I posted about last time, you may have already seen it, but it is certainly worthy of it’s own post and it’s something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while now.
In [...]
It's all good
Blog Salon - ALA Midwinter
The Blog Salon is on Saturday, January 20 at the Sheraton Seattle, starting around 8pm. It will be in the OCLC Blue Suite. We don't know the number of the room yet, but you can ask at the Front Desk or the Concierge's Desk, or come back here Friday when one of us will have posted the room number.The Salon is right after the Celebration of Life for Fred Kilgour. That event is at the Westin Seattle, in Grand Ballrooms I & II. it begins at 5:30pm.Alice was going to do this reminder but she's been saying she'll post stuff for weeks! She's already in Seattle, being busy. Yesterday she emailed me and said she was off to get a haircut at an Aveda training insititute and hoped she wouldn't end up with a "wacky west coast girl 'do."We'll have to see if she did!
Catalogablog
Call to Koha Users
LibLime, the support company for Koha, posted this announcement:
The Koha project is working to improve Koha's visibility by adding Koha users to an important automation list. This list is maintained by Marshall Breeding (U.S. researcher), and tracks libraries worldwide and what ILS they are using. Marshall puts out a library technology guide every year (this year's is upcoming) which is very influential in helping libraries select an automation system.Traditionally, Koha has not been included in his guide, and we are trying to change that this year :) In fact, Marshall has specifically invited Koha users to include themselves in the guide, to ensure open-source automation gets the recognition it deserves. We've been encouraging Koha users to add information about themselves to the site, and adding libraries ourselves as we come across them. If your library is using Koha, make sure you are counted! To make sure your library has already been added to Marshall Breeding's list, you can do a search for your library.If your library is not listed, you can add yourself.You'll need to add your library by the end of the month to be counted for this year's guide.
Tame The Web: Libraries and Technology
See You in Seattle
The taxi will be waiting for me at 6am tomorrow (uhhh) for an 8am flight to my favorite American city. I'm looking forward to seeing library friends and colleagues and the OCLC Social Software symposium. If you are attending (last I heard over 300 are signed up), please say HI! I'll be armed with Moo cards.
Here's to safe travels for all!
January 16, 2007
Tame The Web: Libraries and Technology
The Semester Begins with Assistance
A greeting to all who read TTW and may be starting a new semester - studying, working in a library that serves students or teaching. The new semester is what I have been gearing up for -- for over a week. It's been days of updating syllabi, making copies, planning, reading and pondering a new wave of students. This semester I am happt to report I have assistance - a graduate assistant! You may know him as The Wanted Librarian! How fortuitous it is to have a fellow biblioblogger working with me. We already had some cool conversation about the library biz and I can tell I'll learn a lot from him.
Sadly, this new beginning was marred by the untimely death of Brian's iPod Shuffle.
Catalogablog
PURL Spam
The spam problem on the OCLC PURL server has been resolved.
A new PURL server has been put into service.Deleting what we though were spam. We added a disclaimer about PURLS on the first page.
53674 PURLS were deleted along with 95 user ids.
PURLS has now change, to request a user id you will need to request it from the System Administrator (me for now).
Users that have an existing USER ID should be able to create PURLS, DOMAIN, GROUPS etc.
Don't know if I got all we think we're spam, but if any are found let me know, also any USER ID that should not have been deleted and was, let me know.
Tom DehnOCLC Inc.
Official Google Blog
UNCF/Google Scholarship
Posted by Aneto Okonkwo, Associate Product ManagerWhen I learned in October that Google had established a new scholarship program with the United Negro College Fund (UNCF), I was excited. The number of African-Americans in the field of engineering is critically low: according to the National Science Foundation, as recently as 2003, African-Americans accounted for less than four percent of the total scientific and engineering workforce. When I was an undergrad, I applied for scholarships similar to the UNCF/Google Scholarship Program; those few opportunities were instrumental in my career development.So it's especially meaningful that I've been able to participate in the program's review process. We will have eight U.S. undergraduate students who will each receive a $5,000 scholarship toward their 2006-2007 academic year tuition. The selected scholars will also be invited on a trip to our Mountain View headquarters this spring. While at the Googleplex they'll have the opportunity to meet each other and attend technical talks and professional development workshops, not to mention explore the San Francisco Bay area. We hope this program will encourage students to excel in their studies in years to come, inspire them to become role models and leaders, and attract more African-American students to the fields of science and technology. All congratulations to this year's winners:
- Olaniyi Bajulaiye, Benedict College
- Desmond Baldwin, Morehouse College
- Keitha Griffin, Alabama A&M University
- Jennifer Hairston, Wilberforce University
- Keith Morren, Florida Memorial University
- Derrick Nnaji, Prairie View A&M University
- Lawrence Secrease, Florida A&M University
- Shantavious Williams, Alabama A&M University
It's all good
Howard Rheingold Interview
How nice of CNET's Second Life Bureau to have a chat with Howard Rheingold just ahead of his participation in the OCLC Symposium on Friday. It's a great snapshot of his current interests and thoughts on virtual communities. This quote foreshadows his presentation starting about 1:55pm PST on January 19:
"I personally think that the importance of online discourse ought to be taught in high school, but public education changes slowly. My latest effort is at https://www.socialtext.net/medialiteracy. I'm trying to find some funding to set up after school and summer programs to teach participatory media as an avenue to civic engagement about issues that young people care about."
We won't be streaming video from the Symposium but will--as usual--have it up on the OCLC web site in a few weeks.
Thanks to Andy Havens for alerting me to the interview.
LITA Blog
Unordered list of “top tech trends”
This is an unordered list of “top tech trends” from Library Land. Season to taste:
* Full-text data/information is increasingly available. Now this presents real opportunities (as well as challenges) for libraries. To what degree is surrogate description necessary when full-text indexing an option.
* Increasingly libraries are thinking about repurposing existing staff. “I know things are [...]
blyberg.net
Five Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Me
As long as we’re on meme’s…
Five people and counting have now tagged me with this one, so I think I ought to capitulate!
1) I used to sneak into the back room in out middle-school library to use their 300 baud modem to dial into my BBS at home and check new messages. My first [...]
eFoundations![image]()
Repositories and OpenID
This is a short post... it should be longer, but I don't have time to flesh out my thoughts properly and I wanted to at least get something down on paper (so to speak). Pete and I recently met up...
Catalogablog
D-Lib Magazine
The latest issue of D-Lib Magazine contains several pieces of possible interest to catalogers.
Link Evaluator
Link Evaluator is a free Firefox add-on from OCLC.
Link Evaluator is a Firefox extension designed to help users evaluate the availability of online resources linked to from a given Web page. When started, it automatically follows all links on the current page, and assesses the responses of each URL (link).Link Evaluator examines both the HTTP status code and the page contents returned by each URL.
Tame The Web: Libraries and Technology
A Big Mess at Kohl's (or Corporations, Customers and the Cluetrain)
This fascinates me.
The Church of the Customer blog points out "The Not So Secret Shopper" who visited a Kohl's Department store and found a mess. Cameraphone in hand, he documented the condition of the retail establisjment and blogged about it.
http://heehawmarketing.typepad.com/hee_haw_marketing/2007/01/hurricane_kohs_.html
The folks at Church of the Customer state:
Here's the thing: 156 million Americans use high-speed cellphone networks that allow them to take pictures like this and post them immediately to a blog where, naturally, they can spread.
Pew estimates that 41 percent of American cellphone owners use their phones as content creation tools. That translates into about 64 million people in the U.S. alone who have the potential to be not-so-secret shoppers.
Take a look at Kohl's reply. Is this the human voice of the company sharing the concerns of its community? Probably not!
I can't help but wonder how this could play out in our world. How might we respond if someone snapped a few photos, shot video or the like of something "not quite right" in one of our libraries. (And it has happened.) Has your library marketing/PR department/person developed a plan embracing citizen jounalists, citizen marketers and human communication? I hope so.
Also, this post at COTC details how CBS has embraced YouTube. Again, fascinating.
blyberg.net
I’ve been Meme’d!
You might have noticed that blyberg.net had a little downtime over the weekend. I think the culprit was my tired ol’ card catalog generator sputtering smoke and oil.
Walt gave me a heads-up last Friday, letting me know that the generator had become a “meme of sorts” among science bloggers. Looking at my referrers [...]
eXtensible Catalog (XC)![image]()
Size Matters
We all know that the easiest way to find a book is to search by title, author, or perhaps some well-chosen keywords. And that may be the way that most people find books most of the time.
But when we study our faculty members’ actual behavior in their offices and labs, we sometimes find out that [...]
It's all good
I have been rummaging around in LinkedIn which is described by Wikipedia as a "business oriented social networking site, mainly used for professional networking. As of January 2007, it had more than 9 million registered users, spanning 150 industries and more than 400 economic regions (as classified by the service)."
I had forgotten I had a profile on LinkedIn which I set up ages ago, when Cindy Cunningham, the Director of Media Cataloging at Corbis in Seattle, invited me to join her network. After I'd joined I did nothing with my network. Recently, though, LinkedIn showed up on my radar.
My husband who is job hunting joined and is enjoying finding and connecting with people he'd worked with in a couple of past jobs.
And Stephen Aquilar-Millan, a UK-based futurist whom I know, had mentioned on the listserv we both belong to, that he had recently joined LinkedIn and was viewing it as an extension of his corporeal network for now, but that "[e]ventually, we will have to start to develop content within the network. It's at this point that the system will be truly tested as it will show whether we have connections because people are being polite, or we have connections because people think that we are doing something useful. That's always a moment of truth!"
I've been building my network, looking for and inviting people I know to join. A few have commented that they don't really use LinkedIn and don't find it very useful at the moment. Certainly one of the reasons for this is that few of us are job hunting as most of the people in my network have salaried, on-going positions. Stephen the futurist, however, has a consulting business and so might find this sort of very defined social network more immediately relevant to him.
I do find the "three degrees of separation" fascinating and perhaps this is one motivator for me to participate. For example, I spotted the name of a well-known libraryland person--someone I know personally too--who is connected to me, not through any other libraryland person, but through one of the futurists in my network. I had no idea they knew one another! Although "knowing" a person in LinkedIn can mean something much more tenuous than meatspace "knowing", the ability to identify and make visible these tenuous relationships in a virtual community is one of the most interesting aspects of it all, to me.
Recently, Guy Kawasaki, entrepreneur, blogger and self-professed hockey addict, blogged "Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn." He wrote: "However, it is a tool that is under-utilized, so I’ve compiled a top-ten list of ways to increase the value of LinkedIn."
Another top ten list! Which actually includes 13 points. And it struck me, reading his list, that librarians working in corporate libraries might find LinkedIn a good source of competitive intelligence, as well as a place to showcase their research and reference skills.
LinkedIn has recently started a service called LinkedIn Answers in which questions from within a member's broader network (people you know, know these people, who know these people) can be answered or experts' names suggested. For example, there's a question from my network asking for help in finding information on world stock market growth in 2006. 14 people so far have provided what look like good links or answers. So, Stephen Abram, Mr President-Elect of SLA, perhaps this is one way to increase the visibility of the members of your association?
Any IAG readers who are also members of LinkedIn, send Alice and me invitations to join your network! And if you've opinions on the usefulness--or not--of this kind of social network, leave a comment.
YouTube :: Blog
Behind the Features
People always wonder how videos are chosen for the homepage and as part of our effort to improve communication with you, I thought it was time to introduce you to some of our editors and give you a glimpse of what goes on behind the scenes here at YouTube. First up is bigjoe [at] youtube [dot] com (Big Joe Smith) -- everyone say, "Hi Joe!" -- who made this video for you and then outlined a typical week on homepage duty (including some extra video goodies). Let us know if you like this kind of stuff and we'll make it a regular feature. I'm even charging up the battery on my own video camera and getting out the rouge and mascara... -- editor [at] youtube [dot] com (Mia)
Mon
1/8
Ask
and you shall receive. A while back we got a request from a
user to feature picniccasket's Monument Valley.
I was quite impressed with the energy in the video and the fact that it was a
solo project, so it had to go on home. Rock on, my man, rock on.
It
was Mac World last
week and this spoof of "The
Special Christmas Box" by RandiandJen
couldn't have come at a better time. Mac love runs deep here in Silicon Valley and these ladies figured out how to steal
back some of that affection and shared their secret with us.
Tues
1/9
Triponic taught us how to make our
own steam room
inexpensively. The video was set to great music and made his idea
seem all the more inviting… I got to make me one of those things -- have any of
you tried it yet?
Talk
about cuteness, The Cuppycake Song
has been a classic in many homes for many years and finally credit can be given
where it is due thanks to the sonoman
posting the original material to YouTube. Make sure to check out
the bloopers for even
more adorableness.
Big Dancing, Small Town…I
have to commend QuadMagicalNESS
for their hard work. We received this video via email from a user and I'm
pretty sure it hit the homepage the next day. My favorite scene is a toss-up between when they are dancing on top of the Goodwill building and when they are dancing on the billboards. Excellent way to turn your small town
boredom into something unique, productive and well…big. Nice job, guys.
Wed
1/10
From
the hills of Matheran came a video chock-full of sincerity and love. Congratulations David and Susie
on your engagement.
Check out this video response
after seeing the original video -- even Susie liked it!
We
also like to feature videos that encourage community interaction. Zakgeorge21's latest video did
just. If you haven't submitted your video response yet, please do because we're watching! In the meantime, here's a great response to
his video from NicholasPickolas.
Thurs 1/11
Our
ears were sent tingling by the playing of DukeRightious when we heard his
"C minor Etude".
This original composition evoked emotion and was a perfect way to start the
day. Duke actually emailed us himself to nominate his video
and when I reviewed it, I knew it had to find its place on the homepage. He's got some other
great material as well; I'd recommend checking out his short version of "Things".
Talk
about talented: the eight-year-old Puehse twins
could show a lot of veterans a thing or two about skating. Check out the air
these kids can get off the ramp.
Fri
1/12
When
I happened to stumble on the World Freehand
Circle Drawing Champion, it was already gaining some traction
on the site, but I felt it deserved even wider exposure. A lot of users said that it's easy to draw a perfect circle, but I encourage you to try it. I did and well…let's just say I'll leave the perfect circle making to the pros.
Sat
1/13
Nalts gave us insight into the world
of a Viral Video Genius.
Special thanks go out to Nalts for deciding to be nice from now on. .
Sun
1/14
So
we know most of you are qualified to have a Bachelors Degree in YouTubery (here
I go making up words) but The YouTube
Guided Tour by JackDanyells
is very informative. What's even better is that if you watch the video
response by Therapix, you can
learn how to make your own green screen.
BaratsandBaretta…pretty
much 'nuff said. These guys are legends and have been bringing us viral
classics for quite sometime. The Other Son is a
funny venture into the life of Jesus' other brother Wesley. Make sure you check
out their other videos.
Mon
1/15
The
great thing about a holiday like Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is that it not only inspires progressive thought but also (hopefully) progressive action (hint hint… make your video response,
like this one). Daniel Stringer
brought a strong message
to YouTube. What's your dream?
There
is a great story behind Drawing
YouTube. Marcoseiji
contacted our video Czarina
editor [at] youtube [dot] com (Mia) about his channel. It was
a simple message that said he felt his channel could make a lot of YouTube users happy. When Mia checked it out, she was in awe and asked Marco to make a compilation video for a possible feature. This all happened yesterday within about three hours (despite the Brazil-San Francisco time difference) and the video made it to the homepage the same day.
Keep on Tubin',
bigjoe [at] youtube [dot] com (Big Joe)
The YouTube Team
ebyblog![image]()
HTML email and Outlook 2007
If you haven’t already caught it, Outlook 2007 changes html support rather drastically. In fact it appears to go backwards from the last version of Outlook. The change is from the IE rendering engine to the Word html rendering engine. Some are guessing this is related to anti-trust.
Regardless if your library sends out newsletters that are html emails then you may want to test it with the latest outlook to make sure it’s readable.
MBR Fix and AutoPatcher
Here are a couple I’ve found useful lately:
MBR Fix
A command utility that allows you to fix the MBR while logged into Windows. I moved my linux to another comp and wanted to get the one I was on up and running again. I had neither the windows boot cd or the Administrator password. However the user I was logged in as had Admin rights. Just ran the utility from the command line and presto. Was a lot quicker then going through the recovery console. You can also backup or move MBR records with it. You can download it here.
AutoPatcher
A single download of all the Windows updates for 2000/XP/2003. It will extract everything to a folder and has a program you run that will search for ones already installed. Also includes some tweaks and registry hacks. This can come in handy if you have a computer that is on a less then stellar internet connection somewhere. Run to the library or somewhere and download the file. You can burn the extracted directory to a CD or copy to a flash drive if it’s big enough. The patch presumes you already have the latest Service Pack. If you don’t, get that first and then use AutoPatcher.
The only thing I found is that it has all of the patches MS releases for that Windows version and may not be specific for what you have installed. Windows Update showed no updates at all but AutoPatcher had plenty, many of which were for locales, etc that I didn’t use. I suppose it never hurts.
January 15, 2007
Dilettante's Ball![image]()
Grandpa Maximon
The Guatemalans believe in some really cool stuff.
Not sure I’m bold enough to bring one of his icons into our house, though. I mean, what if we run out of Coca-Cola and smokes?
ebyblog![image]()
Podcast Seminar by Apple
Not sure how old this is but Apple offers a free on-demand seminar called The Podcast Recipe: Producing a successful show.
Podcasting is one of the most explosive technologies to hit the Internet. And with literally thousands of podcasts available on Apple iTunes, the need for high-quality production is critical. In this free, on-demand, three-part seminar Apple experts take you behind the scenes to see what it takes to perform a great-sounding podcast, produce a professional show, and promote a podcast to reach as many people as possible.
Obviously slanted towards Apple software but may be useful to some.
LibraryThing
MLK day and new book pile contest
In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day (the first since the death of his wife, the NYT reminds me), we announce a Black History Month bookpile contest. Post your photos to Flickr, with the tag "LibraryThingBHM" by 3pm on Jan. 29th, and we'll announce the winner on the blog on February 1st.We have a whole bunch of bookpile contests queued up now, so if this one doesn't strike your fancy, you can start preparing your piles for the upcoming celebration of 10 million books, Valentine's Day, Women's History Month, and more. We're also always looking for ideas for contests, so send those along too (I'm perfectly willing to have a Groundhog day contest, for example, if anyone thinks they could pull together a book pile for that)!
Free Our Data: the blog
How OS costs hold back local authorities housing associations: the view from the ground
An interesting post that we came across by letting Blogdigger trawl the web for mentions of “Ordnance Survey”. Extract:
In the field I work in housing (asset management) the use of maps would be particularly beneficial. On top of this, I also help manage some patch related data for our housing management team. Being able to [...]
One Big Library. - dchud shelf-readin', taking notes and naming names.![image]()
Library Geeks 010 - King Day 2.0
<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
A break from form to participate more actively and more publicly in the U.S. holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., if only just by reading aloud some of his words.
To learn more about the life of Dr. King, see his biography from The King Center or nobelprize.org.
To read the full text of the speeches I read from:
- His Influence Speaks To World Conscience, written on the 10th anniversary of the assassination of Gandhi, January 30, 1958
- Speech at the Great March on Detroit, June 23, 1963
- Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence, April 4, 1968
For many other resources of note, see "A Collection of Web Resources For Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2007," from ResourceShelf.
For firsthand accounts of the day of his assassination, including video clips from the "I've Been to the MountainTop" speech he gave to support a sanitation workers' strike on the eve of his assassination, see today's episode of Democracy Now. It is beyond eerie to hear how clearly he perceived the threats against his life.
To learn more about principled nonviolence, see the UC-Berkeley course lecture podcast for PACS 164A - Introduction to Nonviolence.
Audio files are available through the feeds linked at left.
What are you doing to celebrate or serve today, at home or in your library? Leave comments or links below so we can share ideas.
A happy and peaceful King Day to all!
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->
Free Our Data: the blog
Advisory Panel on PSI notes Free Our Data campaign again
As Oscar Wilde said, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. So it’s encouraging to note that in its latest minutes from the November 2006 meeting (PDF, 185KB) the Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information (APPSI), which previously noted the campaign, has once more noted the contribution we’re making:
A [...]
library technology issues![image]()
NLM's PubMed Central
I've recently been reading about PubMed Central, NIH's repository for journal literature in the biomedical and life sciences. A former NLM colleague of mine works with PMC, in the NLM back issue digitization effort.
Some points that stand out:The full journal list is available online. What's impressive to me is the number of journals with coverage back to volume 1.
The scale of the back issue
Tame The Web: Libraries and Technology
Resource for the Research Paper
Tonight I start my first section of LIS701. The big assignment? An 8 page research paper on a pis realting to the core values and principles of librarianship. Are you wrestling with a research paper assignment? Try:
http://www.degreetutor.com/library/online-assignments/termpaper-writing
Library Stuff
What Art Garfunkel Reads
Bookslut links to a page of every book Art Garfunkel has read since 1968. I'm impressed and jealous, now having wished I started a list back when I first started my "serious" reading. Not too late, I guess.
Library Decides Not to Close to Thwart Rowdiness
So, it turns out that that the Maplewood Library Board's decision to close the library was successfull.Not that they will close (they won't), but the initial decision got the attention of the community members and efforts were taken in an attempt to solve the problem.Win, Win!I applaud the library for making their unpopular decision. Here's to ruffling feathers and getting the job done. Bravo.
Caption This Photo
Punishment Originally uploaded by runminrun.
Talk about Reading trash at the libraryJim was so embarrased about his fines...
Tame The Web: Libraries and Technology
Upcoming Presentations
January 19, 2007. "Who's Watching YOUR Space?" Moderator. OCLC Symposium with danah boyd, Howard Rheingold & Marc Smith, ALA Midwinter. Seattle, Washington.
January 21, 2007. Next-Gen Sharing Libraries. OCLC Program. ALA Midwinter. Seattle, Washington.
January 23, 2006. Elmhurst College Library Honors Program. Elmhurst College, Elmhurst, Illinois.
February 1, 2006. Library 2.0.: Learning 2.0 Kickoff Presentation. McMaster University Library, Hamilton, Ontario.
February 2, 2007. Best Practices for Social Software in Libraries. Ontario Library Association. Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
February 3, 2007. Top Technology Trends with John Blyberg & Amanda Etches-Johnson. Ontario Library Association. Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
February 15, 2006. The Hyperlinked Library. Boston Public Library Staff Institute, Boston, Massachusetts.
January 14, 2007
ebyblog![image]()
Moving Site
I’m currently moving the website over to a Textdrive as part of Joyent Core instead of hosting it on my own server. You may notice some hiccups as I move everything over.
Tame The Web: Libraries and Technology
LIS753 Student Blogs Spring 2007
Alexis: http://cybrarianalexis.blogspot.com/
Allison: http://allisonlibrarianharrell.blogspot.com
Bridget: http://libbuzz.blogspot.com/
Claudia:http://heylibrarylady-claudia.blogspot.com/
Dan: http://danlis753.blogspot.com/
Dana: http://librarylibrary.blogspot.com
Eileen: http://wantslibrarian.blogspot.com/
Jody: http://bookmobileblurbs.blogspot.com/
Kristen: http://musings-kstew.blogspot.com/
Leslie: http://megaleslie.blogspot.com/
Louise: http://753spring07.blogspot.com
Malino: http://mkhun.blogspot.com/
Marita: http://marita-blogreader.blogspot.com
Mary: http://joyformusic.blogspot.com/
Megan: http://librarymegan.blogspot.com/
Monica: http://monilovesmocha.blogspot.com
Susan: http://spring753.blogspot.com/index.html
My blog for class: http://lis753spring07.blogspot.com/
January 13, 2007
LITA Blog
Thomas Dowling’s Top Tech Trends
Increasingly radical rethinking of the catalog. What is it? What’s in it? What do we need it to do? Does every library really to buy its own, or build its own – or can we all work off of one Great Big Catalog In The Sky (or in Dublin, OH)? [...]
Library Stuff
Westlaw Stress Toy
My boss, Ray Jassin, sent me this hilarious video. I'm not sure if it's an "official" Westlaw ad, but it's really funny.
LITA Blog
It’s Trend Time Again
With my mind distracted by a new job, I feel my trends are a bit watery. However, a few readers have vastly improved what I will bring to the table, and I encourage you to keep putting lipstick on my piglet.
The one trend of mine I would underscore is the fledgling emergence of the [...]
LibraryCrunch
What Browsers Do People Use to Read My Blog?
What Browsers Do People Use to Read My Blog?
Originally uploaded by Michael Casey.
Library Stuff
Footnote.com
News from Smart Mobs today on the launch of Footnote, a neat site that apparently lets users annotate public document.I'd play with it more if I didn't have to pay to play. :-(
Still, a cool research tool. And they've RSSified it.
January 12, 2007
LITA Blog
Sarah Houghton-Jan’s Top Technology Trends
I won’t be able to join you all for the Top Technology Trends panel, but someone more worthy than I can read this in a good strong feminine voice, and hopefully he or she will be wearing black, so as to most accurately reproduce the experience of actually seeing me speak.
My predictions are few this [...]
Weibel Lines
National Gallery of American Art
One of the pleasures of visiting a great museum city across a broad span of years is appreciating favorite works of art, in person and in the context of a great collection,over and over again. It was with just this...
ebyblog![image]()
Online Stores I Like
I’m really not much of a shopper and I tend to research for so long that by the time I make a decision a new set of products are out. I do most of my shopping online, outside of groceries, and here are some of my favs. I figured I should post it so there is some record on the all-seeing google.
Adagio Teas
Adagio has some nice loose leaf teas but what makes it worth it is the experience. The site is easy to use, has reviews and ratings and also includes some community features. What set’s it apart is the experience once you order. You get plenty of tracking on the site, can copy your order to someone at a discount and also send gift certificates to others for free. The unexpected part was when I got an email letting me know it was delivered which included all the info from the tracking service. I was inside my house and didn’t even know it was left outside.
Woot and Woot Wine
A gimmick site. The deal is available only for 24 hours or until it’s sold out, whichever comes first. The wine is available for a week it seems. Goes for the impulse buy but they do have some great deals. I haven’t actually ordered anything from them but keep tabs in case something on my someday list comes up at a discount.
Amazon and associates
Still my main shopping location. The addition of affiliate stores has expanded the selection and I find myself ordering many more things. The shipping can get you if your not careful but I’ve found I still save quite a bit. I’d look into Prime if it was eligible on more items. I’ve had great luck with returns which is my main concern when buying online. I also start at Amazon for the reviews and recommendations even if I don’t buy it there.
Newegg
The Amazon of computer parts. I’ve bought nearly all of my computer components and accessories here. Great prices, lots of reviews and I’ve had great service with returns. With the large and fanatic user base you get a lot of detailed reviews that let you really trust the product your buying.
Sweet Maria’s
This is where I buy all my green coffee beans to roast them at home. They also have roasted coffee which is pretty good. Their reviews of the beans and information on homeroasting is great. Their site could use some more organization but it’s worth finding the info.
Etsy
More browsing then shopping, but some great hand-made items. Also has a nice community. Great if your looking for some unique items.
Windows Media Player 11 and MMS
A new semester and some new problems. The first is Windows Media Player 11. Not yet out via Windows Update so not a huge problem but with the coming release of Vista I think it will be.
I think it was reported in a few places but WMP11 seems to have removed support for the MMS protocol. You can see a chart showing this on their network protocol kit page. It says that it can be used as a rollover protocol but that doesn’t appear to work, at least not in my testing though it may be a server configuration issue.
In my testing I had to change the URL in the ASX file to specify RTSP as well as remove any port statements. The file then worked in WMP11 thanks to Helix serving it on that protocol as well.
A rather abrupt change as most streaming servers appear to use it for windows media files. We got kind of lucky here as Helix will stream the file over rtsp or http without too much problem. The hurdle is changing the ASX file generation it does on the server to include the proper link.
If you have streaming windows media files you may want to check and make sure they play on the latest WMP.
Library Web Chic
Some thoughts on the iPhone
Over at One Big Library Dan Chudnov has a good post entitled “What iPhone is telling us” that talks about why the iPhone has the potential to reshape the landscape of user interfaces and devices. In particular when it comes to visual and tactile ways of navigating. Probably the part of this post that [...]
Catalogablog
OLAC Newsletter
I got my copy of the OLAC Newsletter yesterday. Always a good read. This issue has conference reports as well as the ever enlightening Cataloger's Judgment. The reports often have the PP presentation and examples available. The on-line version is open and free to all. Looks like it was a great conference. The next one is in two years, start planning to attend now. A three year membership in OLAC is only $70.00, a best buy to be sure.OLAC
LibraryCrunch
Monticello Does Anime
The Monticello library in Monticello, Minnesota (part of the Great River Regional Library system), is attracting teens to their library with a great looking anime club.
One of the Monticello Library's newer kids' clubs is luring local adolescents through its doors in droves.
The Anime Club, a Great River Regional Library pilot program, meets once a month to watch an animated film, munch on Japanese candy and bond over a shared interest in a popular cultural sensation that blurs the lines between technology, artistry and cartoonery.
"Anime is geared for children to adults," said GRRL youth services coordinator Heidi Hoks. "It's getting to be a very popular art form. It won a foreign film award at the Academy Awards a few years ago. It isn't just cartoons...
Monticello's club caters to preteens and teenagers, hosting a half-hour meeting for ages 10-12 followed by another for ages 13-18. "
We view a film and the club previews books the library offers," said librarian Deb Lukken, who hosts the club. "They love it."
"It's a place where kids who like anime can hang out," explained Taylor Radike, who was part of Monday's 10- to 12-year-old group.The appeal of anime, club members explained, has to do with its unique combination of art style, action and storytelling.
The club is part of a pilot program launched with the beginning of the school year at three GRRL branches: St. Cloud, Sauk Centre and Monticello.
"It's a way for kids to get together and talk about movies and books," Hoks said. "It's been an extraordinarily positive experience for all the locations, especially Monticello. We were looking for something that would get kids into the library, get them excited about reading, and it seems to be doing that. Kids check out anime materials, and then they check out other materials, too. It's a great way for them to see what's available to them." "
Way to go! Full Monticello Times article here.
Talking with Talis
The Library 2.0 Gang talk about changing library buildings
In this Library 2.0 Gang discussion, we talk about the changing role of the library building in delivering a range of services. As more material moves online, and as a growing number of those using library services are remote from their physical library, how do we adapt the services that are offered, and how do we transform the buildings for the 21st century?
Listen Now | Download MP3 [49 mins, 34 Mb] | How to Listen | Read more...
Official Google Blog
Real-time quotes for free
Posted by Katie Jacobs Stanton, Group Product ManagerAt Google, we get excited about making all kinds of information accessible to everyone. The more up-to-date the information, the more valuable it is. This is particularly true in the world of finance; information, and timing of that information, is money. Today, real-time quotes are not freely and easily available on the web. Some websites offer one real-time quote at a time, but typically only after you have enrolled in a service and/or signed a complicated legal agreement. Other sites approach the problem differently and show you streaming delayed data, but that doesn't solve the problem either -- it masks it. What's really important is getting free, easy and fast access to real-time quotes so you know how the market or your company is doing now, not as of twenty minutes ago.As a result, we've worked with the SEC, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and our D.C. trade association, NetCoalition, to find a way to bring stock data to Google users in a way that benefits users and is practical for all parties. We have encouraged the SEC to ensure that this data can be made available to our users at fair and reasonable rates, and applaud their recent efforts to review this issue. Today, the NYSE has moved the issue a great step forward with a proposal to the SEC which if approved, would allow you to see real-time, last-sale prices across all Google properties including Google Finance, Personalized Google, Mobile, and of course, Google.com. It won't matter if you're on Wall Street or Main Street -- you'll have free, easy and fast access to real-time prices from NYSE on Google.So stay tuned on our progress with this. We're excited that financial data as we know it is about to change. In the meantime, set up your portfolio on Google Finance today.
Library Stuff
American Libraries and Public Libraries Get Some Well Deserved Press
The Contra Costa Times has a piece on the two publications. Hopefully, the article will make Meredith Farkas smile, as she's probably not doing much of that lately. Hang in there girl and congrats on the quote. Well deserved.
One Big Library. - dchud shelf-readin', taking notes and naming names.![image]()
What iPhone is telling us
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There are some interesting things that the iPhone do at Macworld seems to be telling us if you look beyond the immediate. Like, I have no problem believing that they'll capture 1% of the cell phone market within 18 months, because so many people with older players and crappy phones will add up the totals and say "why not get an iPhone for the same amount?" I'm not worried about Steve Jobs indicating that they'd hold development close to the vest. Instead of 1000 flowers blooming, you get interested developers funneled through some sort of licensing and certification and testing program so your iPhone doesn't crash a lot. People want reliability, and they're used to it in a phone, so there's every reason to fear user-mod-driven crashes.
But I don't think any of this is the point of what iPhone has to say to us. Beyond iPhone as *product* is iPhone as *inflection point*. The Apple ][, Macintosh, OSX, and iPod were similarly inflection points that meant nothing looked the same afterward. If we presume that iPhone doesn't even have to succeed to have the same magnitude of effects, it gets easy to guess what Apple will do next and be confident that you'll be right.
First off, they'll refresh the hard-drive iPod lineup with similar widescreen, multi-touch UIs (it certainly wouldn't help the Shuffle). They'll need time to work the kinks out with the early adopters, first, so this might not happen for a year or even two. But what can they possibly do to the current iPod line to make anybody satisfied with their somehow now-antiquated look and touch-wheel UIs short of dropping prices dramatically? I'm guessing we'll see a high-end hard drive iPod with widescreen and multi-touch sometime in 2008 at the latest.
But that's just the start. The vision of replacing hardware input devices on semi-limited use consumer devices is *huge*. In recent years there have been several attempts to make the keyboard "soft": like the projected-light keyboard, and the Optimus keyboard where the keys all have their own color Uis in them so you can soft-swap the keyboard for gaming or i18n or other purposes. The thing is, have you ever seen one of these in person? Do you know somebody who owns one?
No, you don't, because they're both cool but ill-fated one-trick ponies. If you've watched Jeff Han's TED talk video you'll know that the multi-touch UI is a huge departure from what we know and so broadly capable that it might just change everything we know about UI development. And for Apple to grok that deeply enough to devote so much engineering and PR willpower into pulling this one little phone off says that they're betting multi-touch UIs have legs far beyond limited-use devices.
During the Macworld keynote Steve Jobs made the point about how they've "learned from the iPod". They take this stuff more seriously than most anybody out there, and surely one of their goals with the first iPhone is to learn from it so they can figure out just how far multi-touch can go up the food chain. My hunch is that it can go all the way - that *every* computer form factor we're used to using today (laptop, pda, desktop) can be ultimately improved dramatically with multi-touch UIs, and that Apple already has a roadmap for doing just this in mind.
Why do I think it can go all the way? I'm not sure I can explain it well, but here goes. I'm a bit of a dabbler with UI paradigms - I'm not a 3D-savvy coder so I've always been a few steps removed from trying lots of things out myself, but since I took a course in Information Visualization with George Furnas at UMich during library school (1996 I think) I've tried to keep an eye out for improvements and implementations with large-scale takeup, and tried repeatedly to work on fun new UIs myself. Here are some images of ones I've been involved with.
So far, I'm not sure I've seen many, and the ones I've worked on while at Yale (DubMed, above, a circa-1998 java applet for visual query construction, and the MeSH Visualizer, below, a circa-2003 multipane vocabulary browser with AJAXy popups and highlights and scrolling in SVG) were cool and fun, but ultimately rather limited in potential.
Sure, the cognitive coprocessor model is basically a given at this point - you see it in sliding AJAX widgets, in the OSX dock, in UI widgets like menubars sliding open and closed. And the fisheye view model is relatively well-known too. But have you used *any* 3D UI at any length, ever? Or do you navigate your filesystem in treemaps? I know there are high-end visualization libraries out there, and that lots of data mining applications have glossy visualizations. And there's touchgraphs and lots of stuff like Grokker's map interface but, seriously, do you or anyone you know use those with any regularity?
Back in Pf. Furnas's class we were able to poke at the Pad++ environment, which appears to have lived on in Piccolo. This is way cool stuff, but I'll tell you, there's a huge limitation with all of these paradigms, and it's the mouse/keyboard/window/scrollbar input device model. We can go up and down and left and right and float in XY space really well but navigating zoomable 3Dish spaces like these just don't work well. Did you ever try navigating a VRML world with an SGI spaceball? Grokker's responsiveness to the mouse is great but its circular anchoring counters the way our brains are trained and our devices are forced to work today - X and Y axes and scroll a lot. These variants didn't work that well ten years ago, and I don't know of any widely-used interfaces that really are better now.
There's a reason google's simple search box and paged result lists worked so well and we keep coming back to them after trying stuff like grokker. It simply fits what we're used to doing with our input devices better, and therefore lets us get at what we want faster, period.
I think multi-touch UIs can solve many of these problems. I'm *certain* multi-touch could have made DubMed and the MeSH Visualizer a heck of a lot more engaging. And I'm pretty sure that once a few million people get a feel for it, it'll take off like wildfire.
I think Apple thinks so too.
If I'm right, where does this lead to? After refreshing the iPod lineup, what does Apple do next? I'm thinking it's tablet time. Imagine how cool a multi-touch UI tablet would be. No more stylus, right? And the bigger the touchable surface, the more powerful and wide-ranging the soft, "swappable" UI widget set could be. With a simple paper-sized tablet you could even project a keyboard easy enough for common typing tasks - though it wouldn't have to be QWERTY, come to think of it. :)
So remember, you read it here first - sometime by summer 2009, Apple will introduce the MacPad, a keyboardless tablet computer with a wholly reimagined UI based on multi-touch.
(Er, hold on a sec... /me googles... yeah, okay, there's this, but they didn't know about the multi-touch bit. So nyah. :P)
That's as far as I've gotten with this - I'm still deliberating over whether notebooks could be wholly replaced with tablets. It's hard to know. Maybe if a text-input method for multi-touch is developed that's as good or better than QWERTY keys with loving tactile response, the answer's yes, and if not, I'm not so sure, but I wouldn't count it out. One of the big rumors leading up to Macworld was ever-bigger screens, so maybe something like huge touch screens with voice recognition is the way up. Maybe the "minority report" interface is really coming soon.
I'm not sure. But I'm not selling my Apple shares anytime soon.
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Card-carrying columnist
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I am now a columnist.
What's *really* cool about this is that I get to be published in the same magazine as Library Web Chic and The Liminal Librarian.
Thanks to InfoToday's liberal licensing policy I've retained numerous rights after a 90-day post-publication window, so I'm collecting it all and plan to republish them down the road a piece. I don't think they'd mind a little tease though, just to introduce the premise. The column is called "Libraries in Computers." (Get it?)
"Imagine we're starting a library from scratch—no building, no staff, no budget, and no shelves, books, databases, or servers. All we start with is a community—a group of people connected to each other like any library user community might be connected to each other, whether for geographical, educational, corporate, or other reasons. Members of this community would probably have lots of computers and music players of their own, and lots of their own books, magazines, and videos, and lots of other random things collected over the years. What if we could instantly turn all of this into a library?"
With each subsequent column I'm taking this premise apart bit by bit to identify today's technical challenges and recontextualizing them with what we librarians already know. It's a fun way to find angles between hot topics and the little bit of old knowledge I've managed to pick up along the way, and I hope at least a few readers will feel the same way.
Want to read the rest? CiL is available through EBSCOhost, but this new issue doesn't seem to have shown up online quite yet. Reports from home indicate that the paper copy has arrived, though, so if you have a paper subscription you can read it for yourself. Or, stop by your neighborhood library and pick up the print copy, which should be on the shelf already. Or, better yet: buy yourself a copy. :)
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Library predictions for 2007
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I'll be in Seattle next weekend during ALA midwinter. I just saw FRL's library prediction for 2007 so I thought I'd try some too.
- eIFL-FOSS will have a major impact.
Listen to this if you want to know why and how.
Some project benefiting from the combinatorial potential of F(L)OSS in libraries will have greater impact than any particular library FLOSS
project.
It might be some new project that sticks stuff together in a new and mindblowing way. It might be a few existing projects like the umlaut and LibraryFind mashing together to great effect (film at 11 :). It might be a vendor polishing up and supporting some existing package and gaining a ton of customers thinking "hey, so long as we're here, why don't we just add Foo and Bar?" and then doing so. It could be Library-in-a-Box (see #1 above).
I can assure you, though, that when it happens, FLOSS will suddenly be acclaimed as an overnight success.
Some big corporation will acquire a library.
There could be any number of reasons -- rights to rare materials, cozying up to an institution, entrance into the library services market by a major conglomerate, or maybe all these and more -- and it will probably be cloaked in "sponsorship" terminology rather than M&A-speak, but it'll be a purchase, not a donation, and it'll scare the hell out of a lot of people.
That's all I can think of for now.
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TechnoBiblio
Not something you see every day - or ever....
I heard about these guys at a regional library system meeting and got to meet them. They responded to my questions from a geeky patron perspective and seem to be interested in listening to customer feedback.
The OPAC patron interface is not pretty, but I think that could be fixed rather easily and is the least of their worries. I heard many "oohs" and "ahhh" from the library staff when they demoed some of the features on the library staff side of the technology. Although working closely with library staff on the development of the ILS is touted as a plus by Biblionix, I think that is probably one of the shortcomings of working with the library staff and not the library patrons. You get solid staff functionality with a so-so patron interface.
That whole paragraph sounds more negative than it should - I think it is a solid offering as it addreses one of the huge problems that I saw in many small- and mid-sized libraries - the care and feeding of an on-site server and all the pieces that go along with it. Heck, there are stories of larger libraries having problems with failed hard drives, no backups, etc. All of that is built into the hosting solution and the libraries can even pay a little bit extra for additional services like web hosting, e-mail, etc.
It will be interesting to follow their progress - I am not sure how many libraries have signed up with them, but this press release had a couple interesting tidbits:
Biblionix Announces 50% Price Reduction for Apollo Automation Migration
"Biblionix today announced a 50% price reduction in migration fees for the Apollo Automation Service. Apollo is a hosted service, allowing small- and medium-sized public libraries to operate without an in-house server. The cut is effective immediately across all three pricing levels, from $800, $1500, and $2500 to $400, $750, and $1250. Already known as an exceptionally economical and effective solution, Apollo is now even more attractive. Customers who have already paid the full migration fee will be refunded the difference. "
Now that is nice and all - I mean who doesn't want a vendor who realizes that they are doing things well and for less than they budgeted so they refund the dollars? You could certainly argue against this from a business perspective, but it warms the heart of someone who has worked with small libraries.
But the really big piece to me is this part of the press release:
"On the other side of the coin, Biblionix makes it even easier for customers to migrate away from Apollo. With full recognition that the data belongs to the library and that it should not be held captive by the automation vendor, Biblionix created LDIF (Library Data Interchange Format). LDIF is a specification for
a self-describing XML file that contains all library automation data. It is implemented in Apollo today. Biblionix is exploring options to make LDIF an approved industry standard, allowing libraries to quickly and easily switch automation systems any time they wish. "
Hmmmm - interesting to see if this open format for data exchange becomes one of the top technology trends for 2007?
Library Stuff
More from Gather.com
Gather.com loves the book industry.
From AP:"A major US book publisher is hoping its new Web-based writing contest can tap into the popularity of interactive competitions like hit television show "American Idol."As part of the "First Chapters" contest, aspiring first-time authors and members of www.gather.com can post manuscripts on that social-networking Web site, organizers from publisher Touchstone Fireside and gather.com said on Thursday."
Library Web Chic
Code4Lib Scholarship for Women!!
I was so excited when Jeremy Frumkin announced this on the code4lib list.
Oregon State University / Code4lib Scholarship for Women
The OSU / Code4lib Scholarship for Women will provide up to $1000 to cover travel costs and conference fees for one qualified attendee to the 2007 Code4lib conference. This scholarship is eligible to any woman [...]
January 11, 2007
eFoundations![image]()
ALT-C 2007 deadline reminder
I'm on the programme committee for this year's ALT-C, so just doing my duty you understand... ALT-C 2007: Beyond control, Learning technology for the social network generation, 4-6 September 2007, Nottingham, England. The online paper submission system for ALT-C 2007...
UK Schools Minister sets out his vision for educational ICT
Jim Knight, the UK Minister of State for Schools, spoke yesterday at BETT about the way that ICT is set to transform education. A transcript of his speech is available from PublicTechnology.net Web site. It's not a bad speech, in...
YouTube :: Blog
Messaging, Vlogging and Guest Editors
Hello! Wanted to update you on some progress this week:
• We know there were some major things wrong with commenting and private messaging. Our engineers looked into it and discovered an over-enthusiastic spam filter. (There are people with racks of machines sending out spam and the filter helps to cut down on the junk that gets through.) Anyway, things should be working smoothly again in messaging land, but please let us know if you continue to encounter problems. **UPDATE (1/12): Messages that contain URLs and email addresses are still problematic. We're testing a new spam filter to see how well it catches spam that includes URLs. Based on that performance, we will lift the URL restriction.**
• Many of you have pointed out that we should be vlogging more ourselves, including site updates like this. I’m terribly camera shy, but we’ve asked a high-profile and well-connected member of the YouTube community, Damien Estreich, to help broadcast these messages (in addition to the ones we produce ourselves). He’s working on his first one as we speak.
• Of course you can expect to hear from (and see) the YouTube staff more often too. Every month we’ll be asking you a thought-provoking question which we’ll introduce by answering ourselves. The first will revolve around Valentine’s Day, so get ready to film some lovey-dovey (or not!) video responses. We'll be asking you to tell us about the person or thing you love the most in this world.
• Finally, we’re opening up the programming of our home page to guest editors. We’ll pick one user a month to take over for a few days. All you’ll have to do is send us 10 videos you’d like to place on home (make sure they adhere to the terms of service!) along with a short video about why you chose what you did and how you found the experience. If you’re interested in participating, please let me know.
Well, that’s it for now. Keep on letting us know how we can improve things.
Ciao,
editor [at] youtube [dot] com (Mia)
The YouTube Team
Free Our Data: the blog
Why making statistics free can save lives
In today’s Guardian, in Uncovering global inequalities through innovative statistics, we look at Hans Rosling’s call for governments to stop hiding away their potentially useful data “
Despite the encouragement that the internet provides, and the hunger of the public for better ways to analyse that data, governments are reluctant to open their databases to [...]
One Big Library. - dchud shelf-readin', taking notes and naming names.![image]()
Note to self w/r/to RMagick: RTFM
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When they say to follow the RMagick OSX Installation doc, they really mean to follow the RMagick OSX Installation doc.
I didn't follow it, and it didn't work. I cursed the code, I cursed ruby, I cursed gems, I cursed myself. Then I followed it, and it worked.
Sometimes I wonder how the heck I've been able to get by all these years. And why I curse so much.
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LibraryCrunch
January Issue of Computers in Libraries
This month's Computers in Libraries has two articles I want to recommend:
Janet Balas, in eLearning About Library 2.0, gives a good overview of Library 2.0 where she concludes:
Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 may seem like just the latest technology catch phrase, but what is most important about Library 2.0 is its emphasis on service. As librarians we are all striving to provide the best possible service to our users, employing new technologies to help us achieve that goal. For Library 2.0 to be more than just a catch phrase, it must result in a library that's responsive to the needs of its users.
Ronalee Ciocco and Alice Huff write about a subject near to me in Mission Impossible: Starting an Instant Messaging Reference Service Using Trillian. This is exactly what we did here at MPOW last year when Meg Wilson and I started an IM reference service called AskGCPL. We, too, used Trillian and have found it to be a very usable tool in pulling together the various IM services. Their closing paragraphs sum up their experience and match what we have found in our own local implementation of Trillian-based IM reference:
But students are so comfortable with the IM environment that these drawbacks have not been a problem. In fact, the students have frequently commented on how much they appreciate it. I was teaching an information literacy class a few weeks ago and at the end I was encouraging the students to ask questions later as they were working on their assignment. When I mentioned IM, a student excitedly said, "I love that you do that!" Trillian is now the standard campus chat application and is loaded on all campus machines.
The seemingly IM-possible mission has been a success in our view for everyone involved. Alice and I set up the service with no problems, no software purchase, no server purchase, and quick configuration. The reference librarians have been able to communicate with students in another way and expand our services to reach more of them. And the students have another way to contact librarians-a way they find comfortable and convenient.
The newest Computers in Libraries is available through ProQuest and (soon) online at the InfoToday web site.
LibraryCog
2007 - long after the day after the day it began
So yeah, my posting rate has almost ground to a halt in the last few months. And yes, it really was the day after Jan. 1 when I started this. For many reasons, this blog is going on an extended leave, which, in fact, it was already on, but making it official makes it a little less embarrassing. I leave with some parting thoughts and expect to return in about two months. When I was young, I grew up in an era when hitchhiking was relatively safe. For example, my younger brother and I hitchhiked when I was 10 years old into town to see the original movie version of Charlotte's Web. Of course, such activity is beyond dangerous now, but one consequence of hitchhiking that I never properly took into account was that it was usually much easier to get somewhere far away from home than to get back again . In some ways, I feel like I have traveled some distance with this blog and now need to think about the return trip. But if you were leaving someone's house in the dead of night, the tradition was to at least leave a parting message with some reason for your nocturnal departure, and so, with a web-based scrap of paper and a scrawling pen, this is mine.
[Ok, I have been guilted into pointing out there is more to this entry if you click the title, though I sort of liked the easter eggish feel of not making it obvious, but no, I will not do 5 things because I am too much of a blathermouth to have many secrets.]
January 10, 2007
Library Web Chic
More on Tableless design
I wasn’t picking on any specific project or vendor in my previous post. I just have noticed that people don’t go to remove the tables where they are easy to remove. For example, a simple two column layout is relatively easy to do using CSS. Also, I’ve noticed that tables get used a lot [...]
LibraryCrunch
and now for something completely different...
Watching the Wheels
People say I'm crazy doing what I'm doing, Well they give me all kinds of warnings to save me from ruin, When I say that I'm o.k. they look at me kind of strange, Surely your not happy now you no longer play the game, People say I'm lazy dreaming my life away, Well they give me all kinds of advice designed to enlighten me, When I tell that I'm doing Fine watching shadows on the wall, Don't you miss the big time boy you're no longer on the ball? I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round, I really love to watch them roll, No longer riding on the merry-go-round, I just had to let it go, People asking questions lost in confusion, Well I tell them there's no problem, Only solutions, Well they shake their heads and they look at me as if I've lost my mind, I tell them there's no hurry... I'm just sitting here doing time, I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round, I really love to watch them roll, No longer riding on the merry-go-round, I just had to let it go.
-John Lennon
This was off Double Fantasy, the last album Lennon would make.
Catalogablog
MIT Catalog
The MIT catalog is once again available for download, not as MARC only as MODS and MODS/RDF. If you need or want a large dataset for testing or research this is a good option. The announcement gives more details.MODS
The CONSER Standard Record and RDA
A comparison of the proposed CONSER standard record and RDA has been mounted on the JSC Web site.RDA
One Big Library. - dchud shelf-readin', taking notes and naming names.![image]()
Not exactly Magic Windows, but close enough
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I'm struggling to meet a writing deadline (how does anybody do this every month for years? Yes, I'm asking you, Roy...) and just found a big helping hand: WriteRoom. It does just what it says it does, expertly well.
As somebody who basically learned to compose prose during my K-12 years while seated at an Apple ][+, a full screen with only a black background and green text is surprisingly supportive of just getting stuff done.
(And there's even a clone for windows called Dark Room.)
Now to get back to that piece...
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