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Libraries & Networked Information

Where did all the votes go?

What happens to voting data after the election is over? What happens to all those certified results by polling place? How is it that there’s so much coverage leading up to and on the night of the election, but this guy seems to be one of the few sources of historical voting data? Amusingly, I found it linked on the Library of Congress’ website!

There’s some very old sources from E. Bowditch J. McConnel, who wrote some papers on voting patterns up to the 2000 election. The Census Bureau reports in detail on who registered and voted (including age, race, education, sex, marital status, veteran status, and more), but not how they voted, and not by geography.

OpenSecrets.org has political contribution stats by zip code (interesting: my last ZIP Code in NH contributes considerably less than my current zip code). Their data is based on the disclosure files managed and distributed by the Federal Election Commission.

Perhaps I’m just looking in the wrong place to find party aggregated registration information or vote histories by county or ZIP code?

Greetings Library Scientist

The California Library Association is pretty much like every other regional library association I’ve seen, not least because their most visible presence is their annual conference. It may be the season, but the CLA is more politically active than others I’ve known. At their core, most such associations exist to promote efficient transfer of operational knowledge from […] » about 800 words

Happy New Scriblio!

The most recently released, stable version of Scriblio is marked 2.9-r1 and was last updated in June 2010. You can be forgiven for thinking development had ceased in the interim. Today, however, I’m proud to introduce a completely new Scriblio, re-written from the ground up to take advantage of the latest features of WordPress and eliminate the mistakes […] » about 600 words

Web Strategy Discussion Starter

What follows is the text of a document I prepared to start and shape discussion about the future of the university website at my former place of work. The PDF version is what I actually presented, though in both instances I’ve redacted three types of information: the name of the institution (many already know, but […] » about 1500 words

What Content Should a University Website Include?

I no longer have a dog in this race, but in cleaning up my hard drive of old files I’ve run across a few items of note. For example, the above illustration I once used to describe the different content, audiences, and uses of a university website. Current students, prospective students, their family, faculty, employees, […] » about 400 words

Search The Sears And Roebuck Catalog

You’d think the Sears Archives would offer an online search of their historical catalogs, but the best you’ll find is a list of libraries holding the microfilms. Ancestry.com offers an online search, but only to paying members. I’m looking into this because I was looking for historical trends in consumer products and thought the catalog […] » about 100 words

eBook User’s Bill of Rights

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 […] » about 300 words

Things Learned About Natural Language Processing at THATcamp Bay Area

The first session I joined at THATcamp was Aditi Muralidharan‘s text mining boot camp, and the topic seemed to set my agenda for the rest of the event (though I wish Aditi had also hosted her proposed data visualization session). Aditi’s blog: mininghumanities.com. If I understood correctly, much of Aditi’s presentation and experience is based on the […] » about 200 words

Pearls Of Wisdom In Mail List Threads

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?” arises in addressing a technical problem, don’t be afraid to generalize the question to other types of organizations. Too often, the answer to the question, “What are other libraries doing?” is “Failing.” Emulate for the sake of success, not conformity.

It’s a point I’m always trying to make: look outside your specialization.

College Students Use, Love, Are Aware Of The Limitations Of Wikipedia

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 […] » about 200 words

What The Critics Are Missing About Apple’s iPad

It’s doubtful that anybody reading this blog missed the news that Apple finally took the wraps off their much rumored tablet: the iPad. Trouble is, a bunch of folks seem to be upset about the features and specs, or something that made the buzz machine go meh. It’s just a bigger iPhone, complain the privileged […] » about 400 words

Do e-Books Have A Future?

David Weinberger kicked off the latest installment in the ongoing debate about the future of electronic books versus paper books in his Will books survive? A scorecard… post. He’s got some good points, but like many of the smart folks I admire, he approaches this question assuming that books, in any form, are important. Ursula […] » about 300 words

WordPress Hacks: Nested Paths For WPMU Blogs

Situation: you’ve got WordPress Multi-User setup to host one or more domains in sub-directory mode (as in site.org/blogname), but you want a deeper directory structure than WPMU allows…something like the following examples, perhaps: site.org/blogname1 site.org/departments/blogname2 site.org/departments/blogname3 site.org/services/blogname3 The association between blog IDs and sub-directory paths is determined in wpmu-settings.php, but the code there knows nothing […] » about 900 words

Who Gets To Control The Future Of Libraries?

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 […] » about 400 words

What is David McNicol’s URL Cache Plugin?

The description to David McNicol’s URL Cache Plugin raises more questions than it answers:

Given a URL, the url_cache() function will attempt to download the file it represents and return a URL pointing to this locally cached version.

Where did he plan to use it? Does he envision the cache as an archive, or for performance? Why hasn’t it been updated since 2005?

It caught my interest because I’ve long been interested in a solution to link rot in my blog. A real “perma-permalink” would be very useful.

Too Bad The Hanzo Archives WordPress Plugin Is Caput

The Hanzo Archives WordPress plugin is something I’d be very excited to use. Ironically, it’s disappeared from the web (though the blog post hasn’t):

We’ve released a WordPress Plugin which automatically archives anything you link to in your blog posts; it also adds a ‘perma-permalink’ for the archived version adjacent to each original link.

An Amazon Web Services case study put me on to Hanzo a while ago, and in May 2008 I actually spoke with Mark Middleton (the markm who posted the entry above). Mark revealed that community take-up on the plugin and other general purpose web archiving services was below expectations. The company has since refocused on legal matters (even their blog tag-line has changed to “web archiving for compliance and e-discovery”).

I wonder if, now that the number of people and companies that have been blogging for years has grown, there might be more of a market for such a service.

Wolfram|Alpha’s Missing Feature: Libraries

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 returns nothing, and it’s not clear that there’s an easy way to fix that.

Here’s a simple way: have Alpha fall back on library data. One example he offers, “global bioethanol production,” is perfect for both library reference and bibliographic collections.

Google Book Search offers a few promising hits for that query, as does Google Scholar. And if we imagine that search in the context of faceted collections, we’d be able to identify subjects the search phrase is associated with and offer additional access points. Add to that some crowdsourcing opportunities for users to expand the knowledge base by identifying an item or piece of text that answers their question and we’ll have a real competitor to Google.