libraries

Greetings Library Scientist

The California Library Association is pretty much like every other regional library association I’ve seen, not least because their most visible presence is their annual conference. It may be the season, but the CLA is more politically active than others I’ve known. At their core, most such associations exist to promote efficient transfer of operational knowledge from […] » about 800 words

Happy New Scriblio!

The most recently released, stable version of Scriblio is marked 2.9-r1 and was last updated in June 2010. You can be forgiven for thinking development had ceased in the interim. Today, however, I’m proud to introduce a completely new Scriblio, re-written from the ground up to take advantage of the latest features of WordPress and eliminate the mistakes […] » about 600 words

Search The Sears And Roebuck Catalog

You’d think the Sears Archives would offer an online search of their historical catalogs, but the best you’ll find is a list of libraries holding the microfilms. Ancestry.com offers an online search, but only to paying members. I’m looking into this because I was looking for historical trends in consumer products and thought the catalog […] » about 100 words

eBook User’s Bill of Rights

It’s easy to see the eBook User’s Bill of Rights as a sign of the growing rift between libraries and content producers. Easy if you’re me, anyway. It connects very conveniently with Richard Stallman’s open letter to the Boston Public Library decrying what he summarizes as their complicity with DRM and abdication of their responsibilities […] » about 300 words

Pearls Of Wisdom In Mail List Threads

David Cloutman on Code4Lib:

Don’t forget to look at trends outside of “Libraryland”. A lot of professional library discussion takes place in an echo chamber, and bad ideas often get repeated and gain credibility as a result. Librarians usually overstate the uniqueness of their organizations and professions. When the question, “What are other libraries doing?” arises in addressing a technical problem, don’t be afraid to generalize the question to other types of organizations. Too often, the answer to the question, “What are other libraries doing?” is “Failing.” Emulate for the sake of success, not conformity.

It’s a point I’m always trying to make: look outside your specialization.

College Students Use, Love, Are Aware Of The Limitations Of Wikipedia

How Today’s College Students Use Wikipedia For Course-Related Research: Overall, college students use Wikipedia. But, they do so knowing its limitation. They use Wikipedia just as most of us do — because it is a quick way to get started and it has some, but not deep, credibility. 52% of respondents use Wikipedia frequently or […] » about 200 words

Who Gets To Control The Future Of Libraries?

The following was my email response to a thread on the web4lib mail list: Okay, it must be said: you’re all wrong[1]. I can understand that news of a librarian being fired/furloughed will raise our defenses, but that’s no excuse for giving up the considered and critical thinking that this occasion demands. Consider this: the […] » about 400 words

Wolfram|Alpha’s Missing Feature: Libraries

John Timmer brings up my two biggest complaints about Wolfram|Alpha. The first is that it’s even harder to identify the source of information than it is in Wikipedia, the other is what happens when searches fail:

A bad Web search typically brings up results that help you refine your search terms; a bad Alpha search returns nothing, and it’s not clear that there’s an easy way to fix that.

Here’s a simple way: have Alpha fall back on library data. One example he offers, “global bioethanol production,” is perfect for both library reference and bibliographic collections.

Google Book Search offers a few promising hits for that query, as does Google Scholar. And if we imagine that search in the context of faceted collections, we’d be able to identify subjects the search phrase is associated with and offer additional access points. Add to that some crowdsourcing opportunities for users to expand the knowledge base by identifying an item or piece of text that answers their question and we’ll have a real competitor to Google.

Juice Your OPAC

Richard Wallace’s Juice project (Javascript User Interface Componentised Extensions) is a “simple componentised framework constructed in Javascript to enable the sharing of Ajax Stye extensions to a web interface.”

WordPress or Scriblio users might do well to think about it as a way to put widgets on systems that don’t support widgets, though as Richard points out, “the framework is applicable to any environment which, via identifiers contained within a html page, needs to link to or embed external resources.”

Way Cooler Than A Catalog

I got a little excited when Shirley Lincicum wrote to the NGC4Lib mail list: [O]ne of the most frustrating things for me about Next Generation Catalog systems as they currently exist is that they seem wholly focused on the user interface and can, in fact, actually hold libraries back from designing or implementing improved “back […] » about 500 words

Scriblio Theater

Flickr Video Flickr Video

I should have done screencasts like the above long ago. It’s not that they’re great, but they are a wonderful excuse to use the canned lounge music I’ve got. Those videos are now on the front page of the official Scriblio site, and I did five more to demo the installation and configuration. Big thanks go to Collingswood NJ Public Library Director Brett Bonfield who let me use his library like this.

Scriblio 2.7 Released

My slides for my presentation yesterday at code4lib are available both as a 2.7MB QuickTime and a 7.8 MB PDF, while the gist of talk went something like this: Scriblio is an open source WordPress plugin that adds the ability to search, browse, and create structured data to the the popular blog/content management platform. And […] » about 500 words

Web Search Re-Imagined: Searchme iPhone App

Re-imagined a bit, anyway. Why browse a vertical list of results when you can flip through them like pages in a book (or album covers in iTunes). Searchme on the iPhone and iPod touch does just that. As you type your search term, icons representing rough categories appear, allowing you to target your search and […] » about 300 words

Declaration of Metadata Independance

Declaration of Metadata Independance: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that Metadata is essential to all Users, and that the Creation of Metadata endows certain inalienable Rights, that among these are the right to collect, the right to share and the pursuit of Happiness through the reuse of the Metadata… (read more) Via. » about 100 words

My DevCamp Lightning Talk

Hi, I’m Casey. I developed Scriblio, which is really just a faceted search and browse plugin for WordPress that allows you to use it as a library catalog or digital library system (or both). I’m not the only one to misuse WordPress that way. Viddler is a cool YouTube competitor built atop WordPress that allows […] » about 400 words

Where The Previews Are

I announced yesterday Scriblio‘s integration of Google’s new book viewability API that links to full text, previews, or additional book information (depending on copyright status and publisher foresight). Now that it’s live with Plymouth’s full catalog, I spent a moment browsing the collection and taking note of what books had what. I get no preview […] » about 300 words

Scriblio Integrates Google Book Search Links

(crossposted at Scriblio.net) Using the newly released book viewability API in Google Book Search, Plymouth State University’s Lamson Library and Learning Commons is one of the first libraries to move beyond simply listing their books online and open them up to reading and searching via the web. Take a look at how this works with […] » about 200 words