library

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 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

Squashing Criticism vs. Improving Products

I wrote yesterday of Nicole Engard’s comment that the ILS was about as open and flexible as a brick wall. Today I learned that the vendor of that ILS had tried to squash her public criticism.

Not cool.

It’s pure speculation on my part, but what comes next? Surely no vendor would send Vinny over to bust an uppity biblioblogger’s knee-caps, but might they offer a customer a better deal if they could just help quiet down a critic within the customer’s organization?

Not speculation: how do we feel about vendors that will spend lavish sums of money to court potential customers, but do little to improve the product and regularly refuse suggestions that they open a round-table with technology leaders among their existing client-base?

John Blyberg‘s ILS Customer Bill-of-Rights is especially relevant here, but also, let’s think about our side of the relationship.

update: I keep forgetting to link to this public example of how bad our OPACs/ILSs are. Thanks go to David Walker for making me ROTFL.

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

And We’re Discarding This?

I read <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/maisonbisson/149529625/" title="Photo Sharing">enough of this to get a good laugh</a>, but not enough to understand if it was serious or not. Some of it reads like satire, but other parts as are dry as, well, they're dry (who really needs a simile anyway, they're just dry, okay?). » about 100 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?

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

Boolean Searching in WPopac

WPopac takes advantage of MySQL’s indexing and relevance-ranked searching (go ahead, try it), including boolean searching (on MySQL versions > 4.x). Here are some details and examples taken wholesale from the MySQL manual: + A leading plus sign indicates that this word must be present in each result returned.  – A leading minus sign indicates […] » about 500 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.

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

Door of Mystery

| I found myself <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/maisonbisson/tags/bostonpubliclibrary/">wandering about</a> <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=700+Boylston+St.,+Boston+MA+02116&ll=42.349252,-71.078281&spn=0.016556,0.054073">Boston</a> <a href="http://www.bpl.org/">Public Library</a> for longer than I expected Friday. Part of it was the <a href="http://www.bpl.org/journeys.htm">map exhibit</a> and part of it was the <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/maisonbisson/117723887/">architecture</a> (and simply a place to relax for a bit). Amusingly, stairs and stairways seem <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/maisonbisson/117723175/">filled with drama</a> at BPL, and if the guard hadn't just warned me about taking flash photos, I might have tried to sneak a peak behind that door. » about 100 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

Wyoming Libraries Marketing Campaign

| I have mixed feelings about the value of advertising -- it's worth pointing out that <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591840880/ref=maisonbisson-20/">according to John Battelle</a>, Google never ran an ad anywhere prior to going public -- but I still enjoy seeing things like this <a href="http://www.wyominglibraries.org/">Wyoming Libraries campaign</a>. <a href="http://librarymarketing.blogspot.com/2006/03/world-comes-to-wyoming-in-wyoming.html">Jill Stover quotes</a> Wyoming Libraries' Tina Lackey with the news that “Wyoming's libraries are as expansive as the state, and as close as down the street.” I'm just hoping that A, the horse is real; and B, they auction it off. See, I have these silly ideas about doing a cross-country road trip with it. » about 100 words

Homeland Security: Now Policing Porn?

The Washington Post reports two men in uniforms bearing “Homeland Security” insignia walked into a Bethesda library in early February, announced that viewing of internet pornography was forbidden, and began questioning patrons. The men asked one library user to step outside just before a librarian intervened. Then…

the two men [and the librarian] went into the library’s work area to discuss the matter. A police officer arrived. In the end, no one had to step outside except the uniformed men.

As it turns out, the men were legitimate homeland security officers, members of the county’s force, though it seems nobody was quite clear about why they were there.

Montgomery County’s chief administrative officer, Bruce Romer, issued a statement calling the incident “unfortunate” and “regrettable” — two words that bureaucrats often deploy when things have gone awry. He said the officers had been reassigned to other duties.

Thing is, regardless of your feelings about porn, please tell me how it relates to homeland security? Perhaps they’ve given up policing copyright?

The code4lib Journal(s) I Should’ve Kept

<a href="http://www.code4lib.org/2006/">code4lib</a> was less than a month ago, but already I've forgotten some details. That's why I'm glad to have notes from Ed Summers (<a href="http://www.inkdroid.org/journal/2006/02/16/code4lib-day-1/">day one</a>, <a href="http://www.inkdroid.org/journal/2006/02/20/code4lib-days-2-3/">two, and three</a>), <a href="http://librarycog.uwindsor.ca:8087/artblog/librarycog/1140232323">Art Rhyno</a>, <a href="http://outgoing.typepad.com/outgoing/2006/02/code4lib_the_co.html">Tom Hickey</a>, <a href="http://www.librarywebchic.net/wordpress/2006/02/">Karen Coombs</a>, and <a href="http://blog.ryaneby.com/archives/post-code4lib-and-oregon-trip/">Ryan Eby</a>. » about 100 words