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.

 
Seen on Micro Persuasion and LibraryStuff, reviews of OpinMind, a blog search engine that attempts to measure bloggers' opinions of various topics, organisations, or people. For example, type in "Bill Gates" and you get two columns of results, one positive and one negative - "I love what Bill Gates does" vs "I hate Bill Gates". Results can be sorted by date or by relevance, and the "sentimeter" measures the percentages of positive vs negative comment.

I like this tool a lot, it's something of a shame that it "only" searches 1.7 million blogs (Technorati indexes 21 million or so). Inevitably, given the nature of language, it isn't perfect - for example, if someone writes about wearing an 'I love Bill Gates' shirt in order to annoy someone else, that would count as a positive result.

Also, Opinmind seems to search a lot of journal type blogs, Livejournal and Xanga, which lessens its impact - I'd rather hear what a techie blogger has to say on a given subject than what a bored teenager has to say, though there is some value in the latter's opinions.

Stephen Cohen noticed some flaws, pointing out that the results for 'librarian' and 'librarians' were almost opposite each other in terms of positive vs negative comments.

What I found more interesting was using 'library' as a search term. The results were generally positive (68% to 32%). It's the 32% that interests me. These are customers (or potential customers) of the library, and they're saying what they don't like about it. Isn't this great information? It's like free market research! I also tried searching on the names of specific libraries, but didn't get many hits (there were a few for the really big libraries - New York Library, British Library - but that's it).

What would be great is if there was some way to extract information from a blog and determine which library [or whatever] the blogger was referring to. For example, my profile says that I'm in Wellington. If I post about the public library, it's fairly obvious to a human that I'm referring to Wellington City Libraries. Wouldn't it be great if Opinmind could understand this, so that I could search Opinmind for "Wellington library" and return one of my posts that mentioned the library, even if it didn't specifically mention Wellington?

| posted by Simon at 3:36 pm

 
Via What I Learned Today comes mention of an RSS reminder service called ReminderFeed. I can see how this could be helpful (especially for those of us who live increasingly within our feedreaders - I have Bloglines open most of the time that I'm online). But at the moment it seems to be limited to sending daily versions of the same reminder notice, which doesn't seem to fit with the reminders that people would actually need (I need to remember multiple things on Monday, multiple different things on Tuesday, etc).

There is also the issue of security: this information would presumably be available to anyone who searched for it in a feedreader, meaning anyone else who wanted to could read my reminders. LibraryElf ran into this problem, though they've moved very quickly to note it, and seemingly correct it (my LibraryElf feed is no longer working in Bloglines).

So, interesting idea, needs some work.

| posted by Simon at 1:43 pm

 
From Web2wsj2.com.

I was aware of most of these, but this list is inspiring me to check some of them out in greater detail. I wish I could get Netvibes to load, it doesn't work for me anymore.

| posted by Simon at 1:22 pm

 
USA Today suggests that Google is taking the place of our long-term memories - we apparently don't need to remember such trivia as the capital of Turkey and how to get red wine out of the carpet now.

Which is OK as far as it goes. But the article misses a crucial point - that memorising facts hasn't been truly important since print became widespread. What's important is knowing where and how to search. For example:

[block] Even such veteran memorizers as physicians use Google. "It's a little embarrassing, coming from a really rigorous academic program," says Eric Swagel, assistant clinical professor of medicine at the University of California-San Francisco. But often, he says, a Google search is far faster than plowing through PubMed, the authoritative medical literature database.

Recently, a colleague told Swagel the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now recommend that adults get the whooping cough vaccine because the immunity from childhood vaccinations wanes.

But the thought of going on PubMed was daunting. "If you plugged in 'pertussis booster in adults,' you'd get a hellacious collection of articles" — none of which would have told them the news.

Instead the doctors typed the same phrase into Google and got the CDC's press release and a news article with a quick overview — maybe not at profound depth, but enough that they understood current medical thinking. [/block]

The fault is not in PubMed. The fault lies in the fact that the doctors don't understand how to search. Of course PubMed is not going to include this information. It's an academic database, not a source for press releases. I duplicated the searches as described - PubMed returned 120 hits. Not too daunting, though none of them were the required article. A Google phrase search produced only the USA Today article, and the same search (without quotes) produced many hits, some of which were relevant - but it took some digging. The quickest way of finding this information? Going to the CDC website and browsing their press releases. Quick, simple - and guaranteed to be authoritative and authentic.

And.... [block] In the midst of packing for her family's move from New Jersey to Las Vegas, marketer Cynthia Mun had a revelation: "I was going through my files and I thought, 'Why do I need this stuff anymore? If I need something, I'll just Google it.' " She and her husband were in the process of turning a decade or so's worth of clippings, files and reports into packing material when their overheated shredder gave up the ghost. [/block]

Because of course everything is available online, for free. Especially commercial reports.

Obviously, I love Google as a free information retrieval tool. But it surprises me to see it constantly held up as the be-all and end-all, and especially to see the dichotomies set up between (e.g.) Google and the library, Google and PubMed - as though one had to choose to use one or the other.

| posted by Simon at 1:55 pm

 
The presentations and discussions from the National Digital Forum are now available. They've been posted in MP3 audio, and some presentations are available as PowerPoints. Some high-level presenters, including National Librarian Penny Carnaby and Chief Archivist Dianne Macaskill.

Topics include:

- an analysis of the opportunities and impediments associated with taking up digital technologies in the cultural and information sectors;
- the Digital Strategy and creating New Zealand On-Line;
- sector initiatives, such as Matapihi (the national digital gateway) and the Sound Archive;
- realities for small archives;
- the Colorado digitisation project;
- end-user perspectives (including a presentation from a former lecturer of mine, Dr Brian Opie from the English Department at Victoria);
- iwi and GLAMs (iwi being Maori tribal groups, I have no idea what GLAMs is and it doesn't appear to be defined);
- Collections Australia Network.

One grumble - surely there's a way to shrink PowerPoint files. Some of the files here are 84MB! That's hardly complying with e-government guidelines to make information accessible to people using dial-up modems....(this issue isn't unique to the NDF, the Internet Librarian conference papers had the same problem. Why do people keep using PowerPoint?).

Link via Synthetic Thoughts.


| posted by Simon at 1:34 pm

 
Wish that I'd seen this when I was still studying: an organisational system for library school (Wanderings of a Student Librarian).

| posted by Simon at 9:44 am

 
Stephen Abram points to an interesting looking study on executive decision-making:

"...most senior-level executives spend hours each week searching the Internet in frustration for business-related information that will help them stay informed and current. The largest group of respondents, 37%, reported spending four or more hours each week searching for information; 36% spent two to four hours each week on information searches."

You can apparently download the full study here, but it didn't work for me.

Nonetheless, very useful ammunition for the special librarian trying to justify their value to the organisation.

| posted by Simon at 2:42 pm

 
Wikipedia alternative aims to be 'PBS of the Web' (C|Net):
Digital Universe is "a new online information service launching in early 2006 aims to build on the model of free online encyclopedia Wikipedia by inviting acknowledged experts in a range of subjects to review material contributed by the general public."

Jimmy Wales says "don't cite Wikipedia" (or, indeed, other encyclopedias). (Ars Technica). "Wikipedia and other encyclopedias should be solid enough to give good, solid background information to inform your studies for a deeper level. And really, it's more reliable to read Wikipedia for background than to read random Web pages on the Internet", says Wales.

Chris Anderson asks "why are people so uncomfortable with Wikipedia?", and suggests the reason is that Wikipedia works on the probabalistic level, meaning it scales much better than (say) Britannica, but may not work so well on the level of an individual post. (The Long Tail).

Meantime, research by Nature suggests that Wikipedia has slightly more errors per article than Britannica. Somewhat disturbingly "the exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three."

| posted by Simon at 11:54 am

 
Mark Cuban asks a depressing question: "will objective search remain the people’s choice in search engines?... Or will we see the same trend that we have seen in TV news. That we want our objective answers painted red or blue?"



| posted by Simon at 11:18 am

 
RSS feeds will now be available in EBSCOhost. This is a very welcome move. EBSCO has long offered journal contents pages and keyword searches by email, which I've made extensive use of in the past. But the advantage of RSS, of course, is that I can access the search results from any computer (via Bloglines) and incorporate the RSS feeds into a web page so that clients have direct access to the search results.

This is especially significant in New Zealand because of the EPIC consortium, which gives pretty much anyone in NZ access to EBSCO databases through their public library. [edit: via LibraryStuff].

| posted by Simon at 10:22 pm

 
Steve Rubel has a good list of blogging hacks. I was familiar with some of them, but #2: automatically insert technorati tags, looks good and was new to me.

Steve's blog Micro Persuasion is one I've been reading for a month or so. It covers the impact of new technologies on PR and marketing. There's a lot here that's also applicable to libraries. Definitely worth a llook.

| posted by Simon at 2:26 pm

 
Great article from Slashdot by Roblimo.

He explains why newspapers need to focus on driving readership of their websites, and on how they can do this by encouraging reader participation/community. He argues that a key method of accomplishing this is enabling comments. This seems like a good idea, but I'm struck by how the comments sections on even serious newspapers like the Guardian descend into flamewars. Roblimo's solution is moderation a la Slashdot. This wouldn't totally remove the problem - imagine partisan moderation of a right/left-winger's posts by left/right-wingers - but it would help.

He says that keyword-based ads are touted as the key to gaining revenue from the site.

He says that newspapers should use classified advertising to build local online communities, as a counter to the Craigslists of this world. They also need to be aware of how easy it is to start specialist online publications - easier than for "even a highly-qualified outsider to get his or her work into a local paper." They should focus on local news - readers can get their international news from a huge range of well-resourced international providers. This makes sense to me. I don't read our local daily paper. I get my national and international news from national and international sources, and my local news from the quirkier, more human free weekly papers. They should also involve their readers as contributors - even paying them for submitting good stories.

He says that text won't go away - people read faster than they listen, so reading a summary of a meeting is a lot quicker than watching a video of it.

Great article. Reading the comments now.

| posted by Simon at 6:15 pm

 
Is that I knew exactly who she was talking about. And I bet everyone who reads this will too.

Posted by Jane at A Wandering Eyre:

I Am Destroying the World

By Jane

Little did I know that the internet and its online "amateurism... was challeng[ing] the basis of our civilization..."

Where is the duct tape when you need it. Seriously, does anything this man says make sense anymore?

OK. You get three guesses as to who "this man" is.

| posted by Simon at 9:26 pm

 
Steven Cohen has another article going over his dislike of email, and quoting a Business Week article for support. I'm not sure I agree with the original article: people receiving 250 emails, only 15% of them relevant? 60% of email being spam? I get precisely zero spam in my work email account. I also get hundreds of emails, and way more than 15% of them are relevant - even though most of my emails are either off mailing lists or part of a current awareness service. If someone's getting hundreds of irrelevant emails per day, there's something wrong with their organisation's internal practices - or they have some very annoying external contacts. The Business Week article does suggest some alternatives - blogs, wikis, RSS, instant messenging. These certainly have potential uses, but I still don't think email is dead. We use it for internal and external communication that just wouldn't work over IM - we need to be able to express involved and complicated ideas, and we need an audit trail to show what decisions were made.

Techdirt says that email won't be dying any time soon.

| posted by Simon at 9:07 pm

 
A good companion piece to Jakob Nielsen's article, which I posted a little while ago. 'Pinyo' at the GreatNexus Webmaster Blog lists the seven deadly sins of blogging.

Sigh. I'm still committing most of them. And they aren't even as fun as gluttony or lust.

| posted by Simon at 12:40 pm

 
A roundup of news stories that caught my eye recently.

Amazon is selling books by the page
Google wants to rent books online - you pay 10% of the cover price and get access to the digital book for one week.
The Washington Times has an article by two Congresspeople, who manage to massively miss the point of Google Print/Book Search: "If publishers and authors have to spend all their time policing Google for works they have already written, it is hard to create more." All their time? How long does it take to email Google and say 'please don't include me in Google Book Search'? (And it's funny how two 'professional authors' seem unable to use correct spelling or grammar).
Forbes carries a rebuttal of the Washington Times article.
BoingBoing quotes a Salon article saying that publishers' criticisms are a smokescreen for greed. (Original article requires subscription or viewing an ad).
Tim O'Reilly has a roundup of articles (via BoingBoing).
The New York Times covers a debate on Google Book Search (via John Battelle). The best line has a publishers' representative complaining that people might find books on Google, and then loan them from a library, rather than buying them. Google's response? "Horrors".
Google is providing funding for a World Digital Library, in collaboration with the Library of Congress (BoingBoing).
In InfoToday, Barbara Quint analyses the 'fee vs free' debate for books online.

| posted by Simon at 6:41 pm

 
Depressing news, via BoingBoing: the Royal Society is criticising open access publishing, saying "journals in some disciplines might suffer. Why would you pay to subscribe to a journal if the papers appear free of charge?".

Good question, to which the answer can only be: why should you? The whole point of OA is surely to allow scientists and libraries cheaper access to other scientific literature, and to enable scientists to have their work more widely distributed. If existing journals fail as a result, well, that's really their problem.

| posted by Simon at 9:37 am

 
Slate reports on problems for academic bloggers; the article links to an old Chronicle of Higher Education article, whose author, an employer at a small US university, is unhappy with job applicants who are also bloggers:

The pertinent question for bloggers is simply, Why? What is the purpose of broadcasting one's unfiltered thoughts to the whole wired world? It's not hard to imagine legitimate, constructive applications for such a forum....Worst of all, for professional academics, it's a publishing medium with no vetting process, no review board, and no editor.....

But the site quickly revealed that the true passion of said blogger's life was not academe at all, but the minutiae of software systems, server hardware, and other tech exotica. It's one thing to be proficient in Microsoft Office applications or HTML, but we can't afford to have our new hire ditching us to hang out in computer science after a few weeks on the job...

Professor Shrill ran a strictly personal blog, which, to the author's credit, scrupulously avoided comment about the writer's current job, coworkers, or place of employment. But it's best for job seekers to leave their personal lives mostly out of the interview process....we agreed a little therapy (of the offline variety) might be in order....

The content of the blog may be less worrisome than the fact of the blog itself. Several committee members expressed concern that a blogger who joined our staff might air departmental dirty laundry (real or imagined) on the cyber clothesline for the world to see. Past good behavior is no guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum.

Depressing stuff, and a sobering reminder that some people still have strong anti-blog feelings.

On a similar theme, Forbes published a virulantly anti-blogger article, Kurt Opsahl posted a hilarious reply on EFF (via Boing Boing).

Wellington blogger Che Tibby has an account of how he negotiated with his public sector employer about what would be acceptable and unacceptable in terms of his blogging. This seems like a sensible approach. Says Che:

Pretty much the first thing I did when I got the full-time job was to make an appointment with my manager and let him know exactly what it was I had been writing. As it was I had it confirmed that I had been turned down for one job specifically because of Club Politique, so I wasn't prepared to have it become an issue at my new place of work.

Also, if you have a blog of any profile at all, make sure you put a big mention of it in your CV if you intend to continue writing to it. It would be a foolish workplace indeed that tried to reprimand you retrospectively for something they must surely have taken into consideration when hiring you.

| posted by Simon at 10:04 pm

 
Via Librarystuff comes a short list of 7 things RSS is good for (New Media Musings).

The seven things?

• saving time;


• convenience;


• access to a richer pool of material;


• zero in on the information you want;


• to serve as an alert service;


• levelling the playing field (between micro-publishers and major news sites);


• to drive conversation;

On the off-chance anyone has been wondering where I was, I moved flat and had a lot of trouble getting internet access hooked up.


| posted by Simon at 5:51 pm

 
Sarah Houghton, the Librarian in Black, has been blogging the presentations at Internet Librarian 05. Almost all of her many posts have been excellent, and are well worth reading, but I'll point to her write-up of Mary Ellen Bates on evaluating search engines. Mary Ellen lists a huge number of tests to run on the search engine, suggesting a range of search techniques and ways of evaluating the quality of the results you get. Sarah calls this "a great session" - it is, and the write-up is great as well.

(I had a post all prepared with links to lots of similar posts from Internet Librarian, but Blogger crashed on me, and there's no way I'm re-typing it. I was planning on linking to LibrarianInBlack, MamaMusings, Librarian.net, The Shifted Librarian and Library Stuff posts).

| posted by Simon at 8:18 pm

 
Phil Bradley has updated his chart comparing major search engines. Of greatest interest, Exalead comes out on top and Google only 4th, tied with MSN. It's worth noting that Phil compared features only, he didn't conduct a qualitative analysis using sample searches. I was interested to learn that Exalead allows truncation, proximity searching, and sorting by oldest/newest. These (especially the last one) are features that I'd find useful at the moment. I must remember to give Exalead a try next time I'm searching.

| posted by Simon at 9:41 pm

 
The Guardian asks a group of experts to critique Wikipedia entries in their area of knowlege. Results are mixed, with scores out of ten ranging from zero to eight. The 'pedia seems to do well when reporting facts, and less well when analysis is required. I did like this comment from the former editor of the Brittanica:

Reading the entry on "encyclopedia" leaves one with the impression that it was written by someone who had no previous knowledge of the subject and who, once he got into it, found it did not interest him very much. He browsed here and there in one or more reference works and noted what seemed important, but had no understanding of the cultural and historical contexts involved. In other words, it is a school essay, sketchy and poorly balanced.

I saw a reference to Wikibooks somewhere else, and decided to have another look at the site. I really shouldn't have bothered. The idea of open source textbooks is a good and worthy one. But so far the results are wildly unimpressive. I skimmed through a couple of "books" in areas I'm familiar with. The contents were equivalent to a short introduction in a university textbook, at best. That said, there are a few good examples - e.g. the UK Constitution and Government, which is clearly written and informative. But it reads like an extended Wikipedia entry, not a book as such.

The Register publishes reader responses to an article critical of Wikipedia, claiming that the tide is turning against it, with readers being more likely to agree with criticisms.

| posted by Simon at 9:24 pm

 
Peter Jacso goes in-depth on Google Print, and concludes by advising readers not to cancel their Web of Science or Scopus subscriptions just yet.

| posted by Simon at 9:17 pm

 
News of yet another Google product "leaks" into the world. Apparently, Google Base will be a database that users can upload their own information to. One possible use would be for classified advertising, and there's talk that it will be a challenge to Craigslist or eBay. Techdirt is less sure, suggesting that the real value of Google Base will be to allow people to create their own specialised applications, powered by Google's search tools. This idea isn't unique to Google, Ning has already developed a similar service - but Google is the 800 pound gorilla, and any service they provide will be seen by vastly more people than niche services like Ning.

Ars Technica thinks that the intention is to challenge Craigslist and eBay. On top of that, Google Base will allow tagging - AT thinks that this is will enable Google to build "a kind of universal tagging schema for information and items, which could then be used to classify information across the net" (via Slashdot)

Ars Technica posts the following quote from the front page (which may be down now):

Google Base is Google's database into which you can add all types of content. We'll host your content and make it searchable online for free.

Examples of items you can find in Google Base:

• Description of your party planning service
• Articles on current events from your website
• Listing of your used car for sale
• Database of protein structures

John Battelle covers this briefly, as well.

| posted by Simon at 7:20 pm

 
Mamamusings has a good write-up of Mary Ellen Bates' presentation at Internet Librarian, in which Ms Bates covers '30 search tips in 40 minutes'. Lots here on new(ish) search engines, personalised searching and search histories on Google or Ask Jeeves, using Furl, searching podcasts, blog searching, and more. I liked this:

Use blogs to search hidden web content. A site may not be spidered by a search engine, but someone may well find and blog it. Use BlogDigger, BlogLines, Blogdex.net, blogsearch.google.com to find things indirectly—you’re leveraging the blog experts’s ability to find obscure content. (No time to dig up URLs…)

I'm finding this technique very useful, as I alluded in my post on companies banning blogs.

Thanks to Liz Lawley for a most comprehensive write-up.

| posted by Simon at 8:35 pm

 
The award wording didn't also say "of all films made by Americans since about 1940", but it might as well have.

Three films by non-Americans (four if we count Lord of the Rings, but that was basically a Hollywood film, even if it was made here in Wellington). Three or four from before the 1960s (Kane, His Girl Friday, It's a Wonderful Life). Vertigo correctly placed high, but no Raging Bull at all. Who are these people? Total Film? Nonsense!

Story at the Register (Total Film don't seem to want to put the list online).

| posted by Simon at 8:09 pm

 
From Wired News comes this story about companies blocking employee access to blogs. I'm not talking about employees running their own blogs on company time, which is a definite no-no as far as I'm concerned. I'm talking about banning employees from reading blogs. The reasons given don't even make sense:
Right. Your employee is breaching privacy by reading a blog? The security issue I can understand, but frankly, if you emply someone dumb enough or malicious enough to give away company secrets in a blog comment, that person is going to give away your secrets some other way, whether down at the pub or in a phone conversation. Blocking the technology will not help you here.

The article raises another issue, that of lost productivity through reading blogs. This seems like a case of staff needing guidance, rather than blanket bans on blogs. I read blogs at work - most of them are related somehow to my profession, though not necessarily to my current work. I treat them as a downtime, a chance to relax and stop concentrating on work for a few minutes. Other people might go for a walk round the office, or a cigarette break, or read the paper or have a chat in the kitchen. I read blogs. This shouldn't be a problem for reasonable employers, as long as the employees are getting their work done.

Most importantly, though, is that blogs are becoming increasingly important as sources of information. I'm responsible for media monitoring at work, and in at least some instances I find things on weblogs that I've missed in the mainstream media - or that the mainstream media itself has missed. I can't afford to ignore blogs, so it seems to me that banning them is very short-sighted.

| posted by Simon at 7:56 pm

 
Eric Schmidt writes on the Official Google Blog on 'the point of Google Print'.

His argument is that Google Print (GP) will "make it easier for people to find books", and that the beneficaries will be publishers and authors, as well as readers. Schmidt provides a reasonable counter-argument to the claims that duplicating the entire contents of books can not be considered fair use - "if that were so, you wouldn't be able to record a TV show to watch it later or use a search engine that indexes billions of Web pages".

I'm gradually becoming convinced by this view. Initially, I had thought that GP couldn't possibly be fair use. But if it isn't, then neither is Google's indexing of the web. One could argue, however, that there is a difference between crawling a website and actively scanning a book and placing its contents online. The website is already online, and presumeably the author wants it to be discoverable online. The book is not online, and possibly the author/publisher does not want it to be discoverable online. The website owner can prevent search engines from indexing it by inserting one simple line of code; the publisher must write to Google and ask for the book to be excluded.

I guess it comes down to whether a judge considers there to be a fundamental distinction between the analogue print and the digital worlds.

Personally, I think publishers are being short-sighted by objecting to GP - but nonetheless, short-sightedness is their right.

John Battelle points out that there are other issues: "who is making the money? Second, who owns the rights to leverage this new innovation - the public, the publisher, or ... Google? Will Google make the books it scans available for all comers to crawl and index? Certainly the answer seems to be no.". The comments on John's post, including some from publishers, and others which address the website vs book issue I mentioned above, are fascinating.



| posted by Simon at 7:50 pm

 
Some good power user tips for RSS, from Micro Persuasion.

| posted by Simon at 7:26 pm

 
Ouch! I'm guilty of as many as nine or ten of these, in various ways. Usability guru Jakob Neilsen writes about the top ten mistakes made by weblog authors, from a usability perspective.

I'd gone off Neilsen a bit. I learnt a lot from his work a few years ago, but I don't feel like he's added much to it recently. This, though, was very helpful to me. If you blog, go read.

| posted by Simon at 8:18 pm

 
In today's Cabinet announcement a new Minister was named for the National Library and Archives New Zealand - Hon Judith Tizard, following the retirement from Cabinet of Marian Hobbs. This is an interesting time to hold those responsibilities. There are definitely some interesting issues for the Minister to deal with - the National Digital Strategy and recent legislative changes such as the Archives Act 2004 and the National Library of New Zealand Act 2003, and the policy decisions that will flow on from these changes.

Hon David Cunliffe has been promoted from Minister outside Cabinet to being a full Cabinet Minister. This may serve to enhance the profile of his Communications and Information Technology portfolios. His reappointment has already been welcomed by Internet NZ.

| posted by Simon at 7:48 pm

 
AnyQuestions is a chat-based help service for New Zealand school children, staffed by librarians and run by the National Library. They've just received sponsorship for the next year from Telecom and Sun Microsystems.

| posted by Simon at 7:28 pm

 
"Twenty-seven percent of adult Internet users access RSS feeds through personalized start pages, though they don't know that's what they're doing on personalized portal pages." Only 4% knowingly use RSS, and another 12% have heard of it. (Clickz.com).

Makes sense. Explaining to people what RSS stood for was never going be easy, especially when even proponents can't agree if its Really Simple Syndication or RDF Site Summary or Rich Site Feeds. Repackage RSS as 'web feeds' or 'news feeds', or better yet don't even tell people that they're using RSS, and maybe they'll be more likely to use it. Keep it simple, save the time of the (user)....

| posted by Simon at 9:57 pm

 
TeleRead provides (one) take on the library of the future. This library is all digital - using the e-book equivalent podcasts or webfeeds. You create a set of criteria, and are then emailed books that meet those criteria, at set intervals. You can read the book on your PC, or download to a PDA. A bookshelf programme on your PC keeps track of what you read, what you like, what books you don't finish, and more.

An interesting read. I have a feeling that we're a long way away from this, not so much because of the technology but because of copyright/DRM issues - will publishers and authors be happy for their books to be included in such a 'library'? Also, this seems to be not so much a library as a subscription bookstore. I would question whether libraries would be permitted by publishers to offer such a service.

That said, I think it would be freaking cool, and I'd be putting my money down to sign up, as soon as it was available ;-)

It does raise another issue, though, which is the future of readers' advisory services. It seems to me that these services are going to become less and less valuable as time goes on. They rely on a single expert (the librarian) giving their opinion of useful or interesting books. Which is fine. But we now have services like Amazon ("those who read this book also read....") and Literature Map, which aggregate the power of many readers to provide the same information. And I'm willing to bet that they are better (Wisdom of Crowds, not to mention that no one librarian can be an expert on all forms of writing. For example, typing David Foster Wallace into literature map tells me that Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and William Gaddis are similar to Wallace. I already know that the first two are similar to him, and I like their work. I haven't heard of Gaddis, but this inspires me to pick up one of his books. Now, a librarian might know that - but then again, they might not). It seems that automatic recommendations, based on the opinions of large numbers of readers, will increasingly be the way in which we discover new books.



| posted by Simon at 5:18 pm

 
Gary Price at Search Engine Watch reports Jim Lanzone of Ask Jeeves, talking about "the blogs that matter". Lazone defines a 'blog that matters' as any blog with at least one subscriber in Bloglines - there are 1.3 million of them. (Why this definition? If someone has bothered to subscribe, then the blog matters). 14, 363 blogs have 50+ subscribers - these "really really matter". 437 have over 1000 subscribers. I've currently got 48 - so if two of you could recommend me to a friend I'd "really really matter" - which would be totally sweet ;-)

| posted by Simon at 9:14 pm

 
Blake Carver is a convert to the digital future:

" Society in general, and younger people in particular, are moving away from the printed word, our bread and butter for a century or two now, and away from libraries, for a number of reasons. Why should they care about or use print? They can't put it on their iPod. They can't put it on their laptop. And they can't view it on a screen. They get most of the answers they need from Google. This is the essence of my argument. If most people are able to "get served" elsewhere, why do they need a book, a library, or a librarian?

It doesn't matter if you think digital isn't as stable as print. It doesn't matter if you think it's impossible to read for extended periods of time on electronic media. It doesn't matter if you think Google isn't meeting their needs. And it certainly doesn't matter if you think books are more convenient. Some of those things may be true today, but none of them will be true in 10 years."

David Rothman at TeleRead endorses Blake's comments, unsurprisingly: "librarians can thrive–if they can make the transition. In part that means more familiarity with the technology, and in part it means a changing of roles, with less emphasis on the routine aspects of librarianship and more emphasis on librarians as content-creators and -evaluators."

Walt Crawford has seen it all before.

| posted by Simon at 8:48 pm

 
I'm so late posting about Google's blog search that I've been overtaken by the launch of Yahoo's version. For some strange reason, Yahoo have put the blog search in a separate box on a sidebar on their news search screen - I missed it the first time I looked at the site.

On first impression, I'm not terribly impressed with Yahoo's offering. I tried it out with the names of a few prominent Kiwi bloggers - it turned up practically zilch. In one case, the only link was to a blog by another author on the same site as the person I was searching for. Google's is somewhat better - it returned blogs by the people I was searching for, and blog posts that mentioned them.

Even so, using Google over the last few days has been frustrating - I've been running a regular search for work, where I need to retrieve everything published on a given topic, and Google is missing posts that I know are out there. In spite of that, it's doing a pretty good job, as is Google News. I do find myself having to double-check media websites, though - Google News misssed an important article that was buried low-down on stuff.co.nz. And both services are still in Beta, so I shouldn't be overly critical - but Technorati is proving more useful at the moment.

What others are saying:

John Battelle;
Techdirt ("None of them are particularly comprehensive, and all of them have problems").

| posted by Simon at 8:33 pm

 
LibraryClips points to Netvibes, a handy (and free) virtual desktop, useful for accessing your online "stuff". It comes pre-configured with links to weather, a few RSS feeds (BoingBoing, Kottke, etc), a search box, a notepad, and a Gmail notifier.

All of these are optional, and its incredibly easy to reconfigure them or add new ones. Additionally, you can include podcast feeds, and play them within Netvibes without needing additional software.

I'm liking this. The only objection I can see is the possible privacy implications - it has to use persistent cookies (in order to remember your personalised virtual desktop), and using the Gmail notifier might not be the best idea if you are paranoid about your security. But other than that, it looks good. Definite value here for clients or colleagues who aren't highly tech-savvy - set them up a page with a few good feeds, and leave them to it. With so few moving parts, it would be pretty hard for them to break it.

| posted by Simon at 12:21 pm

 
New Zealand votes in a national election on September 17. I thought I'd post a few websites related to the election.

Party websites:

• ACT


• Green Party


• Labour Party


• Maori Party


• National Party


• New Zealand First


• Jim Anderton's Progressive Party


• United Future


• Destiny Party

National gets credit for having a clear policy section, which shows when each policy was issued. I find the Labour site less helpful, and I hate the way it automatically starts playing a video when you load the site. Labour and National both lose marks for using splash screens. The Greens homepage looks overly cluttered to me. The Maori Party really need to stop using frames. Destiny takes the boobie prize for having their policies online for several months, but not actually linking to them. Their policy summary is linked from the home page, but none of their other policies had links. They could be found through a Google site search, so they were online, just not accessible. This problem has recently been fixed.

Summaries of party policies, and candidate lists, can be found at Policy.net.nz and NZVotes.org (a supposedly non-partisan site, but one sponsored by the decidedly non-partisan Maxim Institute). The Electoral Commission website has information on New Zealand's system of proportional representation, and on the different parties, as well as a nifty election calculator, which shows the various possible electoral outcomes depending on each parties share of the party vote, and number of electoral seats won.

So far, so mainstream.

The fringes are more interesting.

Both major print media publishers have attempted to take blogging into the mainstream. Both, to my mind, have failed. Stuff is carrying "blogs" written by the party leaders (except for Labour's, which is written by senior Minister Steve Maharey). But these aren't really blogs. They don't allow for replies, they don't contain links, and they're written more like press releases than like a blog post. They lack the sense of authorial voice that a true blog contains, and come off too much like an official party release. Better is the New Zealand Herald's election blogs, which provide comment on the election and assorted issues, though not written by politicians (or by journalists), but by businesspeople, trade unionists, entrepreneurs, and the president of Grey Power. Again, though, these don't take advantage of the internet format: no links, no facility for readers to comment. (Both Stuff and NZ Herald enable readers to email replies, and print some of them, at their discretion, at the end of the page - not the same as a blog comments function). Press journalist Colin Espiner has just started a blog, which gives personal reflections of his time on the campaign trail. It looks promising.

Better, however, are the more well-established blogs: ACT leader Rodney Hide has been blogging for some time. Former Libertarianz leader (and current candidate) Peter Creswell has a blog with the apt name Not PC. National Party worker David Farrar has a good (and fair-minded) blog, and on the left KeepLeft is funny. The Greens' FrogBlog suffers from being anonymous, but is worth a look. My favourite are the group of bloggers on Public Address, who go into issues in some depth, and (admirably) admit to mistakes (see especially Keith Ng's analysis of National's tax cut policies).

Finally, podcasting. Christchurch's Voice Booth has podcasts featuring interviews with party leaders Don Brash (National), Rodney Hide (ACT), Peter Dunne (United Future), and Rod Donald (Greens). Their website is here and an article about the podcasts is here.

Overall, the net hasn't really impacted on New Zealand politics the way it has in the USA. Bloggers like Farrar are now quoted in the media, and various newspaper articles quote from blogs. But the total audience seems small - the same few people commenting on each others' blogs. And there hasn't been a big issue (like the Rathergate affair) broken by non-traditional media yet. It will be interesting to see if that changes.

| posted by Simon at 10:23 pm

 
An interesting article on possible problems with the accuracy of scientific journal articles. New Scientist reports a study which uses statistical analysis to show that there is less than a 50% chance that the results of any given scientific paper are true.

While I don't have the scientific knowledge to argue this one, I would have thought that this is why we place an importance on replicability, and on meta-analysis. The probability that many papers which give the same result are all wrong is vanishingly small.

The original article, by John Ionaddis, is in Public Library of Science: Medicine.

| posted by Simon at 9:05 pm

 
Joy at Wanderings of a Student Librarian has a list of student bloggers, and also of recent graduates who began blogging while they were studying. (Including me, thanks).

Some familiar and unfamiliar names on there, which I will have to investigate further at some point.

| posted by Simon at 10:05 pm

 
Phil Bradley points to an interesting analysis by Thomas Mann* of the problems inherent in using full-text searching, a la Google Print, to access scholarly material:

"Keyword searching fails to map the taxonomies that alert researchers to unanticipated aspects of their subjects. It fails to retrieve literature that uses keywords other than those the researcher can specify; it misses not only synonyms and variant phrases but also all relevant works in foreign languages."

Instead, Google is swamped by millions of pages which contain the required keywords, but not necessarily the content that the searcher seeks. A fully operational Google Print, Mann argues, will only magnify the problem (and imagine trying keyword searches when many of the books in the database will be dictionaries).

Makes sense to me. And a much more reasoned critique than Gorman's from a few months ago. It seems to me that Google Print would have one obvious point of advantage, which would be identifying texts which contained reference to a particular named person, organisation, object or place. For example, someone researching a minor historical figure might have to manually search through a huge number of books (or at least indexes) to locate those which referenced the subject - using Google Print would presumably save the researcher a considerable amount of time.


(*Not this Thomas Mann, unfortunately).

| posted by Simon at 9:45 pm

 
Dan Chudnow has "little patience for anyone who thinks "folksonomies" are anything more than fun, rapid, somewhat useful ways to help find stuff later and interact with fringe communities."

"People of all shapes and sizes are somehow really interested in vocabulary development, of all things, and -- trust me on this -- it can't last."

"Twenty years down the road you [will] realize many of those words you used to catalog all those web links that don't exist are offensive, juvenille, no longer contextually relevant, fully indecipherable acronyms, or just plain no longer interesting"

His view? The current interest in folksonomies will die off rapidly, and the only people left paying attention in this space will be the librarians.

| posted by Simon at 1:45 pm

 
Rochelle writes about the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) labour dispute, and how blogs and podscasts are being used by staff to put across their point of view, while management has shut down their email addresses. But blogging isn't just being used to gain publicity for one side of the dispute, but for communication between sides:

"the blogs are even one way of communicating across the sides of this lock out: staff are reading the blogs of managers, managers are reading the blogs of staff."

| posted by Simon at 1:30 pm

 
With Google announcing Google Talk, Walking Paper wondered how long Google's corporate information page would continue to say "It's best to do one thing really, really well. Google does search. Google does not do horoscopes, financial advice or chat".

Stephen has the answer: about five minutes.

Stephen has more on Google's new features, and what they might mean for libraries.

| posted by Simon at 1:26 pm

 
An article on LISNews.com points out the privacy implications of LibraryELF.

I have to admit I hadn't really thought about privacy when I was praising this service a few weeks ago. I'd also made the assumption that if LibraryELF was available for a library, it was endorsed by that library. The LISNews post suggests that this is not the case.

I'm not tooooo worried about giving away my details. In practice, what have I given up? Some company in Canada knows my library card number and a password? What are they going to do with it? Nothing worrying that I can see. OK, they can see the books I read - I guess that could open me up to some kind of targeted spam, or they could theoretically pass the details of what I was reading to the government - not that my government would really care.

All of this does raise the question of how LibraryELF makes money...I'd assumed it was through a deal with the libraries, but obviously not. Advertising? Not much of that on their site, that I can see.

Hopefully, this is a non-issue. It doesn't appear to be a major one.

| posted by Simon at 1:18 pm

 
Interesting Google privacy issue picked up by Cory at Boing Boing.

" Just before you click on a link on a search-results page, at the "on mousedown" event, Google rewrites the links in its search results with a long redirector URL that is presumably being used to track which search results are being selected most often.

For example, the first search result for a Google search for Boing Boing is listed as "boingboing.net/". If you hover your mouse over the link on the results page, the status-bar in your browser displays the link URL as "http://boingboing.net". However, if you right-click on the link and copy the link location, it is revealed to actually be "http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1& url=http%3A//boingboing.net/&ei=U4gJQ6_fBqKiQevXjYIO" (it will probably be a slightly different URL for you). "

Cory says this is probably benign, but there's a principle here: "Don't be Evil" should surely include being upfront about what information you are collecting about your users. Especially when this is linked to the legendary Google never-expiring cookies....

| posted by Simon at 9:48 pm

 
Local Councils NZ aims to help people understand more about what councils do and to encourage participation in local council processes.

| posted by Simon at 8:55 pm

 
Panlibus describes the launch of personalised RSS feeds for library users at Northumbria University.

"Subscribers to their personal feed receive alerts from their Library account such as 'Item due for return in 3 days', or 'The item you reserved is now awaiting collection at the Library', or 'Your overdue item has already attracted in excess of £2.00 in charges'. The feed items provide a link to take the user, without an interviening login challenge, in to their Library interface at the apropriate page to take the required action such as renew the book on loan."

This is cool. It's not the first example of the use of RSS in a catalogue (I'm using LibraryELF and finding it very useful), but the automatic login appears to be a new, and very cool, feature - LibraryELF gives you the information, but you have to login to the OPAC separately.

There's also a research paper on 'Personalised RSS in the Library' (PDF).

| posted by Simon at 8:34 pm

 
Interesting stats from the ALIA website on the Australian library labour market. Key points:

- librarians earn 119% of the average wage [though I'm guessing a lot smaller percentage of the average wage for people with degrees]
- the profession is 89% female [I would have guessed less]
- the profession is older than average [mainly because for other occupations 18% of the workforce are aged 15-24, for librarians it is 3%]
- job prospects are rated average ('good' for archivists and intelligence professionals) and unemployment is low.

What ALIA doesn't say, but is available at the source site (Jobsearch) is that employment in the sector is expected to decline.

Still, interesting. In the back of my mind, a move to Australia is always a possibility. This is useful information to help inform my choice.

| posted by Simon at 8:28 pm

 
Noted in passing: Film historians figure that 90% of all the silent movies ever made and half of the sound pictures made before 1950 no longer exist in complete form. SysBlog
(which quotes Ken Weissman, head of film preservation at the Library of Congress).

| posted by Simon at 7:51 pm

 
Article on NexGen Librarian saying that Google is taking over the role of libraries: " If you needed to know the capital of Mozambique, you used to call the library. Now, everybody uses Google.". Why is this a bad thing? "This is evil because public libraries fill some roles that Google can never fill. If our budgets continue to be cut, there will be no story hours. There will be no safe place for teenagers to go after school and check their email."...

And a message for Eric Schmidt: "Your company does a very good job at indexing the internet. That’s its niche. Public libraries make information readily available to everybody. That’s our niche.... you are currently invading our territory.... If our budgets [are] cut any further, everyone loses. "

Hmmm. Can't say that I agree with this one. If Google is good at answering people's factual reference questions, then let it continue to do that. Criticising Google from the assumption that we have a divine right to continue to perform this role is arrogant.

Either we need to do what we do better, or we need to stop doing it, and let Google do it. And then re-focus what we mean by 'library' - market ourselves on a different basis - the library as place (as described in the article); the library as entertainment source (books on paper are still better and easier to read than books on screen); the library as source of serious scholarly information (books, or specialist databases).

Complaining that Google allows people to answer simple reference questions without recourse to a librarian is ultimately futile. Like the buggy whip manufacturers complaining at the advent of the automobile. We can do things that Google will never be able to - so let's use it as a resource and an ally, and concentrate on marketing our strengths.

| posted by Simon at 7:49 pm

 
Short article from CIO Update on corporate blogs. Main points:

- every company should have a blogging policy, even if they want nothing to do with blogs;
- benefits of blogging include mindshare, building customer relationships and giving the organisation a human face, and building loyalty and interest internally, while creating "organic groups of people who can solve problems without having to add corporate hierarchy".

Via Phil Bradley's Blog.

| posted by Simon at 7:38 pm

 
US singer-songwriter Fiona Apple will release the reworked version of her new album in the autumn, following its earlier leaked release on the internet, says the BBC.

It was thought that Epic did not want to release her third album over fears it was not commercial enough.

However, the leaked tracks were enthusiastically received by critics and led to fans lobbying for its release.

Just as with Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the online release of an album deemed uncommerical by the record company results in the album being commercially released - and no doubt doing very well (YHF was Wilco's best-selling album, in spite of the fact that most fans had already (with the band's permission) downloaded the entire thing).



| posted by Simon at 7:25 pm

 
From Teleread, more on the Microsoft vs Apple DRM issue which I noted a few days ago. TeleRead: ‘Incompatibility slowing growth of digital music’

| posted by Simon at 10:41 pm

 
In In Saecula Saeculorum Anastasia has a post detailing her negative experiences in an unfamiliar library...."Maybe I'm the only idiot in the world who has never worked in a closed stack library, but I didn't exactly know what to do. I felt really unsure".

She meets an unhelpful fellow patron: "Him: You just walk in. It's not a mystery. It's just like every other library in the world. Use the door." and a "library nazi".

Anastasia's not an uneducated person. She's familiar with libraries and the research process (she's writing a dissertation). Now if someone like her can have problems in a library, and be made to feel like an idiot, how must some of our patrons feel if they don't often set foot in a library?

(Found via a Technorati feed for Libraries).

| posted by Simon at 10:23 pm

 
Very nice directory of Free e-books online. Starts with the most obvious example (Project Gutenberg) and lists a whole lot more of the best digital libraries worldwide. There's a special section on Australian Digital Libraries, too.

| posted by Simon at 10:01 pm

 
The Newsgator Herald has a good list of reference sites. Search tools for blogs, message boards, phone directories, people finders, religious statistics, annual reports, campaign finance information, census data, find a doctor, urban legends, lots of government information (US only) and more. And that's only the A's.

A very cool set of links, containing some good sites I already knew about, and plenty of specialised ones that I had never heard of. Definitely worth a bookmark.

| posted by Simon at 9:58 pm

 
Dave at The Industrial Librarian argues that corporate librarians can get bogged down in two many unimportant clerical tasks, such as checking in journals and meticulous cataloguing*. Instead, they should focus on those activities which really add value to the organisation.

He was responding to Why many medical librarians deserve to lose their jobs, which is also worth reading. I can certainly recognise, in what Dave says, mistakes which I made myself when I was a corporate librarian. I'll try to bear his points in mind if I end up back in a corporate environment.

*Not that cataloguing is really a clerical task, but I take his point. If you have a small collection, does it really need to to be immaculately catalogued to AACR2R standards?

| posted by Simon at 9:27 pm

 
The Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science is a comprehensive LIS dictionary. It covers library organisations, publishers, computer and internet terms, terms related to books as objects, concepts such as censorship and information literacy, and different types of literary form, such as libels and idylls.

| posted by Simon at 4:26 pm

 
India's Frontline magazine has an interview with David S. Magier of Columbia University Libraries. Magier talks about the need for librarians in the digital age, the value of open access journals, problems with library funding post-9/11, and the ways in which technologies such as microfiche and the internet are opening up rare and unique collections to a wider audience.

| posted by Simon at 4:04 pm

 
AllYouCanRead.com lists the top newspapers and magazines for a large range of countries, as well as listing the top 100 newspapers worldwide, and the top 20 magazines by topic (news; science and nature; teens; computers etc).

The listings are based on user visits, not some qualitative measure of what newspaper is the best (at the moment, the world top 10 is dominated by Filipino papers and UK tabloids) and some of the listings are a bit strange - National Geographic as the top sports magazine?

But overall, worth a look and a bookmark.

| posted by Simon at 3:26 pm

 
[Which turns into the story of how I found out a few things about podcasting, where I looked, and what I still need to know].

I can tell that something that formerly appealed only to techies has reached the mainstream when my non-library/non-techie friends start talking about it. With podcasting, that point was reached all at once last week when three friends, seperately, mentioned podcasts. That indicated to me that I really needed to make an effort to understand the concept.

I'd never been much interested in podcasts, for several reasons. I don't take in information well aurally. I've tested as being a kinesthetic learner, rather than visual or aural. I prefer making sense of things myself, by trial and error, rather than learning by listening to someone else (which made school a riot, I can tell you - luckily most of my teachers figured they could just leave me alone). Added to that, I'm partially deaf (the hearing aid is on its way, eventually - the good thing about a public health system is that treatment is free - the bad thing is that it's incredibly slow). And finally, I don't have a portable media player, or speakers on my work PC. So my only time to listen to podcasts is at home.

Still, I thought I'd better at least try to understand them (partially because an iPod or equivalent is on my Christmas list, even if I have to buy it myself, and partially because I figure it's just something I need to know).

So the process. First stop was Wikipedia's podcasting page (with the number of geeks on Wikipedia, they should understand podcasting, right?). Which answered a few questions I had (notably one of my friends had indicated that podcasting used radio waves, which I was sure was incorrect, but didn't have any evidence to back myself up. I was right. Podcasting is the transfer of audio or video files over the internet. It uses RSS to aggregate and syndicate the files, and make them available to listeners using feed-readers.

So far so good. I understand RSS, blogs and readers, obviously. The Wikipedia article had links to some sources of feeds. I checked out audiofeeds.org, a source of independent music feeds. I grabbed a couple of likely looking feeds and subscribed in Bloglines. I hit Apple's iTunes podcasting page, billed as a clearing house for huge numbers of quality feeds. It was disappointing as it only allows subscriptions through the iTunes store - which isn't available in New Zealand yet.

I now have three feeds in Bloglines. I've been trying for the last few days to play them, without any luck at all. I click on the 'link' or 'enclosure' links provided with the item, and if I'm lucky it opens Quicktime, which plays about a three second fragment of the song, and nothing else. If I'm unlucky, it crashes my web browser. I've tried saving files to my hard drive, but then I can't get them to play in either Windows Media Player or iTunes. I don't think I'm an idiot, but I can't get this working for the life of me.

| posted by Simon at 6:58 pm

 
New Zealand is finally seeing some movement from the big players in online music downloads. (That's "iTunes" to you). Apple has bought the itunes.co.nz domain name (Dominion Post), while Coca Cola have launched their own service. Prices are $1.75/song or $18/album** - a discount on store prices (let's say $24) but not a very large discount. And you can't play their tunes on an iPod (surely a big issue for a lot of people).

Meanwhile, mobile call prices in New Zealand are among the highest in the world (Dominion Post).

Not everyone is happy with iPods, says Peter Griffin in the New Zealand Herald. The criticism comes because the iPod isn't compatible with Microsoft's Digital Rights Management. Meaning you can't load DRM'd files on the iPod from either the Coke download service, or from Sony's CDs, which are all going to be DRM'd from the end of the year. (Cheers Sony - you've just guaranteed I won't be buying any of your CDs).

I'm not sure whether consumers should be mad at Apple for going its own way, or at Microsoft and the record companies for using DRM. (Here's a thought: DRM is pointless and will only annoy paying customers. I can get any song I want on file-sharing networks, anyway. I do not need to rip or copy your CD. BUT, if you make it hard for me to take songs from a CD I have legitimately purchased
and transfer them onto my PC, I might be more inclined to just download the songs. It's easier).

Finally, the launch of Vodafone's 3G phones is being greeted with indifference, by Peter Novak in the Herald. He criticises the videophone feature for lag and pixelation. What's worse though is the music download feature. Songs cost $3.50 to download. That's twice what they cost from Coketunes. They have DRM to prevent you moving the song to your PC. The phone has 32mb storage. That's it. So you can store maybe 8 tunes on your phone, before you have to start deleting to make room for more. With issues like these, would it be any wonder if people chose to pirate songs for use on these phones, rather than paying ridiculous prices for them?

** As a note for American readers, I'm talking New Zealand dollars. Which are worth about 70 cents, US. So $1.75 for a song translates as US$1.23. More expensive than the US iTunes, but not extortionately so.

| posted by Simon at 6:49 pm

 
Techdirt points to a BBC study that suggests people are more likely to turn to the internet first for information, rather than asking teachers or parents.

Techdirt adds: "Of course, parents still do have a role in teaching their kids how to find information and how to view the information they find."

Or, indeed, librarians....

| posted by Simon at 5:14 pm

 
Botany Library has won the 2005 Computerworld Excellence in the Use of IT in Government Award for its use of RFID. Press release, Computerworld article on the finalists (they don't seem to have anything in depth on the winners yet).

Meanwhile, Jessamyn is sceptical about the value of RFID, and it isn't popular in Berkeley, either (LISNews.com).

Funny how a given issue can be seen as highly important in one country, and almost ignored in another. There doesn't seem to be much (or any) controversy over RFID in New Zealand - it's just seen as a technology. But it's clearly quite controversial in the US.

On the other hand, Trusted Computing has raised a lot of concerns in New Zealand government agencies, whereas US government agencies see it in purely beneficial terms (from what I've read).

| posted by Simon at 5:35 pm

 
Interesting article here from the ALA website, where there are proposals to "provide up to $5,000 in loan forgiveness to qualified librarians, teachers, and child-welfare workers in low-income communities." American Library Association).

$5000! That's roughly the total (tuition) cost of my MLIS. I'll remember that next time I'm complaining at how big my student loan is.

Interesting though to see that the US is trying to deal with similar issues as in New Zealand, where reducing the impact of student debt is shaping to be a big issue at next month's election. (See policy.net.nz for a summary of the main parties' positions - most are offering to write-off all or some of the interest on the loan, for students who stay in New Zealand after graduation).

(Original link via Librarian in Black)

| posted by Simon at 5:07 pm

 
Via Techdirt comes this story, wherein an Arizona school has given up textbooks and will instead supply children with laptops and "use electronic and online articles as part of more traditional teacher lesson plans".

Great way to give kids the (incorrect) idea that everything is available online, I guess. I'm not filled with confidence at their prospects for success, given that even the superintendent of the School District is unsure of how the switch will work.

I'd also question the technological determinism of the claim that "we visited other schools using laptops. And at the schools with laptops, students were just more engaged than at non-laptop schools". That's a correlation. It's not causality. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least one other explanation for the difference - kids who have access to laptops at school are probably attending school in a wealthy district, and have other advantages at home. The presence of the laptops, and the engagement of the students, could be explained by their background, rather than the laptops themselves causing greater engagement.

| posted by Simon at 8:32 pm

 
LibrarianInBlack has an update on the use of RSS in Innovative's 2006 release of Millennium:

" Library staff can insert customized RSS feeds into catalog pages (for library events, booklists, etc.)
Any search run using Boolean can be turned into an RSS feed. This means that new items that fall into the search parameters of a patron's choosing can be fed to them (kind of like Preferred Searches)"

I may be reading the press release wrong, but it seems to me that only librarians can create feeds from Boolean searches. Which is good, as far as it goes. But, thinking as a user, I don't want librarian-generated feeds - I want to create my own!

Maybe in the 2007 release...

| posted by Simon at 9:30 pm

 
Excellent, balanced article that introduces folksonomies, discusses their strengths and weaknesses, and compares them with traditional heirarchical and faceted classification schemes. Definitely worth reading.

Via Library Stuff.

| posted by Simon at 9:45 pm

 
I'm not "studying to be a librarian" anymore.

I handed my research paper in last Friday.

As soon as it's graded, I'm officially the holder of an MLIS!

28 months work is finally completed!

I'm happy.

| posted by Simon at 9:32 pm

 
Technology Review has an article on the problems archivists face regarding digital storage, and on what the US National Archives and Records Administration is doing about it.

Worth a read.

(via LISNews.com).

| posted by Simon at 9:32 pm

 
The US Supreme Court has ruled against Grokster (PC World) in Grokster v MGM. The plaintiffs were arguing that makers of file-sharing software products, such as Grokster, were liable for copyright violations committed by users of the software. The Court argued that Grokster (and StreamCast) were aware that users were primarily using their products to commit copyright infringement, and that both companies actively encouraged this.

Grokster backers argue that this will make technological innovation harder, as software creators will have to be mindful of any possible illegal uses that could be made of their products.

In Popular Science Cory Doctorow points out that the Court didn't state what actions legally constitute an 'affirmative step', and therefore make a company guilty of inducing infringement. He adds:

"This decision won’t kill P2P sharing. Engineering students write P2P software in 11 lines of code as class assignments....But what today’s decision will kill is American innovation. Chinese and European firms can get funding and ship products based on plans that don’t have to comply with this decision’s fuzzy test, while their American counterparts will need to convince everyone from their bankers to the courts that they’ve taken all measures to avoid inducing infringement. "

Xeni Jardin has more links on the Grokster decision (BoingBoing). Ernest Miller has notes on the decision, and argues that BitTorrent might be next.

The former head of the Recording Industry Association of America, Hillary Rosen, notes the futility of fighting the battle, even though the RIAA won. So obvious I feel ashamed for saying it, but the internet's a global institution, after all. This decision doesn't stop someone in New Zealand creating a file-sharing application - and the Supreme Court won't be able to do anything about that. Or China. Or Nigeria. Or wherever really.

| posted by Simon at 8:50 pm

 
Test the Nation is a TV quiz show with an interactive element - viewers can take part in the quiz online or record their scores with pen and paper. For the last two years (in New Zealand) it's run as an IQ test. This year, it's being run as a general knowledge quiz, with a focus on New Zealand topics. One of the gimmicks of the show is that they have different groups competing against each other. In the past this has included blondes, sportspeople (several of my former workmates were in the team), teachers - that sort of thing.

This year, they have asked "nurses, fitness gurus, farmers, librarians, trades and bankers". My girlfriend is part of the librarian team. Here's hoping they don't let us down...

| posted by Simon at 10:03 pm

 
The vivisection conference, scheduled to be held at the National Library, has been cancelled. The National Anti Vivisection Campaign has a press release which says ""The National Library didn't really want the hassle and controversy of hosting a vivisection conference, and ANZCCART knew that a lot of library staff opposed the conference and I think they decided that holding the conference there was too risky."


Here's the text of a post I made on NZ-Libs:


Firstly, I think as librarians we should be supporting the rights of others to free speech, whether or not we disagree with their views. We should also be presenting an image of neutrality, or at least impartiality, on controversial issues. It really makes no difference whether anti-vivisectionists will one day come to be lauded as heroes, or castigated as villains. Our impartiality should remain in place, no
matter what the public opinion is of either group. So I share Stephen's disappointment, irrespective of whether or not the staff protests had anything to do with the cancellation of the booking.

Secondly: the National Library is (obviously) a publically-funded institution, so any (legal) group should have the right to utilise the Library's services. This includes booking meeting rooms. It seems problematic to me that some organisations can be expected to pay tax to support the Library, but have librarians lobby against their use of the Library's facilities.

Thirdly: the National Library is part of the Public Service. This carries obligations of neutrality and impartiality. For example: "The public must have no basis on which to believe that decisions are made or policies are applied unevenly. Public servants must observe the principles of fairness and impartiality in all aspects of their work." [State Services Commission, Public Service Code of Conduct].

Now it seems to me that, by protesting against this conference, Library staff have been lobbying to have a policy applied unevenly.

Obviously, I fully support the right of Mark's group to conduct lawful protests against the conference, and of librarians to join those protests in their capacity as private citizens. But, as librarians, I think we should be supporting the right of the conference organisers to meet.

| posted by Simon at 9:58 pm

 
I like this a lot... Dilbert 26 June 2005:

"your design reminds me of hieroglyphics. Are you sure the ancient Egyptians didn't patent it?"
"First of all, I didn't use hieroglyphics. Secondly, the ancient Egyptians didn't have microchips. Thirdly, they didn't have patent laws".
"Oh yeah? Then how did they build the pyramids?"

| posted by Simon at 8:50 pm

 
LibraryELF provides email and/or RSS reminders of overdues and holds at your library. To my surprise and joy, Wellington City Libraries has signed up with LibraryELF, along with five other New Zealand libraries (out of a total of eight international (non-US/Canada) libraries).

Sweet! My account is already created. Given that I make an art-form of forgetting when my books are due, this is going to be very, very useful to me. Kudos to the librarians involved in this initiatives - and a shout-out to Jeff, as I see Upper Hutt libraries are involved as well :-).

| posted by Simon at 7:14 pm

 
Off-topic, but I obviously had to post this. Hanson Robotics has developed a robot Phillip K. Dick. The robot will be interacting with the crowd at WIRED magazine's NextFest, June 25-27, 2005.

I wonder if it thinks that it's really Phil?

via BoingBoing

| posted by Simon at 12:50 pm

 
Christian Science Monitor has some words of support for the American Library Association as they argue against a renewal of the PATRIOT ACT, especially s. 215 (the one that allows federal agents to secretly obtain library records without a warrant). (via LISNews.com)

| posted by Simon at 10:12 pm

 
LibrarianInBlack spots that Innovative will be introducing RSS features for patrons. Options will include one-to-many and one-to-one communication - so you'll be able to get RSS feeds for overdues, holds (and hopefully, though it doesn't say, customised new books lists).

This is exactly what I want in a catalogue....

| posted by Simon at 9:48 pm

 
I have nothing to say to this. I am truly speechless. But read it. Seriously.

"The California Assembly just passed a bill that bans textbooks longer than 200 pages, requiring publishers to shorten their tomes and include -- get this -- an appendix of related websites."

Techdirt: Books Over 200 Pages Considered Harmful To Students.

| posted by Simon at 10:15 pm

 
And speaking of the National Library....

The Sunday Star-Times reports that anti-vivisectionists are set to disrupt a conference being held at the National Library.

The paper writes: "The Australia and New Zealand Council for the Care of Animals in Research and Teaching (ANZCCART) conference is a gathering of research scientists and members of animal ethics committees."

There has been an interesting debate of this topic on the NZ-LIBS mailing list. Search on 'vivisection' in the list archives (also on the Knowledge Basket, though that contains many other lists too).

The debate was sparked by Mark Eden of the National Anti Vivisection Campaign (safe for work), who wrote to the list asking librarians to support his group's protests, or for the National Library to cancel the conference booking. National Librarian Penny Carnaby wrote in response, and a number of other librarians chimed in on both sides of the debate.

Many argued that the Library has a responsibility to uphold freedom of information, though Eden and others claimed that ANZCCART itself is guilty of concealing information, an apparent paradox. There were claims that the Library should side with powerless groups in society, rather than powerful ones such as ANZCCART, and that (by charging usage fees) the Library was shutting out some groups, even if it claimed to be open to all. Several librarians asked if they would be able to exercise their right to protest against the conference.

My few cents: the Library should allow ANZCCART to hold its conference. The Library is a public institution, funded by New Zealanders. It therefore should be open to all New Zealanders who wish to carry out lawful activities there. ANZCCART are breaking no laws. What they are doing may be distasteful to some (or even "murder" as one librarian called it). But it's lawful. It's not the Library's place to pass judgements about what is and isn't lawful - if vivisection should be banned, or restricted, that's a decision for Parliament, not for the Library as a public agency.

By those standards I would support the right of the National Front to meet in the Library as well. Equally, the Library should respect the right to lawful protest that NAVC and its allies possesses.

The fact that one person, or group - or many people - object to another group is no reason to prevent them from booking space in the Library. If we adopted that approach, the Library would be unable to hold meetings of gay rights groups (no doubt Destiny Church would object); nor of the Destiny Church (no doubt gay groups would object). Pretty soon no-one would be able to use the Library.

As for protesting, as public employees the librarians are of course bound by the Public Service Code of Conduct, so should give consideration to whether their actions contravene this code or not. (As a purely personal, non-legal-in-any-way opinion, I would guess that quiet protest probably wouldn't....)

| posted by Simon at 9:40 pm

 
Treasury has posted papers from the 2005 Budget on its website. The papers include Treasury briefing papers on Budget bilaterals, which are discussions between individual Ministers and the Minister of Finance, where the Ministers seek approval for funding for their projects. The National Library (PDF) bilateral paper includes a request for a staff salary increase. This is Treasury's response:

"Treasury does not support this initiative as we do not consider that there is evidence for of significant declines in outputs associated with not funding the bid. In the last budget it was agreed National Library receive $0.961 p.a. for the purpose of staff salary increases. There does not yet exist any evidence of declines in staff morale or increases in staff turnover that typically support funding such a proposal."

There you have it. We just need to start quitting our jobs more often, and complaining about how badly we are treated, and we'd be in line for big pay rises. What's worse, the National Library's Statement of Intent (PDF) says that one of the risks facing the organisation is an aging workforce and low turnover. So the fact that staff aren't leaving is a double whammy, a risk for the organisation and a reason for staff to be paid less.

Fortunately, the salary bid was approved (Cabinet minute, PDF). National Library's 385 staff can share an increase of $1.4 million. That works out at an average of a bit over $3000, so it's not too bad for someone at the lower-end of the scale (assuming that it was shared evenly, which it won't be anyway). But hardly enough to attract new talent. I'd quite like to work at the National Library at some point - but even at this stage in my career, I would have to take a pay cut to do so - unless I went straight into a team leader or manager position. There's something not quite right there.



| posted by Simon at 9:23 pm

 
What it says on the tin, basically. A simple list of features that a library web site should have (LibrarianInBlack).

| posted by Simon at 11:00 pm

 
A report from the Futures Group: Public library service in 2015 (pdf).

"[Libraries] will need to segment [users] by the nature of their requirements, sometimes they will need to segment them by their financial status."

"There are many examples of new technology being used for old uses, with no real exploration of what it can do. For example, netLibrary uses web-based texts to create e-books that are issued like traditional books. A more inventive use of the same technology might be to create a national electronic back catalogue for storing out of print texts that can be downloaded by library members to wherever they happened to be"

"Libraries are not well supplied with change managers."

"In the public library of 2015, marketing will play an increased role"

"Staff almost always score highly in terms of friendliness and approachability in customer surveys. However, when asked about how knowledgeable staff are, satisfaction ratings are lower."

"These changes in library staff requirements will draw attention to staff who will have little to contribute to the new service and who are unable or unwilling to change, or who may even actively work against the revised objectives of the service organisation. It is vital that these people leave and a variety of methods should be used to assist them in this." [though good staff should be renumerated more appropriately].

"While public funding is the only guarantee of free access to the service at the point of delivery, the particular form it takes could change."

"a bookshop and library could share premises with the library remaining free and the bookshop taking profits from sales, and absorbing the lion's share of the infrastructure costs. Similarly, a library could be sited within, say, a supermarket with the same type of result"

Also discusses roles for central government, local government, and library schools.

Premium services could involve home delivery of books, even within the hour, by mail or courier.


| posted by Simon at 9:44 pm

 
New Zealand state schools have been allowing their internet policies to be determined by what Russell Brown calls a fringe Christian organisation. The Fundy Post broke the story, pointing out that students at Takapuna Grammar were unable to access an anarchist website, thanks to the filtering software installed by web filtering company Watchdog. On further investigation, Watchdog also bans parody sites such as Happy Clapping Homos, a site parodying the Destiny Church, claiming that Destiny is homophobic.

Watchdog offers to ban sites that users have reported as offensive, and analyses logs of accessed sites, in order to investigate what sites should be blocked in the future.

As the Fundy Post writes: "Students can use the internet for study, but can only visit sites approved by a company run by fundamentalist Christians, who comb the records of sites visited by students to find new ones to ban and who encourage denouncement of sites they have not found themselves.".

We have a secular schooling system here. Religious schools are welcome to implement whatever filtering arrangements they want, but I don't think an overtly religious group should be filtering sites based on its own criteria.

The NZ Herald also reports that Watchdog is preventing access to sites such as GayNZ. (Interesting to note that the Herald published this story several days after Brown's story, and didn't mention the extensive coverage given by the Fundy Post).

| posted by Simon at 10:49 pm