photo: prelinger library
I mentioned SHERPA a while ago:
SHERPA is a large consortial UK project that’s attempting to build an academic archive/repository for 20 institutions, including the British Library and Cambridge University. [link added]
I bring this up again now because they’ve got some advice for people on the subject of digital archives. They recommend EPrints, an open source [...]
It’s been a problem we’ve struggled with here for much longer than we should have, and it took a hotshot new guy in desktop support to show us the answer. But if you know the right magic, you can add a printer to Windows XP and make it available to all users.
See, if you add [...]
Drawing from John Blyberg’s ILS Customer’s Bill of Rights and
The Social Customer Manifesto, Jenny Levine offers this Online Library User Manifesto:
I want to have a say, so you need to provide mechanisms for this to happen online.
I want to know when something is wrong, and what you’re going to do to fix it.
I [...]
As part of a larger message to faculty returning from winter break, our CIO offered this summary of how he sees advancing internet use affecting higher education:
Are you familiar with blogs and podcasts? Google them, or look them up in Wikipedia. Some of you may already be using these new tools. Others may think these [...]
We can be forgiven for not noticing, but the world changed not long ago.
Sometime after the academics gave up complaining about the apparent commercialization of the internet, and while Wall Street was licking it’s wounds after the first internet boom went bust, the world changed.
Around the time we realized that over 200 million Americans have [...]
You won’t get your salad dressing on the side in San Antonio. I don’t know what it says about a place, but in New England it’s so common I never learned to ask for it on the side, it just happens. Not so in San Antonio.
You’ll also have trouble finding a place to eat [...]
A chat with Ryan Eby, also an Edward Tufte fan, elicited this line about another reason we continue to struggle with the design of our catalogs:
data isn’t usable by itself
if it was then the OPAC would just be marc displays
And yesterday I was speaking with Corey Seeman about how to measure and use “popularity” information [...]
ALA Midwinter IUG SIG Presentation: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0
update: PDF version with space for notes
Web 2.0 and other “2.0” monikers have become loaded terms recently. But as we look back at the world wide web of 1996, there can be little doubt that today’s web is better and more useful. Indeed, that seems [...]
I’m in San Antonio for ALA Midwinter and enjoying the benefits of wide-area mobile internet access via my Treo and and the power of local search. This is sort of a test for me and my Treo, as I passed on all the usual trip prep I do and entirely I’m depending on what I’ll [...]
Take a look at this editorial by Jerry D. Campbell, CIO and Dean of University Libraries at the University of Southern California:
Academic libraries today are complex institutions with multiple roles and a host of related operations and services developed over the years. Yet their fundamental purpose has remained the same: to provide access to trustworthy, [...]
In recognition of the divisive and increasingly meaningless nature of x.0 monikers — think library 2.0 and the web 2.0 that inspired it — I’m doing away with them.
When Jeffrey Zeldman speaks with disdain about the AJAX happy nouveaux web application designers and the second internet bubble (and he’s not entirely off-base) and starts claiming [...]
I have over 1000 posts here at MaisonBisson, but even so, the table with all those posts is under 3MB. Now I’ve got a project with 150,000 posts — yes, 150,000 posts! — and the table is about 500MB. An associated table, structured sort of like WP’s postsmeta, has over 1.5 million records and weighs [...]
The ALA’s Intellectual Freedom folks came up with this Radical, Militant Librarian button (which I found in Library Mistress’ photostream):
In recognition of the efforts of librarians to help raise awareness of the overreaching aspects of the USA PATRIOT Act, the American Library Association (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) is offering librarians an opportunity [...]
I’m not running it here (only because I’m too lazy), but I was happy to find Arne Brachold’s Del.icio.us - Bookmark this! WordPress Plugin. It puts a sweet Bookmark on del.icio.us link whereever you call this function: <?php dbt_getLinkTag(“Bookmark on del.icio.us”); ?>
Arne also wrote the Google sitemap plugin I use (though it turns out I’m [...]
Rebecca Lieb reports for ClickZ Stats that, based on US Census data (report), most Americans have PCs and web access:
Sixty-two million U.S. households, or 55 percent of American homes, had a Web-connected computer in 2003, according to just-released U.S. Census data. That’s up from 50 percent in 2001, and more than triple 1997’s 18 [...]
