photo: taipei dragon
The following was my email response to a thread on the web4lib mail list:
Okay, it must be said: you’re all wrong[1].
I can understand that news of a librarian being fired/furloughed will raise our defenses, but that’s no excuse for giving up the considered and critical thinking that this occasion demands.
Consider this: the principle’s blog reveals [...]
Bret Victor offers the above design suggestions (from 2006) to Amazon in the book search results display (he’s comparing to this). I didn’t discover them at the time, but many of them are still relevant now. Bret notes that Amazon’s display doesn’t do a good job of answering the questions a person has when searching for [...]
Who doesn’t want to be an anarchist librarian? Or a bibliophian?
Jessamyn pointed out the dust up over the dissapearing of PaperOfRecord.com, a historical newspaper archive.
Richard Wallace’s Juice project (Javascript User Interface Componentised Extensions) is a “simple componentised framework constructed in Javascript to enable the sharing of Ajax Stye extensions to a web interface.”
WordPress or Scriblio users might do well to think about it as a way to put widgets on systems that don’t support widgets, though as Richard points [...]
I got a little excited when Shirley Lincicum wrote to the NGC4Lib mail list:
[O]ne of the most frustrating things for me about Next Generation Catalog systems as they currently exist is that they seem wholly focused on the user interface and can, in fact, actually hold libraries back from designing or implementing improved “back end” [...]
My slides for my presentation yesterday at code4lib are available both as a 2.7MB QuickTime and a 7.8 MB PDF, while the gist of talk went something like this:
Scriblio is an open source WordPress plugin that adds the ability to search, browse, and create structured data to the the popular blog/content management platform. And WordPress [...]
lcsh.info is gone, but there’s a lot to learn from this paper. I wish I’d seen that earlier.
Re-imagined a bit, anyway. Why browse a vertical list of results when you can flip through them like pages in a book (or album covers in iTunes). Searchme on the iPhone and iPod touch does just that.
As you type your search term, icons representing rough categories appear, allowing you to target your search and [...]
Declaration of Metadata Independance:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that Metadata is essential to all Users, and that the Creation of Metadata endows certain inalienable Rights, that among these are the right to collect, the right to share and the pursuit of Happiness through the reuse of the Metadata… (read more)
Via.
