Menu

Subscribe

lib20

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

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

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

Information Behavior

| It was more than a year ago that <a href="http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000540.html" title="Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: Eat your spinach, it's good for you ...">Lorcan Dempsey</a> pointed out this bit from <a href="http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v51/i18/18b01301.htm">The Chronicle</a>: <blockquote>Librarians should not assume that college students welcome their help in doing research online. The typical freshman assumes that she is already an expert user of the Internet, and her daily experience leads her to believe that she can get what she wants online without having to undergo a training program. Indeed, if she were to use her library's Web site, with its dozens of user interfaces, search protocols, and limitations, she might with some justification conclude that it is the library, not her, that needs help understanding the nature of electronic information retrieval.</blockquote> » about 300 words

Questions Are All Around Us

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/search/tags:library%2Creference%2Cinformation%2Csilly/tagmode:all/">These pictures are mostly foolish</a>, but here's a small point: none of us had ever seen a cop pull over a cab -- certainly not a cab with passengers -- before this, so we were all rather curious about why. <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=cambridge,+ma&ll=42.372947,-71.094954&spn=0.004137,0.013518">In front of us</a> stood a question, an example of the many questions we all encounter every day, and it's the kind of question that few of us would ever suggest going to the library to answer. » about 200 words

Speaking My Language

| I loved <a href="http://www.brandingblog.com/2004/12/monday_morning_.html">this quote</a> from Dave Young <a href="http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/10914/">when I first found it</a>, and I love it more now: <blockquote>Talk to the customer in the language of the customer about what matters to the customer. Bad advertising is about you, your company, your product or your service. Good advertising is about the customer, and how your product or service will change their world.</blockquote> Read that again, but replace the relevant bits with “user” or “patron” and “your library” or “your databases.” The point of all this in a post from Jessamyn about <a href="http://www.librarian.net/stax/1679" title="understanding what users understand">understanding what users understand</a>. » about 300 words

Native To Web & The Future Of Web Apps

Yahoo's Tom Coats was of seven star speakers at <a href="http://www.carsonworkshops.com/">Carson Workshops</a>' <a href="http://www.carsonworkshops.com/summit/">Future of Web Apps Summit</a> last month. As usual, <a href="http://blog.ryaneby.com/">Ryan Eby</a> was pretty quick to point out <a href="http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2006/02/my_future_of_web_apps_slides.shtml">his slides</a> to me, mostly by way of pointing out <a href="http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/006323.html" title="Tom's Future of Web Apps, Translated for Product Managers (by Jeremy Zawodny)">Jeremy Zawodny's translation</a> of them. » about 500 words

Standards Cage Match

I prefaced my point about how the standards we choose in libraries isolate us from the larger stream of progress driving development outside libraries with the note that I was sure to get hanged for it. It’s true. I commented that there were over 140,00 registered Amazon API developers and 365 public OpenSearch targets (hey […] » about 1000 words

Instant Messenger Or Virtual Reference?

I noted Aaron Schmidt‘s points on IM in libraries previously, but what I didn’t say then was how certain I was that popular instant messaging clients like AOL Instant Messenger or Yahoo!’s or Google’s are far superior to the so-called virtual reference products. Why? They’re free, our patrons are comfortable with them, and they work […] » about 400 words

WPopac: An OPAC 2.0 Testbed

First things first, this thing probably needs a better name, but I’m not up to the task. Got ideas? Post in the comments. For the rest of this, let’s just pretend it’s an interview. What is WPopac? It’s an OPAC — a library catalog, for my readers outside libraries — inside the framework of WordPress, […] » about 1000 words

Educause on Future of Libraries

Take a look at this editorial by Jerry D. Campbell, CIO and Dean of University Libraries at the University of Southern California: Academic libraries today are complex institutions with multiple roles and a host of related operations and services developed over the years. Yet their fundamental purpose has remained the same: to provide access to […] » about 300 words

Goodbye x.0

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.

The Library vs. Search Engine Debate, Redux

A while ago I reported on the Pew Internet Project‘s November 2005 report on increased use of search engines. Here’s what I had to say at the time: On an average day, about 94 million American adults use the internet; 77% will use email, 63% will use a search engine. Among all the online activities […] » about 1000 words