Libraries & Networked Information

Cameron Moll (via Ryan Eby) wants “weight” customer ratings to reflect how two products of the same rating might have wildly different numbers of reviews.

At first glance I agree with him, but after a moment of thought, I begin to wonder if I want the ratings weighted by the number of reviews, or the number of reviews I “trust.”

Amazon keeps huge amounts of data about all its customers. So how hard could it be to correlate my purchasing behavior with the purchasing behaviors of the reviewers along with the details of which reviews I’ve previously checked as “helpful.”

I mentioned SHERPA a while ago:

SHERPA is a large consortial UK project that’s attempting to build an academic archive/repository for 20 institutions, including the British Library and Cambridge University. [link added]

I bring this up again now because they’ve got some advice for people on the subject of digital archives. They recommend EPrints, an open source project developed and maintained by the University of Southampton. Second to that, or for those interested in archiving a broader variety of object types, they suggest MIT’s DSpace.

A chat with Ryan Eby, also an Edward Tufte fan, elicited this line about another reason we continue to struggle with the design of our catalogs:

data isn’t usable by itself

if it was then the OPAC would just be marc displays

And yesterday I was speaking with Corey Seeman about how to measure and use “popularity” information about catalog items. It got me thinking about Flickr’s interestingness metric, which seems to combine the number of times a photo has been “favorited,” viewed, and commented. In a related fashion, I’ve been looking at ways to track the terms people use to find catalog items and use those to help improve search results. A basic form of this is in the OPAC prototype I demonstrated yesterday.

And all of this has me looking forward to Aaron Krowne’s Quality Metrics presentation at code4lib.

In recognition of the divisive and increasingly meaningless nature of x.0 monikers — think library 2.0 and the web 2.0 that inspired it — I’m doing away with them.

When Jeffrey Zeldman speaks with disdain about the AJAX happy nouveaux web application designers and the second internet bubble (and he’s not entirely off-base) and starts claiming he’s moving to Web 3.0, then it’s a pretty clear sign that we should give up on trying to version all this.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s something big going on, but it doesn’t respect version numbers and it isn’t about AJAX or social software. And as much as designers and developers want to take credit, we cant. I’m not the first to say it, but let me repeat it without the baggage of these x.0 monikers: people are making the internet a part of their daily lives and in doing so it is changing us. With or without a label, that’s what we need to talk about.

Unattributable:

“Poetic justice is a lie. It’s no more real than military inteligence. The entire motivation for poetry is the unjust pain of life.”

Separately, what’s the appropriate LC classification for Scotch? My first thought was around PR600, but what do I know. Should it go elsewhere? What about other spirits?

MIT has DSpace, their solution to save, share, and search the collected work of their faculty and students (in use by 115 public sites). Now Royce just shared with me this presentation by Bill Hubbard, the SHERPA project manager at University of Nottingham.

What’s SHERPA? The name is an acronym for Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access, but it’s a project intended to archive the pre and post publication papers and other research products.

They’ve got some advice for those interested in these things. Including some help with dealing with publishers. Bill reported some analysis in his presentation that found that 93% of the publishers they deal with at Nottingham allow authors to self-archive their work in publicly available repositories.

Related to this, I previously reported on arXiv.org. The intent there is slightly different, as Henry Farrell explains:

[I]ts effectively replaced journal publication as the primary means for physicists to communicate with each other. Journal publication is still important — but as an imprimatur, a proof of quality, rather than a way to disseminate findings to a wider audience.

Ryan Eby gets excited over LiveSearch. And who can blame him? I mention the preceding because it explains the following: two links leading to some good examples of livesearch in the wild.

Inquisitor is a livesearch plugin for OS X’s Safari web browser. It gives the top few hits, spelling suggestions where appropriate, and links to jump to other search engines.

Garrett Murray’s ManiacalRage is an interesting blog on its own, but he’s also doing some good AJAX on his search interfaces. Look first at the archive search. But also take some time to appreciate the new content search. Sure, you’ll have some complaints, but it’s his site and not yours and there are some ideas there that are pretty interesting and useful.

You don’t like the “2.0” moniker? So what. John Blyberg reminds us that “if we’re arguing over semantics, we’ve been derailed.” And Stephen Abram is said to have cautioned us: “when librarians study something to death, we forget that death was not the original goal.”

Fresh from Nature: a peer reveiw comparison of Wikipedia’s science coverage against Encyclopaedia Britannica:

One of the extraordinary stories of the Internet age is that of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopaedia that anyone can edit. This radical and rapidly growing publication, which includes close to 4 million entries, is now a much-used resource. But it is also controversial: if anyone can edit entries, how do users know if Wikipedia is as accurate as established sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica?

Several recent cases have highlighted the potential problems. One article was revealed as falsely suggesting that a former assistant to US Senator Robert Kennedy may have been involved in his assassination. And podcasting pioneer Adam Curry has been accused of editing the entry on podcasting to remove references to competitors’ work. Curry says he merely thought he was making the entry more accurate.

However, an expert-led investigation carried out by Nature — the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and Britannica’s coverage of science — suggests that such high-profile examples are the exception rather than the rule. (link added)

Go read the whole story.

No, I don’t mean that they’re disrupting it, I mean they’re getting it. And in saying that, I don’t mean they’re figured it our first, but they they’re making some damn good acquisitions to get it right.

Mostly, I’m speaking of they’re purchase of Flickr last year and their acquisition of del.icio.us Friday. But in a somewhat lesser way I’m also speaking of their announcement Monday that they’ll be offering blogs as well.

Yeah, Google rocked this picture a good long while ago with their purchase of Blogger long before most people could understand what value it offered, and even Microsoft beat Yahoo! to this. But the better way to read this is as the final piece to a rather impressive array of social software.

And where perhaps only ten percent of internet users will likely ever be regular bloggers, it’s a safe assumption that nearly 100 percent of internet users will create bookmarks and almost as many will have reason to post a photo online. And with Yahoo! controlling the leading services for both, it sort of rearranges the picture.