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This OCLC membership report explores this web of social participation and cooperation on the Internet and how it may impact the library’s role, including: The use of social networking, social media, commercial and library services on the Web How and what users and librarians share on the Web and their attitudes toward related privacy issues Opinions on privacy online Libraries’ current and future roles in social networking

Casey Bisson, with the help of Jessamyn West and Ryan Eby, reports on open-source software (OSS) and its use and importance in libraries in the third issue of Library Technology Reports in 2007.

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.

the software has a small footprint and can run on a laptop, IBM has added incremental indexing, support for 200+ document types, support for 30 languages and linguistic features such as synonym detection, spelling correction, lemmatization, stemming and a "did you mean" feature that suggests alternative queries. The relevance ranking is adjustable. It does not rely on link analysis, which often fails inside the enterprise. Instead it uses OmniFind relevance ranking algorithms.Based on the Lucene open source search engine, the OmniFind Yahoo Edition goes beyond commodity search. It is certainly quick to install: Download it, configure it in three clicks and point it at a URL to crawl. However, it is also configurable and customizable. Administrators can change the look and feel of the search page, create shortcuts to other Web pages or best answers to a top query. Reporting tools monitor usage to determine null or frequent searches, and to gauge the effectiveness of the results being returned.

Should the Library of Congress (LC) jettison Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), the longstanding professional taxonomy? That’s one of the provocative suggestions in a new report released last month by LC. “The Changing Nature of the Catalog and Its Integration with Other Discovery Tools,” commissioned by LC and written by associate university librarian Karen Calhoun of Cornell University, was making waves weeks earlier, thanks to a critical review of a draft of her paper, written for AFSCME 2910, the LC Professional Guild, by Thomas Mann (author of The Oxford Guide to Library Research). It warned of “serious negative consequences for the capacity of research libraries to promote scholarly research.”

Schemes to add functionality to the web OPAC fall into four categories: web OPAC enhancements, web OPAC wrappers, web OPAC replacements, and integrated library system replacements. I’m outlining these four techniques in a report I’m editing for an OhioLINK strategic task force and a bit of a reality check on this categorization is desired, so if I’m missing anything big (conceptually or announcements of projects/products that fall into these categories), please let me know in the comments. Generally speaking, this list is ordered by cost/complexity to implement — from lowest to highest — as well as the ability to offer the described enhanced services from least likely to most likely.

Introduction. It is argued that the actual elements of typical browsing episodes have not been well captured by common approaches to the concept to date. Method. Empirical research results reported by previous researchers are presented and closely analysed. Analysis. Based on the issues raised by the above research review, the components of browsing are closely analysed and developed. Browsing is seen to consist of a series of four steps, iterated indefinitely until the end of a browsing episode: 1) glimpsing a field of vision, 2) selecting or sampling a physical or informational object within the field of vision, 3) examining the object, 4) acquiring the object (conceptually and/or physically) or abandoning it. Not all of these elements need be present in every browsing episode, though multiple glimpses are seen to be the minimum to constitute the act. Results. This concept of browsing is then shown to have persuasive support in the psychological and anthropological literature, where research on visual search, curiosity and exploratory behaviour all find harmony with this perspective. Conclusions. It is argued that this conception of browsing is closer to real human behaviour than other approaches. Implications for better information system design are developed.

Case studies of eight e-portfolio projects were created from document analysis and interviews and surveys of learners and teachers. Findings relating to the impact of e-portfolio systems on learning outcomes and processes and commencing and sustaining e-portfolio development were drawn from cross case analysis.

The social networking site Facebook has become an inescapable phenomenon for college students, but little systematic research has studied why these students use Facebook. I conducted an online survey among Facebook users at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (N=1,049) to examine why they use Facebook and how it fulfills their needs. The most prevalent use of Facebook was as a social activity – students reported using Facebook with friends to view and discuss other people’s profiles. Essentially, Facebook appears to operate primarily as a tool for the facilitation of gossip.

The Dutch justice ministry is to temporarily block its 30,000 employees from using Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, at work after a magazine reported that ministry computers had been used to edit more than 800 entries.