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Libraries & Networked Information

Information Is Sexy

It used to be you could identify the librarian by the sensible shoes, but times they are a changing. Witness this ad from Library Bar. Sure their “librarians” are bartenders, but what cultural shift changed to thrust librarians up the sex appeal scale? Yeah, this is old. After all, it was the Spring 2004 of […] » about 200 words

Politics And The Google Economy

While I’m anxiously working to better fit libraries into the Google Economy, a few paragraphs of Barry Glassner’s The Culture of Fear, got me thinking about its role in politics. Glassner was telling of how a 1996 article in USA Today quoted the National Assocation of Scholars saying that Georgetown University had dumbed down its […] » about 700 words

Put A Pepper In Your Library

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 […] » about 600 words

ILS: Inventory or Search and Retrieval System?

There’s an interesting discussion going at LibDev about what our ILSs are. It all started with a discussion of what role XML and webservices could/should play with ILS/catalogs, but a comment reminded us that Vendor’s decisions about adding new features to products that have been around for 20 or 30 years sometimes edge towards lock-in. […] » about 300 words

Tags Tags Tags

David Weinberger at Many-to-Many pointed me to Tom Coates’ post about different schools of thought regarding tags. Coates has been thinking about tags as keywords, annotations. Thats how I’ve been using and thinking about tags too, but some people have different ideas.

…At the end of the argument I said to Joshua that it was almost like he was treating tags as folders. And he replied, exasperated, that this was exactly what they were.

Exasperation aside, Coates is pretty sure that Joshua’s view is loosing currency and the keywords view is growing.

Wienberger offers this explanation: we use tags as folders to organize things for ourselves, but we use tags as keywords as a way to contribute to the social understanding of things. That’s what Yahoo’s Social Search is trying to leverage.

Related: Google’s War On Hierarchy.

Full-Text Searching Inside Books

Search Engine Watch did a story about how to use Google and Amazon’s tools to search full-text content inside books.

The gist? when you can get to the tools and where they’ve got content, it does a lot to make books as accessible and open as electronic content.

Sort of related: I’ve spoken of Google Print before and there’s more in the Libraries and Networked Information category.

Organizational/Institutional Blogging Done Right

Jenny Levine is talking about an example of The Perfect Library Blog over at The Shifted Librarian.

The posts are written in the first person and in a conversational tone, with the author’s first name to help stress the people in the library. The staff isn’t afraid to note problems with the new catalog, the web site, or anything else. Full transparency — nice. You can feel the level of trust building online. They respond to every comment that needs it, whether it’s a criticism, question, or suggestion. And some of the comments are fantastic. Users are even helping debug the new catalog.

Jenny quotes some examples, go look.

The Google Economy

I’ve been talking about it a lot lately, most recently in a comment at LibDev. In the old world, information companies could create value by limiting access to their content. Most of us have so internalized this scarcity = value theory that we do little more than grumble about the New York Times’ authwall or […] » about 400 words

The High Cost Of Metasearch For Libraries

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 […] » about 500 words

LibDev Launched

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 […] » about 200 words

GeoTagging Gets A New Meaning

Who doesn’t love tagging? No, tagging as in annotating, not graffiti. Anyway, Rixome is the latest among a bunch of plans/projects to enable tagging of geographic spaces/real-life environments. The good people at We Make Money Not Art had this in their post: rixome is a network and a tool that turns mobile screens into windows […] » about 300 words

Big Brother Gets More Eyes

Engadget yesterday had a story about the Mobile Plate Hunter 900, a device that mounts on police cars and scans 500 to 800 license plates an hour. More details are in the Wired News story, where LA County police commander Sid Heal notes that the system is hands-off: “It doesn’t require the [officer] to do […] » about 200 words

Google Print: Reports From Michigan & Oxford

I’m listening and watching along with the EDUCAUSE online presentation from the Universities of Michigan and Oxford and their participation in Google Print. Presenters: John P. Wilkin Associate University Librarian Library Information Technology and Technical and Access Services University of Michigan   Reginald Carr Director of University Library Services and Bodley’s Librarian University of Oxford […] » about 300 words

The Mystifying Aroma Of Rot

I love libraries, and I love books, but there the needs of our students and limitations of our budgets have no room for misplaced romantic attachments. That’s why I’ve found myself paraphrasing something from Ibiblio’s Paul Jones (via Teleread):

That smell of an old book, that smell of old libraries? That’s the smell of the books rotting.

We must remember that libraries catalog and share information and knowledge, not books. Our students and faculty have already voted with their feet and demonstrated that our paper (and microform) collections of periodicals are useless compared to the online, fully searchable versions. How long before the same happens for books as well?

Connections: some people don’t get this, but there are a number who do (too many to list, actually). This issue is bigger than ebooks alone, but OpenReader deserves a plug here too.

BBC Backstage Is Gonna Rock (Once They Release The APIs)

The APIs aren’t yet out, but the BBC has already won me over with their Backstage BBC concept. Of course, I’m a fan of anything with an API, but the real deal here is that it appears they’re planning on releasing a “query by geo-location data” API — and I’m all a gaga about about […] » about 100 words

The Google Economy Vs. Libraries

Roger over at Electric Forest is making some arguments about the value of open access to information. Hopefully he’ll forgive me for my edit of his comment (though readers check the original to make sure I preserved the original meaning):

…keep the [information] under heavy protection and you will find that people ignore this sheltered content in favor of the sources that embrace the web and make everything accessible… [Open and accessible resources] will become the influential authorities, not because they are more trustworthy, or more authoritative, or better written, but because they are more accessible.

I’ve been calling this the “Google Economy,” where the value of information is directly proportional to its accessibility. This is a foreign land to libraries, where isolation and division of information is the norm (just count the number of unrelated search boxes linked on your library site), but it’s something I see a few people working to overcome. Kudos to Roger and others for a lot of great work.

Wikipedia and Libraries

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 […] » about 400 words

…And Then You Realize You Wasted Your Life

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 […] » about 500 words

About That Bookless UT Austin Library

There’s a lot of talk about the New York Times story about UT Austin’s undergrad library throwing out its books. Problem is, I don’t think it’s as exciting as people are making it out to be. First, the undergraduate library is one of 14 libraries on campus and the real issue was space, not books. […] » about 700 words

Casey Bisson

Google’s War On Hierarchy, Alert The Librarians

Via Ernie Miller I saw a link to John Hiller‘s story about Google’s War on Hierarchy, and the Death of Hierarchical Folders. Googlization is a concept libraries have been strugling with for a while. And while it’s hard to say wether the change is good or bad, I can say that failure to change makes […] » about 500 words

Casey Bisson

Library Portal Integration

I’ve been back at work less than a week now, and I’m already behind. I’ve finally posted the handout and slides (as a QuickTime movie, PDF here) from our IUG presentation. I’ll submit them to IUG for their archive and add them to the Plymouth State University library portal integration page in an update soon. […] » about 200 words

Casey Bisson

What Are You Doing To Shape The Future Of Libraries?

Jenny Levine recently posted a note about OPACs and XML and Maps wherein she makes two points: first, Mike Copley at North Shore Libraries in New Zealand has been doing some exciting stuff to help patrons find books (go ahead, go there and click a “view map” link), then expands her post to address the […] » about 400 words

Casey Bisson

XML Server Applications

Well, it’s done. The handout and slides as presented are posted here, and I’ll add them to our portal integration page (yeah, they’re sort of connected) when I return to Plymouth. The slides don’t stand on their own, but for those that were there, they should be helpful reminders of what was said what links […] » about 500 words

Casey Bisson