photo: chairfight
Speaking Thursday at the Boston Library Consortium’s annual meeting in the beautiful Boston Public Library, my focus was on the status of our library systems and the importance of remixability.
My blog post on remixability probably covers the material best, but my slides are online as both an animated QuickTime and PDF.
BPL, BLC, boston library consortium, [...]
I certainly don’t mean this to be as snarky as it’s about to come out, but I love the fact that Isaak questions my claim that linkability is essential to online discussions (and thus, communities) with a link:
Linkability Fertilizes Online Communities
I really don’t know how linkability will build communities. But we really need to work [...]
I was honored to join the conversation yesterday for the latest Talis Library 2.0 Gang podcast, this one on folksonomies and tags. The MP3 is already posted and, as usual, it makes me wonder if I really sound like that. Still, listen to the other participants, they had some great things to say and made [...]
“Bagged products” is little better than “cookery.” I’m gonna bet that no customer has ever asked the sales people for “bagged products,” that nobody’s ever checked the yellow pages for “bagged products,” and without context, nobody would come close to answering a question on what the heck “bagged products” are all about.
But we do have [...]
It’s hard to know how Fuzzyfruit found the WPopac catalog page for A Baby Sister for Frances (though it is ranked fifth in a Google search for the title), but what matters is that she did find it, and she was able to link to it by simply copying the URL from her browser’s location [...]
It was more than a year ago that Lorcan Dempsey pointed out this bit from The Chronicle:
Librarians should not assume that college students welcome their help in doing research online. The typical freshman assumes that she is already an expert user of the Internet, and her daily experience leads her to believe that she can get what she wants online without having to undergo a training program. Indeed, if she were to use her library’s Web site, with its dozens of user interfaces, search protocols, and limitations, she might with some justification conclude that it is the library, not her, that needs help understanding the nature of electronic information retrieval.
I’d be excited just to be a fly on the wall at code4lib, but I’m on a bit of a mission to change the architecture of our library software — to make it more hackable, and make those hacks more sharable — so I had to propose a talk.
Title: What Blog Applications Can Teach [...]
I’d meant to point out these two articles from Library Journal ages ago, but now that I’m putting together my presentations for next week (NEASIS&T & NELINET), I realized I hadn’t.
Roy Tennant writes in Doing Data Differently that “our rich collections of metadata are underused.” While Roland Dietz & Carl Grant, in the same issue, [...]
Peter Morville, author of Ambient Findability, stirred up the web4lib email list with a message about Authority and Findability. His message is about how services like Wikipedia and Google are changing our global information architecture and the meaning of “authority.”
The reaction was quick, and largely critical, but good argument tests our thinking and weeds the [...]
Ryan beat me to reporting on the interesting new services at the Ockham Network (noted in this Web4lib post). The easiest one to grok is this spelling service, but there are others that are cooler.
He also alerted me to a Perl script to proxy Z39.50 to RSS. Though for those more into PHP (like me), [...]
I’ve been looking seriously at metasearch/federated search products for libraries recently. After a lot of reading and a few demos I’ve got some complaints.
I’m surprised how vendors, even now, devote so much time demonstrating patron features that are neither used nor appreciated by any patrons without an MLS. Recent lessons (one, two, three) should have [...]
