MOBIUS Libraries

Scholr.ly looks like a very interesting tool. They describe it as "Making Academic Search Social". Here is a description of the search engine: "Undergraduate physicists and comparative literature postdocs have very different search needs. We're building an academic search engine that takes these individual differences into account. The more we know about what you do, the better we can tailor our results to fit your needs. Sometimes, though, it's good to look at a problem from another perspective. Maybe you're doing research in an area you aren't familiar with and want an insider's view. Maybe you're doing interdisciplinary work, or want to better understand your colleague's work. To address these cases, Scholr.ly offers you the opportunity to search as another author- literally. You can search as your professor, a famous linguist, or the highly cited scholar in the department next door- and get the same results they would." It's a very interesting idea...

The Social Networks and Archival Context Project (SNAC) is a project that aims to bring together online resources and archival materials on historical person, to basically allow a researcher to know where all the records are to understand a person. What I found in the prototype is that it resembled a catalog of sophisticated authority records. This could be useful for someone needing quick information or seeing how a historical figure fits in context, but I question if in the end it doesn't repeat information found almost as readily in other resources such as Wikipedia.

The link for the prototype of the SNAC database.

A really interesting way to define librarianship. He says that librarians provide expertise in making accessible, navigating and making sense of the social transcript. Do you agree?

This is an interesting article about a course called "Lying About the Past" run by T. Mills Kelly at George Mason University. He encourages his students to make fictitious stories up to show how readily people will accept things as the truth, such as a lost pirate or a lost recipe for a historic beer. This angers some people but shows how quickly wrong information can spread and be accepted. In particular the article notes the one website that caught the false stories was Reddit, where a centralized exchange of information is encouraged and once doubts were voiced the material was verified by several people, as opposed to Wikipedia where the material is controlled by a minority of editors and most users are passive readers.

The Transparency Report is a report Google has recently made available that shows requests to remove copyrighted material from Google's search results but also requests from governments to remove information and inquiries from governments about Google's users. Unsurprisingly the U.S., is first in user data requests, but oddly followed by India and France.

WE LIVE IN THE FUTURE!

Suck it Oracle.

Google seems to be in the news again. Article 1 of 2: Thousands of authors can sue Google in a class-action lawsuit over its plan to create the world's largest digital book library, a federal judge ruled on Thursday. U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin in Manhattan also rejected Google's bid to dismiss claims by The Authors Guild and several groups representing photographers and graphic artists, which would have forced their members to sue individually.

More Google news, this one on censorship. Interesting how they are working to get around the censorship, I wonder how long it will take for China to stop it in some way.

"Libraries' most devoted e-users aren't choosing using the web over coming to the library in person. Rather, they are choosing to do both."

In 2000 Microsoft made a series of predictions about ebooks over the following 20 years. The prediction for 2012 includes an ad campaign by the logging industry that says, "Buy the real thing - real books printed on real paper.

Paul Otlet was a Belgian inventor who had several visionary ideas, such as a "World City" which would be a gathering of all the leading institutions of the world that would radiate knowledge and the Universal Decimal Classification scheme which is still used in some libraries. He also had a concept in 1934 for a radiated library that was in some ways a precursor to the Internet. It was limited by the technology he knew at the time, and consisted of a center where users would call in to ask for research and information to be displayed, which would then be displayed on a television screen. Aside from the need to call in some of his concepts are similar to early community access cable television.

This article has some great ideas for what to do before and after you speak to help your audience put more of your message in their permanent memories. Great tips for training sessions! Favorite quote: "If someone expects something to be wonderful and valuable, then they're more likely to experience it as wonderful and valuable."

Basically, with git, every merge is a conflict, which leaves you with an index that contains three versions of each file, the versions from each branch and the base. On this index, various resolvers are run, which can decide for each individual file how to resolve the matter.

THOMAS is the website the Library of Congress uses for keeping an online record of bills. As the author notes it's not easy to get a picture of what Congress is working on by looking at one bill at a time. It's possible to get a more overall picture by downloading the data and number crunching it, but it looks like the site will not allow bulk downloads of data, only scraping information by way of scripts.

This is both bad and good news. Good in that rather than stretching out for years or decades with multiple lawsuits and decisions, that instead there will ultimately be a definite answer about Google's book scanning project. It's bad that as a class action some serious money and power will come into play, and the stakes will be that much higher.

This was a fairly interesting article about how, Amazon's Jeff Bezos wants to eliminate the "gatekeepers" by empowering as now anyone can become a publisher, producer, or editor of content. Ultimately I agree with the article's assertion that librarian's should be opening doors and resources, but feel that is essentially what the role has been the whole time. A "gatekeeper" is not so much a barrier to people but a barrier to wasted time and effort, and serves as a resource and authority to what people are searching for.

One of the largest publishers files for bankruptcy, although the reason may be because of long term debt from a previous merger. The bankruptcy is intended to eliminate $3 billion in debt, although the company has struggled with debt since Houghton Mifflin was bought in 2006 and Harcourt in 2007 by Irish investor Barry O'Callaghan. While the banktruptcy is not due to the changes brought about by electronic publishing, the company's corporate credit was cut by Moody's to Ca, the second lowest rating, and can affect the company's attempts to innovate and produce.