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.

 
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