Group items tagged

If we believe all the hype and rhetoric then we are essentially Information & Knowledge Professionals [1]in an Information & Knowledge Society[2] with an Information & Knowledge Economy [3]during the formative years of the Information & Knowledge age[4].

This manifesto is intended to propose that we do just that; that as students, faculty and staff we transform SLIS and create the kind of utopian digital learning organization that we all supposedly advocate. Let us apply the Web 2.0, Library 2.0, social networking, knowledge management principles that we are all in training to implement in society at large. Let us engage in the manifestation of a vision we all allegedly maintain:

Web 2.0 Summit program chair John Battelle moderated a public policy discussion with Art Brodsky, the communications director of Public Knowledge, Ebay's Tod Cohen and Amazon.com's Paul Misener.

Connotea [1] is a free online reference management and social bookmarking service for scientists created by Nature Publishing Group [2]. While somewhat experimental in nature, Connotea already has a large and growing number of users, and is a real, fully functioning service [3]. The label 'experimental' is not meant to imply that the service is any way ephemeral or esoteric, rather that the concept of social bookmarking itself and the application of that concept to reference management are both recent developments. Connotea is under active development, and we are still in the process of discovering how people will use it. In addition to Connotea being a free and public service, the core code is freely available under an open source license [4].

But increasingly data is being produced without tags, and this lack of tagging makes it difficult or impossible to do intelligent aggregate and selective searches. Folksonomies and taxonomies have become powerful tools in the right hands, but too much data is created without any thoughts or any science about how that data will be maintained or re-purposed in the longer term.

I mean an open source desktop can facilitate metadata tagging from the desktop. Open source tools that interface with databases can pass metadata to and from the database. Editors (even 2d paint, 2d illustration and 3d editors) can become part of the metadata workflow.

This wiki began as an unedited 1,059 word article on the wiki phenomenon, exactly as Ryan filed it. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to do the job of a Wired News editor and whip it into shape. Don't change the quotations, but feel free to reorganize it, make cuts, smooth the prose, or add links -- whatever it takes to make it a lively, engaging news piece. You can also talk with your fellow wiki editors about your changes on the discussion page.

The blogosphere has grown more than 100 times the size it was 2003, with Technorati tracking its 50 millionth blog, according to David Sifry's latest "State of the Blogosphere" report. However, Sifry, CEO of Technorati, said in his report that he thinks it's unlikely the number of blogs will continue to double every six months, as they have for about two years.

This Feed2JS web site provides you a free service that can do all the hard work for you-- in 3 easy steps: Find the RSS source, the web address for the feed. Use our simple tool to build the JavaScript command that will display it Optionally style it up to look pretty.

The American Library Association and the Information Use Management and Policy Institute (http://www.ii.fsu.edu) in the College of Information at Florida State University, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is surveying a national sample of public libraries regarding their Internet connectivity and computing access resources.

he data from the enhanced study will help you to identify the impacts of your library's public computer and Internet access on the community that your library serves.

Server log files are inappropriate for gathering usability data. They are meant to provide server administrators with data about the behavior of the server, not the behavior of the user. The log file is a flat file containing technical information about requests for files on the server. Log file analysis tools merely assemble them in a conjecture-based format aimed at providing insight into user behavior. In the commentary below, I will explain why the nature of the web, the HTTP Protocol, the browser, and human behavior make it impossible to derive meaningful usability data from server logs.

Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google and Microsoft to scan their books into computer databases, saying they are put off by restrictions these companies want to place on the new digital collections.

Ubuntu Month of Screencasts is a mad plan concocted by the Screencast Team to produce one full length screencast per day for the whole of one month. That month is September 2007.

My colleague Dean Giustini and I have collaborated on an article, The Semantic Web as a large, searchable catalogue: a librarian’s perspective. In it, we argue that librarians will play a prominent role in Web 3.0. The current Web is disjointed and disorganized, and searching is much like looking for a needle in the haystack.

The U.S. Congress has network neutrality under scrutiny and perhaps under threat. Network neutrality is the concept that broadband carriers will neither interfere with nor inhibit the free flow of information over the Internet. A bill, the Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Efficiency Act of 2006, or COPE (aka the Barton-Rush Act), is making its way through the House of Representatives. It could empower commercial broadband carriers like Sprint and AT&T to manipulate Internet transactions by prohibiting or slowing access to and transmission of specific sites. In effect, the buzz is that the House proposes to cede control of the Internet to the telecoms and cable companies. By contrast, there are bills being introduced in the Senate that seek to protect network neutrality. First among these is S. 2360, the proposed Internet Non-Discrimination Act of 2006. 1, 2

The Lit Wiki is a collection of film, theatre and literature database resources available through Ohio University Libraries. It is designed to assist researchers in finding the best resources for their projects or topics. The Lit Wiki contains links to databases and websites. Nearly all of the resources will only be available to current members of the Ohio University community, as many of the resources are subscription databases.

Welcome to Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki. This wiki was created to be a one-stop shop for great ideas and information for all types of librarians. All over the world, librarians are developing successful programs and doing innovative things with technology that no one outside of their library knows about.

If you've done something at your library that you consider a success, please write about it in the wiki or provide a link to outside coverage. If you have materials that would be helpful to other librarians, add them to the wiki. And if you know of a librarian or a library that is doing something great, feel free to include information or links to it. Basically, if you know of anything that might be useful to other librarians (including useful websites), this is the place to put it. I hope this wiki will be a venue where people can share ideas with one another and where librarians can learn to replicate the successes of other libraries.

OFFSHOOT is a model of an online catalog that would be moderated by the public library community. Constructed as an alternate means to creating an OPAC, OFFSHOOT is cataloging from the "wiki" point of view. Traditional library catalogs, both the public side and internal side, have historically been "locked", giving library patrons little to no opportunity to annotate the library records. OFFSHOOT is the opposite extreme, giving library patrons complete control over the library catalog records. This enables two things within the library system: a veritable multitude of "catalogers" working on a volume of records that has been traditionally worked on by 3 to 10 people, and an intensive expansion in the amount of cross-referencing within the library catalog.

The METS schema is a standard for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata regarding objects within a digital library, expressed using the XML schema language of the World Wide Web Consortium.

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.