You don’t like the “2.0” moniker? So what. John Blyberg reminds us that “if we’re arguing over semantics, we’ve been derailed.” And Stephen Abram is said to have cautioned us: “when librarians study something to death, we forget that death was not the original goal.”
OpenSearch Spec Updated
I just received this email from the A9 OpenSearch team:
We have just released OpenSearch 1.1 Draft 2. We hope to declare it the final version shortly, and it is already supported by A9.com. Uprading from a previous version should only take a few minutes…
OpenSearch 1.1 allows you to specify search results in HTML, Atom, or any other format (or multiple formats) in addition to just RSS. In addition, OpenSearch 1.1 will be supported by Internet Explorer 7, among other software, so we strongly recommend that you upgrade. Also new is the ability to specify suggested searches, such as spelling suggestions and related queries. (link and emphasis addded)
Woot! I’ll be doing something with this soon.
A Patron’s Perspective On Library 2.0
My friend Joe Monninger is perhaps a library’s favorite patron. He’s an avid reader who depends on his public library for books and audiobooks and DVDs, and as a writer and professor he depends on the services of the university library. But he doesn’t work in libraries, and though he listens patiently to my work […] » about 1300 words
Microformats
Oliver Brown introduced me to microformats a while ago, the Ryan Eby got excited about them, then COinS-PMH showed how useful they could be for libraries, but I still haven’t done anything with them myself (other than beg Peter Binkley to release his COinS-PMH WordPress Plugin). What are microformats? Garrett Dimon explains the theory: When […] » about 300 words
OCLC Report: Libraries vs. Search Engines
So, the report was released Monday, and it’s actually titled Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources (2005), but the part I’m highlighting here is the results of the question that asked users to compare their experiences with search engines against their experiences with libraries. Here’s the quesiton: Satisfaction with the Librarian and the Search Engine […] » about 200 words
Raging Arguments About The Future Of The ILS
I feel a little misrepresented by a post from Talis’ Richard Wallis claiming you don’t need technology for Library 2.0 – but it helps, but the company blog doesn’t allow embedded URLs, so I’m posting my comment here: Richard, please don’t misunderstand me. Technology is the essential infrastructure for Library 2.0. My point was that […] » about 300 words
Library 2.0?
Rochelle worries that all this Library 2.0 talk is lost on her library. Ross tells us why he hates the Library 2.0 meme and Dan reminds us it’s not about buzzwords. But Michael is getting closest to a point that’s been troubling me for a while: Library 2.0 isn’t about software, it’s about libraries. It’s […] » about 300 words
A Library For All Peoples
In a Washington Post column last week, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington proposed A Library for The New World:
[T]he time may be right for our country’s delegation to consider introducing to the [UNESCO] a proposal for the cooperative building of a World Digital Library. This would offer the promise of bringing people closer together by celebrating the depth and uniqueness of different cultures in a single global undertaking.
And in this time of war and strife, what makes such a proposal so important?
Libraries are inherently islands of freedom and antidotes to fanaticism. They are temples of pluralism where books that contradict one another stand peacefully side by side just as intellectual antagonists work peacefully next to each other in reading rooms.
And I can’t think of a better message to start the holidays with.
OPAC Web Services Should Be Like Amazon Web Services
No, I’m not talking about the interface our users see in the web browser — there’s enough argument about that — I’m talking about web services, the technologies that form much of the infrastructure for Web 2.0. Once upon a time, the technology that displayed a set of data, let’s say catalog records, was inextricably […] » about 900 words
Theories of Information Behavior
Via Librarian Way I found the LiS Radio webcast of a conversation between Sandra Erdelez and Karen Fischer, two of three editors of Theories of Information Behavior from ASIS&T and Information Today. Unfortunately, the interview focuses on how the book came to be more than the content, but the description reads: overviews of more than […] » about 100 words
Raging Arguments About The Future Of The ILS
I hadn’t seen Ryan Eby’s post at LibDev that connected ILSs with WordPress before I posted that library catalogs should be like WordPress here. It connects with a my comment on a post at Meredith Farkas’ Information Wants To Be Free. My comment there goes in two directions, but I’d like to focus on the technology side now.
Our vendors will inevitably bend to our demands and add small features here and there, but even after that, we’ll still be stuck paying enormous amounts of money for systems that remain fundamentally flawed. Technology marches on, and inevitably we’ll find some new way to use our catalog data. John Blyberg is talking about this in his ILS customer bill of rights post, and that’s what I was getting at when I say the catalog should be like WordPress.
Meredith asks for more programmers, but as a programmer, I’m asking for her help in demanding smart software design from our vendors.
Library Catalogs Should Be Like WordPress
Library catalogs should be be like WordPress. That is, every entry should support comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks. Every record should have a permalink. Content should be tag-able. The look should be easily customizable with themes. Everything should be available via RSS or Atom. It should be extendable with a rich plugin API. And when that fails, it would be nice if it were all written in a convenient language like PHP so we can hack it ourselves.
Pew Internet Report: Search Engines Gain Ground
According to the recently released Pew Internet report on online activities: 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 tracked, including chatting and IMing, reading blogs or news, banking, and buying, not one of them includes […] » about 100 words
Instant Messaging in Libraries: Ten Points from Aaron Schmidt
Aaron Schmidt’s 10 points about IM in libraries include:
- Instant Messaging is free (minus staff time)
- Millions of our patrons use IM every day.
- For some, not being available via IM is like not having a telephone number.
- There are three major IM networks (AIM, Y!M, MSN)
- Y!M and MSN will be interoperable at some point.
- Trillian is a multi-network IM client, meebo is a web-based multi-network client. Use them.
- Having practice sessions in-house is a good way to get staff excited about IM in libraries.
- Staff can communicate in-house using IM.
- Libraries can choose to have one IM point of contact, or they can choose to divide it departmentally.
- IM is user-centered and builds relationships with library users.
edit: URL fixed as per Aaron’s comment below.
Collective Intelligence: Wisdom Of The Crowds
I’m here at NEASIS&T’s “Social Software, Libraries, and the Communities that (could) Sustain Them” event, presented by Steven Cohen. He’s suggesting we read James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds. Surowiecki first developed his ideas for Wisdom of Crowds in his “Financial Page” column of The New Yorker. Many critics found his premise to be an […] » about 200 words
More NEASIS&T Buy Hack or Build Followup
First, Josh Porter, the first speaker of the day has a blog where he’s posted his presentation notes and some key points. Josh spoke about Web 2.0, and ended with the conclusion that successful online technologies are those that best model user behavior. “I think Web 2.0 is about modeling something that already exists in our offline worlds, mostly in the spoken words and minds of humankind.”
Interestingly, in findability terms, it was Josh’s post that clued me in that the event podcast was online because he linked to my blog in his post. Lesson: links make things findable.
Like Josh, I found my voice a little unfamiliar, but you can listen here (51MB) if that’s your thing.
Also, I demoed some features I’d like to see in a future OPAC, but to help people visualize them, I finally put together a graphical mockup of them here.
NELINET Bibliographic Services Conference
I’m here at the NELINET Bibliographic Services Conference at the College of the Holy Cross today. The conference is titled “Google vs. the OPAC: the challenge is on!” and there’s quite a lineup of speakers. My presentation is on “the social life of metadata.” My slides are online, and below is some background. The Library […] » about 400 words
NEASIS&T Buy, Hack or Build Followup
I was tempted to speak without slides yesterday, and I must offer my apologies to anybody trying to read them now, as I’m not sure how the slides make sense without the context of my speech. On that point, it’s worth knowing that Lichen did an outstanding job liveblogging the event, despite struggling with a […] » about 600 words
NEASIS&T Buy, Hack or Build
I’m here at the NEASIS&T Buy, Hack or Build event today at MIT’s Media Lab. On the list are Joshua Porter, Director of Web Development for User Interface Engineering, Pete Bell [corrected], co-founder of Endeca Solutions, and me.
I’m posting my slides here now, but I’m told we’ll see a podcast of the proceedings soon after the conclusion. Be aware that the slides are full of links. I won’t be able to explore them all during the presentation, but they might add value later.
Is Search Rank Group-think?
Way back in April 1997, Jakob Nielsen tried to educate us on Zipf Distributions and the power law, and their relationship to the web. This is where discussions of the Chris Anderson’s Long Tail start, but the emphasis is on the whole picture, not just the many economic opportunities at the end of the tail. […] » about 400 words
Tech Tuesdays: Blogs and Blogging
Note: these are my presentation notes for a brown bag discussion with library faculty and university IT staff today. This may become a series…[[pageindex]] More: my presentation slides and the Daily Show video. Introduction Public awareness of blogs seems to begin during the years of campaigning leading up to the 2004 election, but many people […] » about 1400 words
Findability, The Google Economy, and Libraries
Peter Morville, author of Ambient Findability, stirred up the web4lib email list with a message about Authority and Findability. His message is about how services like Wikipedia and Google are changing our global information architecture and the meaning of “authority.” The reaction was quick, and largely critical, but good argument tests our thinking and weeds […] » about 400 words
Library Feel-Good
A Flash animation about why libraries matter.
Library-Related Geekery
Ryan beat me to reporting on the interesting new services at the Ockham Network (noted in this Web4lib post). The easiest one to grok is this spelling service, but there are others that are cooler. He also alerted me to a Perl script to proxy Z39.50 to RSS. Though for those more into PHP (like […] » about 300 words
Open Content Alliance
The news is that Yahoo! announced they’ve formed the Open Content Alliance. Though that certainly fits the Google versus Yahoo! story that newsmen want to report on now, it’s somewhat disingenuous to the Internet Archive, which has been beating the Open Content drum for a while. But Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive […] » about 400 words