It’s easy to see the eBook User’s Bill of Rights as a sign of the growing rift between libraries and content producers. Easy if you’re me, anyway. It connects very conveniently with Richard Stallman’s open letter to the Boston Public Library decrying what he summarizes as their complicity with DRM and abdication of their responsibilities [...]
David Cloutman on Code4Lib: Don’t forget to look at trends outside of “Libraryland”. A lot of professional library discussion takes place in an echo chamber, and bad ideas often get repeated and gain credibility as a result. Librarians usually overstate the uniqueness of their organizations and professions. When the question, “What are other libraries doing?” [...]
How Today’s College Students Use Wikipedia For Course-Related Research: Overall, college students use Wikipedia. But, they do so knowing its limitation. They use Wikipedia just as most of us do — because it is a quick way to get started and it has some, but not deep, credibility. 52% of respondents use Wikipedia frequently or [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
John Timmer brings up my two biggest complaints about Wolfram|Alpha. The first is that it’s even harder to identify the source of information than it is in Wikipedia, the other is what happens when searches fail: A bad Web search typically brings up results that help you refine your search terms; a bad Alpha search [...]
Who doesn’t want to be an anarchist librarian? Or a bibliophian?
I should have done screencasts like the above long ago. It’s not that they’re great, but they are a wonderful excuse to use the canned lounge music I’ve got. Those videos are now on the front page of the official Scriblio site, and I did five more to demo the installation and configuration. Big thanks [...]
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 [...]
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.
It’s a Pity that searchme disappeared… It was better than google…
Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Leave a Comment »