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Woot! Woot!

The press release: Making Libraries Relevant in an Internet-Based Society PSU’s Casey Bisson wins Mellon Award for innovative search software for libraries PLYMOUTH, N.H. — You can’t trip over what’s not there. Every day millions of Internet users search online for information about millions of topics. And none of their search results include resources from […] » about 600 words

Presentation: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0

MAIUG 2006 Philadelphia: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0 (interactive QuickTime with links or static PDF) Web 2.0 and other “2.0” monikers have become loaded terms. But as we look back at the world wide web of 1996, there can be little doubt that today’s web is better and more useful. Indeed, that seems to […] » about 400 words

Linkability Fertilizes Online Communities Redux

I certainly don’t mean this to be as snarky as it’s about to come out, but I love the fact that Isaak questions my claim that linkability is essential to online discussions (and thus, communities) with a link: Linkability Fertilizes Online Communities I really don’t know how linkability will build communities. But we really need […] » about 300 words

Library Camp East 2006

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).

WPopac Reloaded

I’ve re-thought the contents of the record and summary displays in WPopac. After some experimentation and a lot of listening, it became clear that people needed specific information when looking at a search result or a catalog record. So now, when searching for Cantonese slang, for instance, the summary displays show the title, year, format, […] » about 400 words

Stage Two Truth

Arthur Schopenhauer is suggested to have said: Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first it is ridiculed, in the second it is violently opposed, in the third is regarded as self-evident. If the reaction to Karen Calhoun‘s report to the Library of Congress on The Changing Nature of the […] » about 300 words

Tags, Folksonomies, And Whose Library Is It Anyway?

I was honored to join the conversation yesterday for the latest Talis Library 2.0 Gang podcast, this one on folksonomies and tags. The MP3 is already posted and, as usual, it makes me wonder if I really sound like that. Still, listen to the other participants, they had some great things to say and made […] » about 600 words

…It’s How You Use It

Not A Pretty Librarian has kicked things off well with a first post titled “It Is Not A Tool,” covering an argument about which has more value to a teenager: a car or a computer.

On one side is the notion that “She can’t drive herself to work with a computer.” While, on the other side is the growing likelihood that she won’t drive to work at all, but instead simply work at whatever computer she has available. But then, this is a teenager, and maybe practical matters like work don’t top the list. And that’s where Not A Pretty Librarian (who are you?) asks:

Can you imagine being nineteen right now without computer access?

Indeed, when college students are spending so much time on AIM and logging into Facebook daily, is a car really as important as a computer in a teenager’s social life? When 89 percent of students start their research in a search engine, isn’t the computer more important than a car to get to the library?

It’s Official

WPopac, a project I started on my nights and weekends, is now officially one of my day-job projects too. We’ve been using our WPopac-based catalog as a prototype since February 2006, but the change not only allocates a portion of my work time specifically to the development of the project, but also reflects the library‘s […] » about 200 words

OpenSearch In A Nutshell

OpenSearch is a standard way of querying a database for content and returning the results. The official docs note simply: “Any website that has a search feature can make their results available in OpenSearch format,” then adds: “Publishing your search results in OpenSearch™ format will draw more people to your content, by exposing it to […] » about 300 words

NELINET 2006 IT Conference Proposal

I recently submitted my proposal for the 2006 NELINET Information Technology Conference. It’s about WPopac, of course, but the excitement now is that the presentation would be the story of the first library outside PSU to implement it. WPopac is an open source replacement for a library’s online catalog that improves the usability, findability, and […] » about 300 words

Technology Scouts At AALL

I’m honored to join Katie Bauer, of Yale University Library, in a program coordinated by Mary Jane Kelsey, of Yale Law’s Lillian Goldman Library. The full title of our program is Technology Scouts: how to keep your library and ILS current in the IT world (H-4, 4PM Tuesday, room 274). My portion of the presentation […] » about 300 words

The Social Software Over There

Amusing. One one side of the world is Jenny Levine, the original library RSS bigot, pushing libraries to adopt new technologies from the bottom up, and here on the other side of the world is NewsGator offering their products for top-down adoption. Why are law libraries interested in NewsGator? Could it be that social software […] » about 100 words

Free Markets, Bad Products, Slow Change Rates

Point A: John Blyberg’s ILS Customer Bill-of-Rights. Point B: Dan Chudnov’s The problem with the “ILS Bill of Rights” Response: John Blyberg’s OPACs in the frying pan, Vendors in the fire While there’s some disagreement between John and Dan, I can’t help but see a strong concordance between their posts: Both are an attempt to […] » about 400 words

The ALA/NO Events I’d Like To See

I’m not going to ALA/NO so I’m hoping those who are will blog it. Two events I’m especially interested in: On Sunday, June 25: Catalog Transformed: From Traditional to Emerging Models of Use This program, co-sponsored by the MARS User Access to Services Committee and RUSA’s Reference Services Section (RSS, formerly MOUSS), deals with changes […] » about 400 words

The ILS Brick Wall

Nicole Engard last month posted about The State of our ILS, describing the systems as: I’d say it’s a like the crazy cousin you have to deal with because he’s family! It doesn’t fit, we are a very open IT environment, we have applications all over that need to talk to each other nicely and […] » about 300 words

The URLs From My Portland Talk

Following Edward Tufte’s advice, I’ve been wanting to offer a presentation without slides for a long time now; I finally got my chance in Portland. The downside is that now I don’t have anything to offer as a takeaway memory aid for my talk. My speaking notes are too abstract to offer for public consumption, […] » about 800 words

Presentation: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0

| <a href="http://www.innopacusers.org/iug2006/">IUG 2006 presentation</a>: <a href="http://homepage.mac.com/misterbisson/Presentations/IUG-2006May21.mov">Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0</a> (also <a href="http://homepage.mac.com/misterbisson/Presentations/IUG-2006May21.pdf">available as a PDF</a> with space for notes) This is an update of <a href="http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/11096/">my ALA Midwinter presentation</a>. » about 400 words

Linkability Fertilizes Online Communities

It’s hard to know how Fuzzyfruit found the WPopac catalog page for A Baby Sister for Frances (though it is ranked fifth in a Google search for the title), but what matters is that she did find it, and she was able to link to it by simply copying the URL from her browser’s location bar.

The link appears among her comments in the discussion about her post on an early letter she’d written to her mom. Fuzzyfruit’s comment spawned more comments about the book from Sarahq and Coffeechica.

We talk here and there about how “libraries build community,” but how does that work in the online world? How do our systems support or inhibit community discussions online?

Q: Why Do Some Things Suck?

A: Because we compare them to the wrong things. I’m in training today for a piece of software used in libraries. It’s the second of three days of training and things aren’t going well. Some stuff doesn’t work, some things don’t work the first (second, third…ninth) time, and other things just don’t make sense. At […] » about 600 words

WPopac Gets Googled

A discussion on Web4Lib last month raised the issue of Google indexing our library catalogs. My answer spoke of the huge number of searches being done in search engines every day and the way that people increasingly expect that anything worth finding can be found in Google. There were doubts about the effectiveness of such […] » about 800 words

Shifting Borders

My first reaction to the notion of librarians running reading groups in Second Life was a question of whether this was akin to putting a reference desk in a bar.

My second reaction was a question of how our systems will support these extra-library interactions. Can people quickly and easily trade URLs to access the library materials they’re talking about? Will library systems ever be as easy to use as the game/social environments we’re trying to use them in?

My third reaction is a question of politics. The movement of people online doesn’t respect geographical borders, nor those of gerrymandered political districts. Libraries may serve online users, and some of them will be successful, but our funding models are for local libraries that serve geographically constrained communities.

Don’t Think You Use Web 2.0? Think Again

It can be hard for library folk to imagine that the web development world might be as divided about the meaning and value of “Web 2.0” as the library world is about “Library 2.0,” but we/they are. Take Jeffrey Zeldman’s anti-Web 2.0, anti-AJAX post, for instance. Zeldman’s a smart guy, and he’s not entirely off-base, […] » about 400 words