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