photo: reference information
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 [...]
(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 [...]
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.”
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 [...]
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 [...]
[]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 we have and how [...]
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 [...]
Even though mountain bike sales and participation are down (as a percentage of market share, biking has been declining for ten years), the Library of Congress has just issued a directive to change the subject heading from “All Terrain Cycling” to “Mountain Biking.” The term was apparently first coined by Charlie Kelly and Gary Fisher [...]
Like Mr. Ranganathong said: “The intellect cannot be tied down with a decimal thong.” (via)
A post to Web4lib alerted me to this U Mich survey about libraries in social networks (blog post) that finds 77% of students don’t care for or want libraries in Facebook or MySpace.
the biggest reason being that they feel the current methods (in-person, email, IM) are more than sufficient. 14% said no because they [...]
A member of the Web4lib mail list asked:
How do I create a semantic web site?
I know I have to use either RDF or OWL but do I use either of these to create a mark up language which I then use to create the web site or, with the semantic web do we move away [...]
Scriblio 2.3 v4 is out. See it. Download it. Install it. Join the mail list.
What’s new?
Lots of small bug fixes.
Implemented wp_cache support.
Revamped SQL query logic for better memory efficiency.
New widget options.
Search suggest/autocomplete support (implemented in the new theme).
New theme. New Theme! By Jon Link.
The Library Problem:
In March of 2006 my wife Mary and I owned about 3,500 books. We both have eclectic interests, voracious appetites for knowledge, and a great love of used bookstores. The problem was that we had no idea what books we had or where any of them were. We lost books all the time, [...]
It’s way cool to see Lichen’s Scriblio installation instructions translated to Hungarian. Even cooler to have Sarah the tagging librarian take hard look at it and give us some criticism (and praise!). But I’m positively ecstatic to see Robin Hastings’ post on installing Scriblio (it’s not easy on Windows, apparently).
Part of it is pride [...]
The first article database I remember using was Dialog, sometime in the late 80s or early 90s. Today I found myself amused that we used to call such things “interactive.” That is, you poked the command line interface with questions and it usually beeped a syntax error, all while they charge $4 per minute, plus [...]
