Vast Active Library and Information Science blog. From a recent library science graduate in Wellington, New Zealand. A focus on reference and current awareness tools and issues, especially free, web-based resources.

 
I managed to miss this story until I saw it on LIS News. Christchurch City Libraries has scored in the top five places to work in New Zealand (for medium-sized businesses) and 13th overall.

The survey (in Unlimited magazine) is a well-respected one, so this is quite an achievement. Congratulations to them.

| posted by Simon at 5:15 pm

 
Will there be a need for libraries/librarians in the future, asks Barbara Quint. Her argument is that improved access to electronic information will obviate the need for libraries, especially if the open access movement is successful, and end-users no longer require libraries to purchase expensive scholarly journals.

There's a fair bit of truth in this, in my opinion. But I can still see a role for librarians. I work in a small, quasi-government agency. Many of the information sources I use are freely available. Those that aren't could be made available to our staff even if I didn't work there. So how do I add value? I filter. I do current awareness, and it isn't rocket science, but I can strip out the useful information from a mass of data, and get it to the right people. So they don't need to know about blogs or RSS or Google's advanced search or PubMed. I do all that, they use the information. I locate. I can find information faster than they can - and because I know where to look, the other 60 people on our staff don't need to know.

And that's what I'll be doing in the future, whether or not the information sources are free. Saving the time of the reader, basically.

| posted by Simon at 4:40 pm

 
"If you type 'Zantrex' into Google," he writes, "more than a hundred thousand citations will appear." Though he preceded the sentence with evidence and statistics of the drug's increased use, Specter seemed worried that in this dot-com age, Internet-savvy readers would be left unconvinced without hard search-engine evidence. Scientific studies as proof? Eh. Web searches? Now you've convinced me.

A story from Media Bistro points out that journalists have become lazy by using Google as a means of gauging a subject's popularity or importance, or appealing to Google as a kind of higher authority.

Very true, I remember reading articles that "proved" that Jonah Lomu was far more popular and important and respected than Colin Meads (both are famous New Zealand rugby players). The reason? Google produces far more hits for Lomu than for Meads. Of course, the fact that Meads retired in the 1960s and therefore isn't quite as likely to turn up on the internet as Lomu, who's still playing, wasn't mentioned.

Seen on LIS News an article from

| posted by Simon at 8:43 pm

 
Yahoo indexing deeper than Google?

Wow. I've just been reading on The Shifted Librarian that Yahoo no longer uses Google as its search engine (this one's been coming for a while, of course). Jenny mentioned a cool feature in Yahoo - some search results will display an RSS feed, with an 'add to My Yahoo' link.

That's all good, and I took advantage of it by adding The Shifted Librarian to My Yahoo (though why I bother seeing as I use Bloglines anyway).

So I decided to test-drive Google vs Yahoo, see where the differences are. Being somewhat self-obsessed, I started by Googling (Yahooing?) my own name. Google gives a fairly reasonable set of results - there's a snowboarder, a session musician, and a partner in a major accounting firm who share my name, and they're all near the top - I get a few hits for this blog and a few other mentions on the web.

I switch to Yahoo. Valisblog is the number 1 hit. So high that I don't even notice it's there ;-). What's really weird is at number 6 - a result from my old junior soccer club, that I played for aged 9-12. It's a page out of their database that describes my career at the club, which teams I played for, who my teammates were. Out of a database. I don't get that. How can Yahoo get that deep into the DB that it pulls my name out - at #6 no less? (I mean, there are at least that many webpages that have my name on them on the front page). Also interesting is the #14 entry, which is me again, from a mailing list I subscribe to.

I'm going to be very interested to see what the search engine experts have to say about this one. As it is, Yahoo and Google seem to be covering significantly different ground - at least in as far as New Zealand librarians are concerned ;)

| posted by Simon at 8:14 pm

 
Fancy an unusual career change? The Salt Lake Tribune points out that the CIA could use your skills.

For example, librarians at the agency are supposed to be able to quickly provide reference service when current intelligence is being produced. These librarians will use unclassified resources from just about every resource imaginable, just as many librarians do, but they'll also have access to classified information. Sound more exciting than working at a public library?

It does actually. I've got the type of mentality where I love having access to secrets, or to information that isn't readily available to others. The chance to work with all those CIA files sounds quite appealing. And I'm willing to bet I wouldn't have to provide patron use records to anyone ;)

Still, the job isn't open to just anyone. The CIA requires a master's degree in library/information services or a bachelor's degree and equivalent work experience at an intelligence community library.

Making it different from other library jobs how, exactly?

| posted by Simon at 1:00 pm

 
Nice article from the Philadelphia Inquirer pointing out that the state's libraries would be better served by a decent level of state funding than by the packages of gift books they received from the First Lady.

Nothing terribly surprising, but it's always nice to see newspapers arguing so emphatically that libraries are actually important.

| posted by Simon at 12:55 pm

 
"We should stop seeing libraries as places of function - storing this, lending that, checking the other," he gamely deposed, "and more as places of free and shared exploration and learning via all media, a democratic space wherein to free your mind."

No disrespect to Mr Dolan, but I laughed out loud when I read that, as I did a day or so later when stumbling across an advert placed by Staffordshire county council: "Sorry Edna" ran the letterpress, above a picture of a cardigan-wearing, bespectacled librarian. "Libraries aren't the sombre, silent places you'd like them to be.

Novelist DJ Taylor, writing in The Guardian asks for more emphasis on books and silence in libraries.

He does make at least one fair point, that he was lucky enough to have space at home in which to study in quiet, but that other children aren't as fortunate, and that the library was the one place that could meet this need. On the other hand, perhaps the 'youth of today' are more comfortable with noise than Mr Taylor's generation?

(And just a small sigh at the 'Edna' stereotype.....)

| posted by Simon at 4:56 pm

 
During a week in January, 30 Florida newspapers, including The St. Augustine Record, tested how officials responded to a routine request to inspect records. Reporters and other news media employees posing as citizens visited 234 local agencies in 62 of Florida's 67 counties. Items requested included public officials' e-mails, cell phone records and routine police logs....

Public officials lied to, harassed and even threatened volunteers who were using a law designed to give citizens the power to watch over their government. In six counties, volunteers were erroneously told that the documents they wanted didn't exist.

On the other hand, 57% of agencies actually complied, which actually seems quite high to me.

From The St Augustine Record via Metafilter.

| posted by Simon at 4:49 pm

 
The BBC reports on an anti-spam researcher who has discovered a fool-proof way to fool Bayesian filters.

To find out how to beat the filters Mr Graham-Cumming sent himself the same message 10,000 times but to each one added a fixed number of random words.

When a message got through he trained an "evil" filter that helped to tune the perfect collection of additional words.

Soon he had generated a short list of words that, if added to a spam message, would guarantee its safe passage into his inbox.

Why am I left thinking that it was a bad idea to publicise this?

Original here

| posted by Simon at 4:45 pm

 
I emailed them about the problem mentioned in my previous entry, after Greg emailed me to say the feed was displaying strangely in Bloglines for him, too.

I received a response within two hours, max, explaining that they'd had some problems with data corruption, and correcting the problem. Two hours! That's a very impressive response time, as far as I'm concerned. So, respect to Bloglines. I was already impressed with their set-up - I'm even more impressed now.


| posted by Simon at 6:41 pm

 
I am so confused. I just checked my own feed in my aggregator (Bloglines), and it's showing 5 ads for books on Amazon. I certainly didn't post them myself, and they aren't showing up on the site itself.

If anyone is reading this via aggregator and they've seen these ads, could they email me and let me know: inamorato[underscore]anon[at]hotmail[dot]com? If anyone has any idea what might be going on, that would be even better ;-)

| posted by Simon at 12:30 pm

 
The New York Times carries a longish article on Microsoft's challenge to Google. The Times is casting this as MS vs Silicon Valley, round 2, seeing similarities with the MS/Netscape battle.

Perhaps more interesting is the mention on page three of the article of a collaboration between Google and Stanford University Library:

And Google has embarked on an ambitious secret effort known as Project Ocean, according to a person involved with the operation. With the cooperation of Stanford University, the company now plans to digitize the entire collection of the vast Stanford Library published before 1923, which is no longer limited by copyright restrictions. The project could add millions of digitized books that would be available exclusively via Google.

In probably unrelated news, Library Journal reports that Stanford has left the ARL.

| posted by Simon at 10:01 am