VALISblog

Please update your feeds, moving this blog

2006-03-05T20:00:00.000+13:00

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.

Please update your feeds, closing off this blog

2006-02-21T21:50:00.000+13:00

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.

Track your comments on other blogs

2006-02-18T12:05:00.000+13:00

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.

Moving domains, and need a new name

2006-02-15T20:42:00.000+13:00

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.

Knowledge Basket adds Scoop media archive

2006-02-15T19:31:00.000+13:00

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.

Doctorow on Google Book Search and Google Video

2006-02-15T12:35:00.001+13:00

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.

Roundup

2006-02-14T20:01:00.000+13:00

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.

Ad-Supported Free Online Books

2006-02-14T19:56:00.000+13:00

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).

Link roundup

2006-02-11T11:53:00.000+13:00

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.

Libraries in Second Life?

2006-02-09T09:23:00.000+13:00

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?

Comparison of music recommendation services

2006-02-05T14:37:00.000+13:00

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.

BBC: Libraries fear digital lockdown

2006-02-05T14:10:00.000+13:00

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".

Quciklink: Walt Crawford: 'Abandoning library?'

2006-02-03T12:49:00.000+13:00

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...

The End of the Internet? (The Nation)

2006-02-03T12:17:00.000+13:00

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.

Various links

2006-02-01T15:05:00.001+13:00

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.

In brief - politicians edit Wikipedia, misspelling gets round Google China

2006-01-30T20:11:00.000+13:00

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).

del.icio.us + flickr + google maps + blogs + wiki + myspace + livejournal +you

2006-01-29T18:49:00.000+13:00

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.

Lots more about Google in China

2006-01-29T17:39:00.000+13:00

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".

Techdirt: Court Says Google Cache Is Fair Use

2006-01-29T15:54:00.000+13:00

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

OCLC Symposium at ALA

2006-01-25T18:49:00.000+13:00

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

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

Google and the DOJ

2006-01-25T18:44:00.000+13:00

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.

Top Technology Trends for libraries

2006-01-24T21:32:00.000+13:00

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.

Quick search roundup

2006-01-24T19:38:00.000+13:00

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?

Safari publishing books before they're written

2006-01-24T19:20:00.000+13:00

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.

What's Holding Back Corporate Blogging?

2006-01-24T19:12:00.000+13:00

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.

Link roundup: Google and the DOJ, DRM, social networks, so much more

2006-01-19T19:14:00.000+13:00

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!

Two good posts about library technology

2006-01-17T19:45:00.000+13:00

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.

The vital importance of good records management

2006-01-16T22:09:00.000+13:00

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."

Online learning changes the nature of the university

2006-01-16T21:54:00.000+13:00

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.

Digital vinyl

2006-01-12T18:00:00.000+13:00

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.

Library 2.0

2006-01-10T22:22:00.000+13:00

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.

Reference Librarian Start Page (Walking Paper)

2006-01-10T19:32:00.000+13:00

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.

Makeover For The Academic Library (ACRL Blog)

2006-01-10T19:23:00.000+13:00

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.

Yahoo! Music purchases Webjay

2006-01-10T19:06:00.000+13:00

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!

Why companies monitor blogs

2006-01-04T10:00:00.000+13:00

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.

Ten good reasons to start social bookmarking today

2006-01-04T08:56:00.000+13:00

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.

Free and Innovative Software

2006-01-04T08:45:00.000+13:00

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.

Opinmind: Positive and Negative Blog Views

2005-12-30T15:36:00.000+13:00

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?

ReminderFeed - RSS Reminder Service

2005-12-30T13:43:00.000+13:00

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.

The Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005

2005-12-30T13:22:00.000+13:00

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.

USATODAY.com - This is the Google side of your brain

2005-12-27T13:55:00.000+13:00

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.

National Digital Forum : talks available in MP3

2005-12-27T13:34:00.000+13:00

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.

A student librarian's organizational scheme

2005-12-27T09:44:00.000+13:00

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

How Executives Stay Informed

2005-12-25T14:42:00.000+13:00

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.

Wikipedia roundup

2005-12-25T11:54:00.000+13:00

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."

Objective vs Subjective Search - Mark Cuban

2005-12-25T11:18:00.000+13:00

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?"

EBSCO now offering RSS feeds

2005-12-03T22:22:00.000+13:00

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].

Micro Persuasion: Ten Blogging Hacks

2005-12-03T14:26:00.000+13:00

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.

A recipe for newspaper survival in the Internet Age (Slashdot)

2005-12-01T18:15:00.000+13:00

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.

What's sad about this....

2005-11-30T21:26:00.000+13:00

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.

Email: dead or alive?

2005-11-30T21:07:00.000+13:00

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.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging (GreatNexus Webmaster Blog)

2005-11-28T12:40:00.000+13:00

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.

Amazon digital books/Google Book Search roundup

2005-11-27T18:41:00.000+13:00

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.

Royal Society criticises open-access publishing

2005-11-27T09:37:00.000+13:00

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.

Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs - When academics post online, do they risk their jobs? By Robert S. Boynton

2005-11-26T22:04:00.000+13:00

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.

7 Things RSS Is Good For

2005-11-26T17:51:00.000+13:00

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.

Evaluating Search Tools - Mary Ellen Bates

2005-10-27T20:18:00.000+13:00

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).

Search engines compared, Google 4th

2005-10-26T21:41:00.000+13:00

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.

Couple on Wikipedia

2005-10-26T21:24:00.000+13:00

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.

Google Print, critiqued again

2005-10-26T21:17:00.000+13:00

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.

Google Base

2005-10-26T19:20:00.000+13:00

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.

30 Search Tips - Mary Ellen Bates

2005-10-25T20:35:00.000+13:00

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.

Goodfellas voted top movie of all time

2005-10-25T20:09:00.000+13:00

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).

Blogs no longer safe for work - Wired

2005-10-25T19:56:00.000+13:00

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:

Keith Crosley, director of corporate communications at censorware company Proofpoint , says there's no anti-blog conspiracy at work, but that some companies have higher security, privacy and regulatory needs that require greater diligence over what companies can and cannot do. In particular, companies worry that employees might leak sensitive material -- perhaps inadvertently -- while posting comments to blog message boards.

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.

Google CEO on Google Print

2005-10-24T19:50:00.000+13:00

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.

Ten RSS Hacks from Micro Persuasion

2005-10-24T19:26:00.000+13:00

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

Neilsen on the top ten weblog design mistakes

2005-10-19T20:18:00.000+13:00

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.

New Minister for the National Library; promotion for IT Minister

2005-10-19T19:48:00.000+13:00

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.

Funding secured for AnyQuestions.org.nz

2005-10-19T19:28:00.000+13:00

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.

Survey: .More Use RSS Than Have Heard Of It

2005-10-17T21:57:00.000+13:00

"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)....

The Library of the Future, 6 (TeleRead)

2005-10-16T17:18:00.000+13:00

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.

SEW: How Many Feeds Really Matter

2005-10-11T21:14:00.000+13:00

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 ;-)

Libraries in the digital future (LISNews)

2005-10-11T20:48:00.000+13:00

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.

Yahoo and Google Blog Search

2005-10-11T20:33:00.000+13:00

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").

Netvibes: virtual desktop

2005-09-28T12:21:00.000+12:00

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.

NZ Election: blogs, podcasts and websites

2005-09-01T22:23:00.000+12:00

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

Party websites:

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.

Problems with scientific papers

2005-09-01T21:05:00.000+12:00

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.

MLS student bloggers

2005-08-30T22:05:00.000+12:00

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.

Google Print vs LoC classification

2005-08-30T21:45:00.000+12:00

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).

The end of the folksonomy boom?

2005-08-27T13:45:00.000+12:00

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.

Random Access Mazar � The Revolution Will Be Podcast

2005-08-27T13:30:00.000+12:00

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."

Google fails at consistency (Walking Paper)

2005-08-27T13:26:00.000+12:00

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.

Privacy issues in Library Elf

2005-08-27T13:18:00.000+12:00

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.

Boing Boing: Google stealthily monitoring clickthroughs from search-results

2005-08-23T21:48:00.000+12:00

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....

Resource: local Councils online

2005-08-18T20:55:00.000+12:00

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

panlibus: Ground breaking Library Personalised RSS

2005-08-18T20:34:00.000+12:00

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).

Labour market for librarians in Australia

2005-08-18T20:28:00.000+12:00

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.

Deterioration of America's filmstock

2005-08-18T19:51:00.000+12:00

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).

Librarians to Google: Stop Being Evil (our buggy whip sales are down)

2005-08-18T19:49:00.000+12:00

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.

Corporate Blogging Gaining Momentum

2005-08-18T19:38:00.000+12:00

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.

Record company releases leaked CD

2005-08-18T19:25:00.000+12:00

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).

TeleRead: ‘Incompatibility slowing growth of digital music’

2005-08-16T22:41:00.000+12:00

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

Haters in the library

2005-08-16T22:23:00.000+12:00

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).

Free e-books

2005-08-16T22:01:00.000+12:00

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.

Useful reference websites for bloggers (and anyone)

2005-08-16T21:58:00.000+12:00

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.

The Industrial Librarian: Are librarians doing too many clerical tasks?

2005-08-16T21:27:00.000+12:00

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?

ODLIS: Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science

2005-08-14T16:26:00.000+12:00

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.

`We need libraries more than ever'

2005-08-14T16:04:00.000+12:00

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.

AllYouCanRead.com

2005-08-14T15:26:00.000+12:00

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.

Trying to grok podcasts

2005-08-13T18:58:00.000+12:00

[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.