Category Archives: Libraries & Networked Information

Where Do They Find The Time?

April 30, 2008 – 11:21 am

Clay Shirky recently posted a transcript of his Web 2.0 Expo keynote.
…If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project — every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in — that represents something like the cumulation of 100 [...]

By Casey | Also posted in Politics & Controversy, Technology | Comments (0)



Anglia Ruskin University Faces Criticism 2.0

April 28, 2008 – 11:17 am

Anglia Ruskin University is in Cambridge, but it’s not Cambridge University. It’s likely that none of us would even know of Anglia Ruskin’s existence if it wasn’t for Naomi Sugai, but she’s not interested in promoting the school.
She’s got complaints, she’s fed up, and she’s taking her case to YouTube.
Well, she took her case to [...]

By Casey | Also posted in Politics & Controversy, Technology | Comments (0)

SWIFT: Another Ham Handed Attempt At Social Networking

April 3, 2008 – 9:11 am

All yesterday and this morning I’ve been seeing tweets about SWIFT, so I finally googled it to see what it was about. The service promises to help organize conferences in some new 2.0 way, but it looks to be about as preposterous a social network as WalMart’s aborted 2006 attempt at copying MySpace.
There are some [...]

By Casey | Also posted in Politics & Controversy, Technology | Comments (0)

Evil Google

March 27, 2008 – 12:53 pm

Aaron Swartz’s Bubble City, Chapter 8:
He sent the report to his superior and wandered off for a bit to dwell on the power he had as a faceless person deep inside an office park in Mountain View to know every detail of another person’s life. He wondered what it would be like if he came [...]

By Casey | Also posted in Dispatches | Comments (0)

Google PageRank Is/Is Not/Is All Machine Generated

March 17, 2008 – 10:49 am

Google’s always been in the awkward position of claiming that PageRank is algorithmic, not editorial, while also explaining that they’re constantly adjusting their algorithms to ensure that PageRank reflects editorial judgments of quality. Here’s a peek inside the machine.

By Casey | Also posted in Dispatches, Technology | Comments (1)



Where The Previews Are

March 14, 2008 – 6:11 am

I announced yesterday Scriblio’s integration of Google’s new book viewability API that links to full text, previews, or additional book information (depending on copyright status and publisher foresight). Now that it’s live with Plymouth’s full catalog, I spent a moment browsing the collection and taking note of what books had what.
I get no preview for [...]

By Casey | Comments (0)

Scriblio Integrates Google Book Search Links

March 13, 2008 – 1:56 pm

(crossposted at Scriblio.net)
Using the newly released book viewability API in Google Book Search, Plymouth State University’s Lamson Library and Learning Commons is one of the first libraries to move beyond simply listing their books online and open them up to reading and searching via the web.
Take a look at how this works with books [...]

By Casey | Comments (2)

Warming

March 10, 2008 – 4:49 am

If this doesn’t warm your heart, check to see that it’s not made of stone.

By Casey | Also posted in Books, Movies, Music, Dispatches | Comments (0)

Netflix for Audio Books

March 10, 2008 – 4:23 am

Netflix for audio books: Simply Audiobooks. Though it makes me wonder why we don’t say ?like a library for audiobooks where they send you the stuff you want.?

By Casey | Also posted in Books, Movies, Music, Dispatches | Comments (1)

Quaint vs. Libraries

March 5, 2008 – 5:13 pm

This Slashdot post asks the same question a lot of people do: ?can libraries be saved from the internet??
Slate has an interesting photo essay exploring the question of how to build a public library in the age of Google, Wikipedia, and Kindle. The grand old reading rooms and stacks of past civic monuments are giving [...]

By Casey | Comments (2)

Scriblio Feature: Text This To Me

February 28, 2008 – 12:51 pm

Take note of the ?New Feature: Text this to your cellphone? line above.
Adam Brin of Tricollege Libraries explained that the ?text this to me? feature he built to send location information about items in the library catalog as text messages to a user’s cell phone is being used as many as 60 times a [...]

By Casey | Comments (5)

Apache Reverse Proxy

February 19, 2008 – 11:03 am

Apache mod_proxy does most of the work, Nick Kew’s howto on running a reverse proxy with Apache explains it. Now, can I tack on some authentication and make it replace III’s WAM or EZproxy?

By Casey | Also posted in Dispatches | Comments (1)

Top Tech Trends

February 2, 2008 – 8:00 am

Contents:

Sophistication
Contextualization
Disintermediation
Identity & Reputation
Comments & Contribution

I’m excited and honored to be joining Meredith Farkas and David J. Fiander in a roundtable discussion of Top Tech Trends, an OLITA program at Superconference. We’ve made a pact not to share our trends with each other in advance (no peeking), so it’ll be interesting to see how much overlap [...]

By Casey | Comments (4)

OLA Superconference Presentation: Scriblio

February 1, 2008 – 11:54 am

I’m honored to be invited to the Ontario Library Association Superconference to present my work on Scriblio today (session #1329). A PDF of my slides is online.
Scriblio has had about a year of use in production at each of three sites, and the lessons suggest that Web 2.0 technologies really do work for libraries. And [...]

By Casey | Comments (0)

What Do Coots Eat?

January 29, 2008 – 4:26 pm

Turns out that coots are omnivorous, but prefer plant matter. Why.

By Casey | Also posted in Dispatches | Comments (2)