Libraries & Networked Information

It’s old news (Boing Boing and Slashdot covered it a month ago), but Flickr’s patent application is a bit troublesome. It’s not that they’re trying to patent tagging (they’re not), it’s that they’re trying to patent the things library folks have been wanting to do (and in some cases actually doing) for some time.

Media objects, such as images or soundtracks, may be ranked according to a new class of metrics known as ”interestingness.“ These rankings may be based at least in part on the quantity of user-entered metadata concerning the media object, the number of users who have assigned metadata to the media object, access patterns related to the media object, and/or a lapse of time related to the media object.

See, interestingness is what you get when you link two or more metrics — think $interestingness = ($circulation * $comments * $rating); — together to get a number you can rank items by. I’d been playing with that sort of thing with bsuite, does that mean I might be subject to a lawsuit?

Via a friend who coordinated a program I presented at not long ago I received this message about difficulty accessing my blog post with notes from the presentation:

Do you have the notes electronically that you could send? Believe it or not our federal government internet filter is blocking access to the blog site below…..big brother is truly at work these days…..

Jessamyn has been dealing with this for a while now, but this is the first I’d learned that I’d been blocked.

It’s good to know that my site has joined the ranks of those like Jessamyn’s and MySpace and probably thousands (millions?) of others that are blocked but shouldn’t be. Thinking of that, I wanted to find a list of those websites, but Google came up short. Any suggestions?

What I did find, however, amused me: <a href=“http://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_can_i_connect_to_myspace_at_school.html” title=““How can I connect to MySpace at school?” from the Ask Dave Taylor! Tech Support Blog”>How can I connect to MySpace at school?, What are YOU looking at?, and Elementary Student Threatened With Psychiatric Evaluation After Visiting 9/11 Websites.

Rebecca Nesson, speaking via Skype and appearing before us as her avatar in Second Life, offered her experiences as a co-instructor of Harvard Law School‘s CyberOne, a course being held jointly in a meatspace classroom and in Second Life, and open to students via Harvard Law, the Harvard Extension School, and to the public that shows up in Second Life.

Nesson has an interesting blog post about how it all works, but she also answered questions from the audience about why it works:

As a distance learning environment it’s head and shoulders above anything else because of levels and types of interactions possible versus any previous tool.

It’s a poor format for lectures, but a great format for discussions, so it really encourages conversation and discourse.

It’s a community that exists independent of the class meeting. In here we have much more of those liminal times when people are just hanging out. …We have more opportunities for interaction.

They don’t want to engage in chat with their professors in the classroom space, they want to chat with other students in their own space.

— from Eric Gordon’s presentation this morning.

Hey, isn’t that the lesson that smart folks have been offering for a while now: “Nobody cares about you or your site. Really.” How could learning environments not be subject to the same cluetrain forces affecting the rest of the world?

Students love IM. They love Google. They love FaceBook. What does your courseware matter to them?

It’s really titled Social Software for Teaching & Learning, and I’m here with John Martin, who’s deeply involved with our learning management system and portfolio efforts (especially as both of these are subject to change real soon now).

Aside: CMS = content management system, LMS = learning management system. Let’s please never call an LMS a CMS…please?

On the schedule is…

• Social Software in the Classroom: Happy Marriage or Clash of Cultures? (Eric Gordon, Emerson)
• Teaching and Learning in a Virtual World (Rebecca Nesson, Harvard)
• Electronic Constructivism: Inspiring and Motivating Students with Thought Provoking Questions and Emerging Technologies (Dr. Maureen Brown Yoder, Lesley University)
• Social Computing Tools in the Curriculum (Katie Livingston Vale, MIT)

A bibliographic instruction quiz we used to use asked students how many of Dan Brown’s books could be found in our catalog. The idea was that attentive students would dutifully search by author for “brown, dan,” get redirected to “Brown, Dan 1964-,” and find three books. Indeed, the expected answer was “three.”

As it turns out, my library has all four of Dan Brown’s published books, including the missing Digital Fortress. The problem is that three books are cataloged under the more common Brown, Dan 1964-, but Fortress was cataloged under Brown, Danielle.

The problem is that cataloging is imperfect.

Yeah, it takes some marbles to say that, but the fact is that cataloging is a human endeavor. Humans make mistakes. The challenge we face is to build systems that tolerate error, and then make it easy to fix those errors when discovered.

David Kane asked the web4libbers:

Can anyone tell me what the conversion between ISBN-10 and ISBN-13 is, please. I need to write a little conversion program. Anything in PHP, for example.

Answers:

“There is already an online converter: http://www.isbn.org/converterpub.asp;” some pointing at Wikipedia on ISBNs, Bookland, and EANs; John Blyberg’s PHP port of the PERL ISBN-10/13 tool; some explanation that you have to watch the check digit, and discussion about why you’d need to do all this conversion.

Finally, Tim asked:

Someone should offer single and batch converstion as a free API, not an online form and an offer to have a “representive” call you for larger jobs.

Does anyone want that, or shall I?

And I answered:

http://api.wpopac.net/v1/isbn1013/0811822842 changed: http://api.scriblio.net/v01a/isbn1013/0811822842

Same usage as xISBN and thingISBN. Returns empty result on invalid ISBNs.

Based on Blyberg’s code, incorporates some changes, may not be accurate. Poke at it, break it. Report findings, but don’t blame me if it returns incorrect results (I will try to fix the code/service, though).

Geeky extra: anybody know the Lat and Lon to Bookland? I’d really like to put this post on the map.

LCE2006 was a success. Let me quickly join with the other participants to offer my appreciation to John Blyberg and Alan Grey for all their work planning the event, as well as Darien Public Library director Louise Berry and the rest of the library for hosting the event.

Side note: Darien is a beautiful town, but we all have to learn to pronounce the name like a local.

Michael Golrick and John Blyberg each have a number of photos on Flickr, and I’m jealous of those like Lichen Rancourt who can live-blog events like this. I’m still digesting what I learned, but at least I can wash it down with a sip from my new LCE mug.

Further discussion will continue, as always, in the blogosphere, in the L2 Wiki, and just about anywhere else librarians gather.

In addition to all that material, let me offer some screenshots and notes from my short preface to the discussion about OPACs. (And, I hope my words were clearer than the pictures snapped of me at the time — vis: one and two).

In the list of things I should have done a month ago is an item about making my hotel reservations for Library Camp East 2006. Fortunately, John Blyberg notes that Alan Gray has arranged for a special rate Doubletree Hotel in Norwalk, not far from the site of the event.

Library Camp East 2006 is set for September 25 at Darien Public Library in Darien CT.

It’s an unconference, so the content is determined by the participants, and judging from the names on the signup page (John Blyberg and Jessamyn sound excited), there will be a lot of good discussion.

Somewhere in the WordPress code extra slashes are being added to my query terms.

I’ve turned GPC magic quotes off via a php_value magic_quotes_gpc 0 directive in the .htaccess file (we have far too much legacy code that nobody wants to touch to turn it off site-wide). And I know my code is doing one run of addslashes(), but where are the other two sets of slashes coming from?

I really need to keep better tabs on Michael Fagan, as his June 11 OpenSearch Update is full of goodies.

Matt Mullenweg announced WordCamp in San Francisco, then ten days later Abby announced the LibraryThing cookout in Portland (Maine). Both are set for August 5. The LibraryThing event promises free burgers and potato salad, while WordCamp attendees will enjoy both free BBQ and free t-shirts. I’d like to go to both, but rather than have to make some decision about which one I’d most like to go to, I’m leaning on the fact that I’d already bought my flight to SFO when the LT event was announced.

Anyway, it’s casual Friday here, so this post is really just an excuse to (again) link to the funniest BBQ-related video I’ve seen in a while.