photo: keflavik airport
According to the recently released Pew Internet report on online activities:
On an average day, about 94 million American adults use the internet; 77% will use email, 63% will use a search engine.
Among all the online activities tracked, including chatting and IMing, reading blogs or news, banking, and buying, not one of them includes searching a [...]
First, Josh Porter, the first speaker of the day has a blog where he’s posted his presentation notes and some key points. Josh spoke about Web 2.0, and ended with the conclusion that successful online technologies are those that best model user behavior. “I think Web 2.0 is about modeling something that already exists in [...]
I’m here at the NELINET Bibliographic Services Conference at the College of the Holy Cross today.
The conference is titled “Google vs. the OPAC: the challenge is on!” and there’s quite a lineup of speakers.
My presentation is on “the social life of metadata.” My slides are online, and below is some background.
The Library Catalog…
The catalog is [...]
I was tempted to speak without slides yesterday, and I must offer my apologies to anybody trying to read them now, as I’m not sure how the slides make sense without the context of my speech. On that point, it’s worth knowing that Lichen did an outstanding job liveblogging the event, despite struggling with a [...]
I’m here at the NEASIS&T Buy, Hack or Build event today at MIT’s Media Lab. On the list are Joshua Porter, Director of Web Development for User Interface Engineering, Pete Bell [corrected], co-founder of Endeca Solutions, and me.
I’m posting my slides here now, but I’m told we’ll see a podcast of the proceedings soon after [...]
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), [...]
Libraries are known for books. And despite the constant march of technology, despite the fact that we can put a bazillion songs in our pocket, despite the availability of the New York Times and so many other newspapers and thousands of journals online, books are a big part of what libraries are. Books, dead tree [...]
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 [...]
LibDev launched today. From the Welcome message there:
LibDev is a site for those interested in libraries and networked information. Want to find a way to apply tags or social bookmarking to library content? Interested in how Wikipedia can serve libraries? Want to find a better way to do patron loads or talk about what [...]
Wikipedia seems to get mixed reviews in the academic world, but I don’t fully understand why. There are those that complain that they can’t trust the untamed masses with such an important task as writing and editing an encyclopedia, then there are others that say you can’t trust the experts with it either. For my [...]
I think I’ve been avoiding commenting on this issue for weeks because it hits so close to home. First I read it in BiblioAcid, then Jenny Levine picked it up, then Richard Ackerman picked it up at the Science Library Pad: library catalogs are broken, and there’s no amount of adding pictures or fiddling with [...]
