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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.

Findability is the quality of an object (be it a physical object, a person, or a bit of data) to be locatable and navigable. While larger than the concept of search on the Internet, nevertheless this talk by Peter Morville from the 2006 O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference deals principally with issues of search over the web.

If the point of reference service is to help people find the information resources they want or need, then the technological environment should help to dictate what a service should look like.

ibraries will need to provide a mix of services via a range of methods:

It would make more sense to play to our strengths: concerns about evaluation and quality of information sources, sophisticated tools and techniques for searching, understanding the nature of users, their communities, their needs and situations, compiling and organizing and packaging information resources for their use, helping them to understand how to help themselves and how to use and evaluate information. These, the goals and motivations for reference librarians for over a century, would lead us to a school of reference librarianship less focused on the answers to specific questions and more on providing assistance and support to people with more detailed, more demanding, more comprehensive information needs of all kinds, from the personal to the professional, from the mundane to the cosmic.

Built on Semantic Web technologies, hakia is a new "meaning-based" (semantic) search engine with the purpose of improving search relevancy and interactivity -- the potential benefits for end users are search efficiency, richness of information, and saving time.

We'll explore these ideas and offer solutions for those struggling with new models of service, technology, and a decidedly opaque climate.

When you contemplate the sheer artifice of the card, it's a wonder that library users have managed to adopt the library view of the bibliographic universe, and often without any formal training. And although we have progressed beyond the card catalog to online catalogs, we are still working within some of the constraints of that technology. For the sake of our users it would be a good idea to decide to leave the card behind us, once and for all.

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.

Presenting a wide range of literature, this article explores the state of art in book research, paying particular attention to John B. Thompson’s interpretation of digital transformations within the book industry, as depicted in Books in the Digital Age (2005). Claiming that Thompson’s analyses are one–sided, the article applies alternative perspectives and a model of a text cycle, contending that the diminishing role of paper in text production and text distribution makes the dominant position of printed books particularly vulnerable to advances in digital reading technologies.

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.

Metaversed.com helps companies stay ahead of the virtual curve. In a rapidly changing virtual world landscape, information is key.

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.

Their first release is Animoto, a web application that automatically generates professionally produced videos using their own patent-pending technology and high-end motion design. Each video is a fully customized orchestration of user-selected images and music. Produced on a widescreen format, Animoto videos have the visual energy of a music video and the emotional impact of a movie trailer.

To be able to answer this question in general principles, we can postulate that a search engine must understand what is going on, which requires algorithms capable of understanding content. This is what experts in the search field have called* Semantic Search Technology (SST).

We've engineered a radical new search technology that allows users to experience improved search results with features like categorization of search results, highlighting best sentences, and complete text snippets. This new approach is based on our proprietary knowledge-gathering system, called QDEX, and a ranking algorithm, called SemanticRank.