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

 
I've still got about 45 subscribers in bloglines to this feed. Please delete this feed and subscribe to the new one: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Valis

The new blog is at www.chamberlain.net.nz/blog

Thanks for reading.

| posted by Simon at 8:00 pm

 
OK, the new blog appears to be ready to go, so I'm ceasing this blog now and just posting over there. Please update your feeds by deleting this feed and grabbing the new ones.

The feed is here. The comments feed is here.

| posted by Simon at 9:50 pm

 
Wired News reports on CoComment, which lets you track, store and republish the comments posted on other people's blogs.

I haven't tried it out, but it looks intriguing.

| posted by Simon at 12:05 pm

 
I now have my own domain name and a "proper" homepage, so I'll be moving this blog over to that domain as soon as I've finished tweaking the template for the new one.

The blog will be at http://www.chamberlain.net.nz/blog (don't go looking yet, there's nothing but a test entry at the moment).

RSS feed for posts will be http://chamberlain.net.nz/blog/?feed=rss2 and for comments http://chamberlain.net.nz/blog/?feed=comments-rss2 . You might as well subscribe to those now.

I'm also looking for a new blog title. The Philip K. Dick pun in the title of this one made sense when I came up with it, but I'm kinda over the idea of using names of sf novels as part of my online identity. But I'm stuck on what to call the new blog.

I think I'd like something with a New Zealand flavour to it. "Kiwi Librarian" sounds a bit too casual. "NZ Librarian"? "Wellington Librarian"? Not very exciting.

Some punning library reference?

I don't know. Any suggestions gratefully received. Naming is not my strong point.

| posted by Simon at 8:42 pm

 
The Knowledge Basket has added over 140,000 records from Scoop's media archive. This is quite a significant addition. Scoop carries press releases from all New Zealand political parties and many NGO/lobby groups and individuals. Unfortunately, though, the archive doesn't seem to include blog posts from Public Address or the other blogs that are featured on Scoop.

| posted by Simon at 7:31 pm

 
Cory Doctorow has two long but excellent posts on BoingBoing. One is full of praise for Google Book Search, with Cory arguing that, as a writer, he loves the idea of more people being exposed to his work, and pointing out that his books are selling well even though readers can download them for free. The second is much more critical, and asks what's wrong with Google Video's DRM? Cory says Google Video is the first instance of Google releasing a product that isn't completely focused on the user's needs.

| posted by Simon at 12:35 pm

 
John Battelle thinks things through about the China censorship issue, and concludes that the government, rather than Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, AOL etc, needs to take the lead in opposing Chinese policy. John also writes about the ADVISE system, "a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity".

John Blyberg has a follow-up, from a library perspective, to Don Hinchcliffe's '10 ways to take advantage of Web 2.0' post. Both of these posts are among the most thoughtful and interesting that I've read on this subject. The heat seems to have left the Library 2.0 debate, and what's left is some decent posts with practical recommendations. I'm still not sure I buy into the whole "L2 revolution now!" type manifesto, but there are some great things being done under the Library 2.0 banner, and I guess I can just take the ones that work for me, and re-mix them the way I want....(and isn't that such a Library 2.0 idea?).

Steve Rubel is sceptical about the emphasis placed on links as a source of authority.

Michael McGrorty has a fascinating post discussing his prior occupation of private investigator, and including some tips for librarians: "I’d like to introduce the [library] trade to the doctrine of necessity: the idea that one has to provide a good answer, no matter what." Amen! If there's one thing I remember from this week's blog posts, I hope that is it. Steven Cohen applauds, and offers some specific tips of his own: "take as many classes as possible on database searching. Know Lexis, Westlaw, and Dialog from the inside out. Know how to use every syntax available in every major search engine".

ALA Techsource Blog has a long post by Teresa Koltzenburg on a presentation by Jenny Levine and Michael Stephens on four specific low-cost, tech tools (blogging software; RSS feeds; instant messaging; and wiki software) that libaries can use. A good, practical introduction for those unfamiliar with these tools (who, unfortunately, are unlikely to be reading blogs).

Meredith Farkas has a wonderful post on how librarians can actually make libraries worse while trying to improve them.

"Sometimes librarians think they’re helping patrons by putting policies in place that actually end up creating more barriers. Sometimes librarians create policies that help one group of patrons but hurt another. Sometimes we implement some new service or policy only to find that we were completely wrong about what our patrons wanted."

"We enlightened librarians are not immune to making mistakes. We create blogs for populations that don’t want them. We develop programs that none of our patrons attend. We see what people are doing successfully at other libraries and we try to replicate those successes, not considering the fact that our population is not the same as theirs. I’ve certainly been guilty of that sort of hubris. In short, we think we know what our patrons want without ever having asked them."

A great post. The whole thing is worth reading. If I remember two things from this week's reading, I want this to be the second thing.

Carnival of the Infosciences #24 is up at Grumpator.

| posted by Simon at 8:01 pm

 
Infotoday has the story. The book Go It Alone! The Secret to Building a Successful Business on Your Own by Bruce Judson has been published online, in full, for free by HarperCollins. The book is supported by contextual text advertising, provided by both Yahoo! and Google. The publisher and author will share revenues.

This is an interesting idea, and apparently the first time that a major publishing company has conducted such a project. On the one hand, I welcome this (who doesn't want free information?). On the other, I wonder what influence advertisers could potentially have over the content of books? Possibly the fact that the ads are automatically generated from the text of the book might lessen this risk - it wouldn't be the same as an advertiser threatening to pull a full-page ad from a magazine that contained content that the advertiser didn't approve of. (And it would be kinda funny to see ads for brand-name sneakers all the way through No Logo, for example).



| posted by Simon at 7:56 pm

 
Google's Desktop Search version 3.0 will have a "search across computers" function. You can upload your hard drive onto Google's servers, and then search it from any other computer. From a usability perspective, great. From a privacy perspective, not so much. More at TechCrunch

Listible has a complete list of Web 2.0 products. Yahoo! has updated MyWeb2.0, their personalised startpage. (via John Battelle).

Answers.com has a special page for librarians (via Librarian In Black).

Ask Jeeves has hired Gary Price (of ResourceShelf and SearchEngineWatch) as Director of Online Information Resources. Gary will be working on product development, and (even better from our perspective) "outreach to the library and education communities...to make Ask Jeeves a product that librarians and educators can count on." Very cool indeed, and I can think of few people who are better able to do such a job.

The Economist writes about corporate blogging. Network World writes about corporate blogs and wikis (both links via Steve Rubel's Micropersuasion).

Caveat Lector has a passionate and interesting post on the quality of a library school education, and why there aren't more librarian coders.

| posted by Simon at 11:53 am

 
Second Life is an online virtual world where users create content. The game is so popular that it's possible for players to make a real-world living from the content they create in the game (Wired News). Copyright expert Professor Lawrence Lessig has lectured in Second Life, and author and blogger Cory Doctorow has conducted a virtual book signing in the game.

The Wired article linked above says "in a recent contract with the UC Davis Medical Center, Rufer-Bach created virtual clinics in Second Life to train emergency workers who might be called upon to rapidly set up medical facilities in a national crisis. The work is funded by the Centers for Disease Control."

So......wouldn't it be cool to have virtual libraries in Second Life? Or virtual reference librarians? Does anyone know if this is happening?

| posted by Simon at 9:23 am

 
Slashdot reports has an interesting comparison of two music recommendation services, lastfm and Pandora. I've used both these services, and both the original article (by Steve Krause), and the Slashdot discussion are worth reading.

Personally, I prefer lastfm (my profile). Pandora is more of a private experience. You enter the name of an artist or song, and are provided with a streaming music station that plays songs similar to that artist or song. The similarity is determined by human analysis of the musical qualities of each track, so it's naturally very labour-intensive. Lastfm simply records all the songs you have played in your own media player (e.g. iTunes), and then creates radio stations based around your personal taste. You can also listen to the radio stations of other users. Some of these will be suggested to you, based on your own taste, but you can also browse all stations. Lastfm has profile pages, message boards, and allows you to join groups and add users as friends. So it's much more social, and the radio stations are constructed based on peoples' actual listening patterns, not analysis of the songs' qualities. It's this social quality that attracts me to the site, and the fact that I have a permanent, public profile there.

Others in the biblioblogosphere have been discussing Pandora - Walt Crawford, Joy at Wanderings of a Student Librarian. Both are positive about its ability to suggest interesting songs that they wouldn't have thought of themselves.

BetaNews has a review which also includes (in the comments) a way to turn the Pandora stream into MP3s. (Which, obviously, you shouldn't do because it would be illegal). [via ResourceShelf]. SearchEngineWatch reviews Gracenote, which is "only" a database at the moment, but will apparently be offering a recommendations service soon. Techdirt suggests that music albums may become an outdated concept as more music is sold by download. This makes sense to me - musical formats have traditionally followed technology, e.g. album-oriented rock was made possible by the development of the LP record - before that the dominant pop music form was the single; albums became longer following the development of the CD. Selling music by download enables artists to sell "chunks" of music of variable length, containing any number of songs. There's no particular reason why they should stick to a 10-12 track, 40 minute album.








| posted by Simon at 2:37 pm

 
BBC News is reporting that the British Library is worried that excessive digital rights management will over-ride copyright legislation, preventing libraries from exercising fair use rights. DRM would not expire when copyright did, and libraries might lack the ability to unlock the DRM, nor be able to contact the rights holders. Format-shifting DRM'd material to new formats would also be impossible.

As an interesting aside, the British Library apparently spends 1/8th of its acquisitions budget on digial materials, and predicts that:

"by 2020, 90% of newly published work will be available digitally - twice the amount that is printed".



| posted by Simon at 2:10 pm

 
Go read: Abandoning 'library'? (Walt at Random). Fisks a report claiming that libraries should drop the name library and ensuer that their branding stays away from any association with books...

| posted by Simon at 12:49 pm

 
A chilling article from The Nation asks if we are facing the end of the Internet?

Not in the sense that it will no longer be there, but in the sense that it would become "a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online". The issue is whether telecommunications providers will be able to offer differential levels of service to different customers. In other words, pay enough and you are able to get priority access for your data.

This risks transforming the internet from a democratic, peer-to-peer medium to a broadcast content medium. It is not something to be welcomed by those who see value in the Long Tail, in user-generated content rather than exclusively in the content produced by large corporations.

| posted by Simon at 12:17 pm

 
Russell Brown writes about social software in the NZ Listener. A good introduction.

librarian.net writes about an OPAC created in [blog software] Wordpress - with tagging and comments enabled, and with each item having a static URL. Very cool.

The National Library of Australia is collaborating with Flickr on a photo archive (Australian IT).

Microsoft will have an RSS reader in IE7 (Dave's Wordpress Blog). Will this be the tipping point for widespread acceptance of RSS?

kottke.org compares the PageRanks of blogs vs the New York Times on various news stories from the last year. I'm not too sure about the choice of search terms, which seem as though they would give an advantage to an after-the-fact summary, rather than a contemporary news story - which may give blogs an advantage in the comparison.

Newspaper owners want to sue Google News, claiming it is making money off their intellectual property (Techdirt). Memo to newspapers: if I read one of your articles, chances are I found it through Google News (or Topix or Newsnow). I click through and read your article, and I see the ads on your site. News aggregators are helping your business, not hurting it.



| posted by Simon at 3:05 pm

 
The Lowell Sun Online reports that the staff of U.S. Rep Marty Meehan have been repeatedly editing his entry on Wikipedia in order to sanitise it (via Slashdot). [Edit: the Talk page for the Wikipedia article makes it clear that even worse editing has been going on, listing a huge number of pages that have been edited by someone posting from the House of Representatives IP address - removing controversial information about Republicans, and portraying liberal politicians as "socialists".]

Paul Boutin writes that misspelt search results will defeat the Google China filter. For example, "Tiananmen" is filtered to show peaceful pictures of the square, and works of art. But spell it incorrectly and you're likely to get the results that you were really looking for - the iconic picture of the student in front of the line of tanks, for example. (via BoingBoing).


| posted by Simon at 8:11 pm

 
GROU.PS is a new community website that aggregates a range of social software services into one place.

It's designed as a virtual home for people who already know each other (real life or virtually) rather than as a dating site or a place to meet new people.

You sign up and register to join a group or groups (approval from the group owner is required).

You can incorporate photos from Flickr, blog feeds from livejournal, myspace, xanga etc. There's a Google Maps feature so you can post your location. There's a wiki, and a links section using del.icio.us.

It looks good. I can't give much more of an opinion at the moment, as I'm still waiting for my group application to be approved, but this is a great idea.

| posted by Simon at 6:49 pm

 
On BBC News, Bill Thompson defends Google's actions, noting that Yahoo! and MSN also censor search results in China, and many sites are censored in Western countries too.

Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineWatch is a lot less happy, noting that Google is actively filtering sites on its own, without waiting for the Chinese government to specify which sites it wants to be filtered. Jessamyn West at Librarian.net has similar concerns, saying that the decision "calls into question the very idea of objectivity in search engines everywhere".

CNet reports that Google China had initially filtered sites relating to alcohol, teen pregnancy, dating and homosexuality, but that these are no longer filtered. John Batelle writes that the real irony is that Google is finally becoming a content editor. He also points out that Google has removed the page in its help area that said "Google does not censor results for any search term".

| posted by Simon at 5:39 pm

 
Good news from Nevada, where a court has ruled that Google's caching of webpages does not violate fair use. (Techdirt).

| posted by Simon at 3:54 pm

 
Three very good posts, summing up this symposium. A lot of thought-provoking material here:

The Shifted Librarian; LITA Blog#1; LITA Blog #2

| posted by Simon at 6:49 pm

 
Danny Sullivan and John Battelle have good things to say. Danny's post gives an excellent explanation of what personal information could actually be gleaned from the records that search engines keep of individual queries they receive.





| posted by Simon at 6:44 pm

 
Over on the LITA Blog, Sarah Houghton has some interesting things to say about her top technology trends. I really hope that at least some of the things she predicts come true (increased IM reference, increasing technology staff - without reducing other staff, automated tagging - without throwing out traditional controlled vocabularies, opening up library computers - removing security restrictions on what tools can be used, and picking and choosing the best of Library 2.0).

A later post on the same blog, by lpressley, summarises the top technology trends discussion at ALA Midwinter. Also worth a look.

| posted by Simon at 9:32 pm

 
Google News comes out of beta, and adds a new feature - personalised search (automatically generated recommendations, based on stories you've read previously). (Official Google Blog).

Greg Linden has comments.

Healthline is a new medical search engine. It claims to "search the web's best health sites". It claims to "understand the words and phrases that both medical and non-medical people use; so, for example, if you search for "brittle bone disease", we know you're thinking about "Osteogenesis Imperfecta"." I can see both good and bad in this approach. While these two terms may have the same meaning, the information needs of a user who searched on the first term would be very different from those of a user who searched on the second.

More disappointingly, it contains links to sites that are misleading at best and dangerous at worst - for example the Scientologist propoganda site http://www.notodrugs-yestolife.com appears high in the rankings in a test search I ran.

In defence of Healthline, they offer a feature called 'trust mark', which appears beside search results that have been certified as being of a high quality. And the FAQ lists a contact address where you can suggest a site, or suggest that a site be removed from their database.

The Financial Times is (unsurprisingly) critical of Quaero, the new French/German search engine that will attempt to challenge the big American search engines. But with a budget of 300 million euros as against 1 billion dollars or so (for Google), does it have a chance?


| posted by Simon at 7:38 pm

 
Because it takes time to write and publish a book about a new technology, but the audience needs the book as soon as possible, Safari are offering customers the chance to buy a beta version of the book, giving them "early access to books on cutting-edge technologies...as they're being written."

Customers "gain access to an evolving PDF manuscript that [they] can read, download or print." Best of all, "[readers] will have a chance to shape the final product [and] send suggestions, bug fixes, and comments directly to the author and editors."

From Safari Bookshelf via BoingBoing.

| posted by Simon at 7:20 pm

 
BlogRevolt.com asks "why aren't more corporations blogging?", and concludes that the reasons are the lack of a clear and demonstrated return on investment, and fear - of not being able to control the message fully, and of openness.

The comments are worth reading, too.



| posted by Simon at 7:12 pm

 
I have no time to comment on this, so I'm just posting the links. There's a lot of good reading here:

• Department of Justice asks Google for search records (SiliconValley.com via BoingBoing)
• DRM primer for librarians (link goes to BoingBoing article (thanks for the compliments Cory); the primer is on the ALA website)
• Recruiters now looking at MySpace, other social network, profiles (Techdirt)
• Jeffrey Zeldman is sick of the Web 2.0 hype (A List Apart, commentary on Slashdot)
• Cops organise video games against troublesome kids; crime drops (BoingBoing) [Police 2.0?]
• Top tech trends of 2006 (Mercury News, via NEKLS Technology Weblog)
• Men and women online (Pew, via NEKLS again)
• On the L2 train (Michael Stephens talks to John Blyberg)
• The Web 2.0 crash is coming, says Steve Rubel (Micropersuasion)
• Will RSS revolutionise email newsletters? (ditto)

I am off to Auckland for the Big Day Out, which this year features one of the greatest bands of all time - the Stooges! The lineup (White Stripes, Franz Ferdinand, Fat Freddy's Drop, Magic Numbers, Kings of Leon, 2 Many DJ's, etc) would be good anyway. With the Stooges, it's amazing. I'm so excited!

| posted by Simon at 7:14 pm

 
Like the post title says, a couple of good posts on the need for libraries to improve their use of technology, especially in the catalogue. Not sure I agree with them 100%, but they're certainly worth a read.

Karen Schneider at ALA TechSource writes 'The Revolution Will be Folksonomied', a strong criticism of the "piteously clunky library systems most libraries pay dearly for because we've never insisted that the catalog could be better than that." Karen argues that catalogues lack useful features such as truncation and relevance ranking, are limited by reliance on Library of Congress Subject Headings, which are either in arcane language or too narrow or broad for users, and because the library catalogue is "still an index, not a full text search engine".

There's a lot more, and Karen's arguments are convincing. She also points to the University of California's Bibliographic Services Task Force report, which apparently condemns the failures of library catalogue software, while offering some solutions. [I haven't yet read the report].

I don't 100% agree with everything Karen writes. Her criticisms of the limitations of LCSH for many libraries are correct, but then LCSH was developed specifically for the Library of Congress, right? And there are plenty of alternatives that suit smaller libraries better (I've never used LCSH in real life). I'm also not sure about the emphasis on full-text searching - surely this isn't practical (or probably legal) if we're talking about print collections? Google might be able to afford to scan books and create full-text indexes, libraries can't. Possibly I've misunderstood, or perhaps Karen's comment "consolidate your resources instead of dribbling finite funds across multiple, duplicated library systems" implies that we should be conducting collaborative scanning projects ourselves, and sharing the results.

Another good post is Eric Martin's on the Library and Information Technology Association weblog. Eric discusses the "increased need for library services and not necessarily library collections", given that our users now have access to a multitude of collections via the web; and the ability to be leaders in the implementation of services through in-house software development, arguing for the importance of knowledge of information technology for librarians.

| posted by Simon at 7:45 pm

 
Archives admits fault in release of secret report:

"Archives New Zealand has admitted fault in mistakenly releasing a top secret spy report to a newspaper, but government officials will also look into how the report came to rest in a box of former prime minister David Lange's papers."

| posted by Simon at 10:09 pm

 
In The University of Anywhere Michael McGrorty writes of his experiences in library school. Over half the courses he took were online. Michael asks: "if a university offers a substantial proportion of classes online, can it really be said that the school is offering anything? With online classes, the school essentially disappears."

Michael raises some very interesting points. It seems that the American experience of online learning is somewhat different from the way it is taught here in New Zealand. Michael writes: "there is a certain amount of help offered via email and other online devices, but there is nowhere to hide and nobody to sit behind; in an online class there isn’t any back row, and you can never be absent. The march of assignments and deadlines presses, and there being no attendance, there isn’t any reminder of time winding down".

Where VUW classes are taught online, students still attend virtual classes, and use microphones and/or a chatroom to communicate. The lecturer delivers a lecture in real-time, using software that allows them to transmit voice and a powerpoint presentation at the same time. Students ask questions and discuss the lecture in the chat room. So there's still a sense of being part of a group. Some students will get together in small groups around the country, so the class can still be quite social. Michael's online classes sounded a lot more isolated. I think they would suit my learning style, but I'd probably enjoy them less.

Finally, Michael suggests: "it becomes possible to envision a return to an older model of the school of library service—the one that was centered in the library itself. We may find ourselves returning to a situation in which library students work as apprentices in various types of libraries while taking their online classes from more or less distant institutions of learning. Nothing would be better for the trade, for the students or the future of the library."

I think he may well be right.


| posted by Simon at 9:54 pm

 
EFF reports that two independent record labels will be offering free MP3 downloads to people who buy albums on vinyl. This is a very, very cool move - vinyl is often a better format than CD, but it's obviously difficult to back-up or convert from vinyl to your PC or MP3 player.

Two thumbs up to Merge and Saddle Creek Records. Merge is already one of my favourite labels for a roster that includes ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead, The Arcade Fire, American Music Club, Buzzcocks, Dinosaur Jr, The Ladybug Transistor, Lambchop, Lou Barlow, The Magnetic Fields (and the 6ths and Future Bible Heroes), Nuetral Milk Hotel, and a handful of excellent New Zealand bands - the 3Ds, the Clean, and David Kilgour. This move has just added to my appreciation for them.



| posted by Simon at 6:00 pm

 
Walt Crawford's Cites & Insights 6:2 is an extensive (26, 000 words!) overview and critique of the concepts behind Library 2.0, and what Walt calls "Library 2.0" ("the movement or bandwagon"). It seems comprehensive, though I'm reading it without much knowledge of the issues (I've had limited internet access for much of the past few months). It's definitely worth reading if you have a few spare hours, and want to get a good overview of the topic, or to find out who has been talking about it.

Jenny Levine, writing on the ALA Techsource Blog, discusses what's new about Library 2.0. She provides a good, clear definition, but then (to my mind) doesn't really back it up. The definition:

"For me, "Library 2.0" is not just about making your content easier to use online or getting feedback from your users. It's about letting others use granular pieces of our content where they want, when they want, how they want, automatically, specifically online (although users can then also mash our content however they want in the physical world, too). Read that over a second time and you'll see that it is a very new concept for libraries."

OK, good. I can see the appeal of this, and I can see how it's different from things that libraries have done before. I'm not sure if, in itself, it deserves a name like Library 2.0. There have surely been other, more significant, paradigm shifts in library history (move from closed to open stacks; the notion of the public library; the notion of lending libraries; invention of cataloguing and classification schemes - I don't know, I'm not a library historian). The name Library 2.0 implies to me that this is a clean break with the past - there's everything that has gone before, and there's this. Jenny writes "If you want to think small and look at L2 through the lens of only what we have done in the past, then yes it is nothing new". It's maybe not her intention, but this sentence seems to imply that "what we have done in the past" is "small". I don't think it is. I'm actually proud of what libraries have achieved in the past.

But generally, I appreciate Jenny's arguments in the first part of her post. Library 2.0 is about re-using and re-mixing content, allowing users access to our resources as they wish. It's a conversation, like the Cluetrain Manifesto says [Jenny doesn't mention Cluetrain, but others have, and the connection seems obvious to me].

But what does this mean?

"If you take a step back and look at what all of those tools and technologies could mean for a library's online presence, you can't help but be optimistic about what L2 can do for us IN THE SPACES WHERE OUR USERS ARE. Again, a very new concept."

I don't get this. I'm sorry. What's new about going where our users are? Having a bookmobile, or a marae-based service is going where your users are. Does it need a new label? Yes, I realise we have users (or potential users) who are most comfortable online. Yes, we should be taking advantage of new tools to serve them wherever they are most comfortable. I don't see how this is different from adopting new technologies like phone or email (or postal mail!) to serve users. I also don't see why online services are being promoted so heavily by Library 2.0 proponents, when something like a third of Americans have still never used the internet (and probably a similar percentage for other Western countries). Some of my co-workers struggle with Word or email [and these are professional people who are a heck of a lot smarter than I am]. Where are they in this picture?

"So pieces of the big picture include things like constant change, making the library user-centered, and encouraging user participation—but there's a lot more to it than that. There's also disintermediation of content as well as shifting your services to where your users are. When L2 opponents say that libraries have been doing these things all along, they're right—IF they're talking about doing it within the library's four walls. However, they've failed to understand that we don't do this online .....Show me an example of librarians doing a great job of fighting censorship online where the content can be reused elsewhere, users contribute, and the content is user-centered."

It's obvious that libraries haven't historically done such things online. How long has "online" existed? Graphical web browsing is only 12 years old, after all. In most cases, it seems logical that we should be moving online, though again I don't see the need for a manifesto in order to do so. Think having a library blog is a good idea? Set up a blog, then. And I don't see why we necessarily have to be online - why is it important that librarians are fighting censorship online, per se?

Finally, I'm a little surprised at the use of terms like "opponents". Both Steven Cohen and Meredith Wolfwater make the same point in the comments to that post. [edit: Meredith has also posted a very good response to Jenny's article]. I'm sceptical (as should be obvious) about the idea of/need for "Library 2.0" as a movement. That doesn't mean I'm opposed to it, just that I don't see what it offers that's additional to what some librarians (notably Jenny herself) have been saying for years.

And I think that's about all I've got to say. I'm going to carry on trying to adapt (some)[1] of the Web 2.0/Library 2.0 tools to my work environment, but I don't think I'll be signing up for the movement anytime soon.

[1] Wikis, re-mixed RSS feeds, librarything.com, social bookmarking/collaborative tagging (at the enterprise level, if possible), IM are all things that I've been exploring, or thinking about exploring.

| posted by Simon at 10:22 pm

 
Aaron at Walking Paper has an intriguing suggestion on using personalised home pages (like Netvibes or Google IG) in the library.

"My job would be facilitated if I could see:

• the day, week, and month’s most requested book, locally and system wide
• the meeting room schedule for the day and week
• important news from the library, community and the world
• reference queries that have come in via email"

I like this idea a lot. As Aaron points out, the lack of support for XML and RSS in our library management software is a hindrance to this sort of tool - but hopefully not for much longer.




| posted by Simon at 7:32 pm

 
A provocative (in both the 'controversial' and 'thought-provoking' sense post from the Assocation of College and Research Libraries blog, suggesting a model for the 21st century academic library.
Makeover For The Academic Library includes suggestions like 'increase local coverage', 'use your readers', 'redeploy resources mercilessly', and (most controversially, perhaps) offer premium services to key users, in order to increase their usage, while offering minimal service to the others.

Via Stephen's Lighthouse.

| posted by Simon at 7:23 pm

 
From the Yahoo! Music Blog. This looks interesting. Webjay is a playlist creation site. "Users can create playlists using music/audio/video from around the Web (with a simple Web form, from scraping a Web page, or with a fancy Ajax interface created by a 3rd party using Webjay APIs), share them with others, include them on their Web sites, browse other users playlists, play the playlists in any media player, or cannibalize the playlists to create new ones."

I had a brief look at the Webjay home page, and I like what I see.

The TNL.net weblog has a write-up, and an interview with Webjay creator Lucas Gonze. Says Lucas "The point of playlists is that they are to internet media what RSS is to weblogs and HTML is to browsing.....Examples of the kinds of goodness I'm talking about:

* Interactivity wide open; anybody on the internet is a full participant
* Implementation wide open; anybody with the chops can write programs which contribute to the ecosystem
* and interoperability; anybody should be able to author content which anybody can render".

Sweet!

| posted by Simon at 7:06 pm

 
An intelligent article from CNet on why companies monitor blogs: "online discussions--be it in forums, on blogs or elsewhere--are a modern replacement for customer satisfaction surveys or focus group reports, which can take months to compile and analyze."

The article discusses market research companies who specialise in analysing blog/internet posts, and also points to several free or cheap tools that can be used to do so - Technorati, Google Blog Search, Pubsub [misspelt as Hubsub] and Icerocket.

As an aside, I have a feeling that someone is going to make a lot of money out of developing a comment/opinion search tool - something that truly aggregates collective intelligence on movies, music, consumer products etc. I've just spent long hours using conventional search engines to find consumer opinions about DVD/DVR recorders. The information is out there, but it's scattered and hard to find. If someone could develop a search engine that would let me see what (e.g.) Amazon customers, and Epinions users, and bloggers, and professional and amateur reviewers on other sites were saying about a given product, I'd use that tool a lot.

| posted by Simon at 10:00 am

 
Roxomatic offers a short, interesting list of reasons to use social bookmarking services. It's worth a read if you're currently agnostic about social bookmarking, or need to convince others of the benefits. Several of them stood out for me:

"...[H]ave a really comfortable place to back up your bookmarks, to get them back e.g. after installing a new system, changing your desktop or switching to another browser.

No time to read an obviously interesting article now? No possibility to print it? Add articles with the tag toberead to your database, and read and/ or print them later.

Find quickly the most recommended bookmarks about a topic, e.g. interesting informations about Firefox extensions will be found at del.icio.us/tag/firefox+extensions, and subscribe to it.

Make a copy of interesting newspaper articles – or are you sure your newspaper company will have permalinks and a free archive forever?"

Looking over those, it seems that my main reasons for using social bookmarking tools (I use Furl and del.ic.ious) are non-social - I'm more interested (at the moment) in organising my own information, having it accessible from both my work and home computers, and storing interesting articles in my own archive. No doubt that will change once I've transferred all my bookmarks into del.ic.ious and I can start finding users with similar interests to mine.



| posted by Simon at 8:56 am

 
From Stephen's Lighthouse, a short list of free software tools that libraries can include in their portals. Blogger, Myspace, LibraryThing, Del.ic.ious, Picasa, Google Maps, etc.

| posted by Simon at 8:45 am