MOBIUS Libraries

Interesting look at QR codes. There's even a website dedicated to bad QR codes! My only big question is do I still have to respond to RT tickets dealing with QR codes since its an almost dead technology :)

I think we need MOBIUS e-cards or billboards, perhaps?

Describes the use of analytics tools such as Inspectlet, ClickTale, userfly, and more; it includes a nice little comparison table of features. Particularly cool are the real time screenshots and heatmaps depicting page use.

I don't know how I missed this, the book banning in Arizona (even though according the schools its not book banning), but I like the sounds of librotraficantes. Very interesting read as we get closer to banned books week.

Is the Social Web being integrated into our public libraries? This installment in ReadWriteWeb's Social Books series aims to find out.

This one is just for fun on Friday, but makes a lot of good points.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan wants the U.S. to begin adopting all digital textbooks, taking as a model South Korea which expects to become fully digital by 2015. Proponents argue digital textbooks are an improvement as they are more immerse and can include multimedia components to help with learning.

A fairly complete review on the new Kindle Fire HD, notable that most of the improvement was done with faster and better hardware and not in the interface. Notable is the upcoming 8.9 inch Kindle is the device with cellular connectivity, the Fire HD still uses wireless ethernet. Also notable is the primary competitor is not Apple's iPad but Google's Nexus 7 which in shape and general performance is similar but uses Google's Play store.

Really cool article that looks at : "Espresso Book Machines can offer two kinds of services: print-on-demand of any title available through the EspressNet database (which includes Google Books, the Internet Archive, all of Ingram's partnered publishers, and more) and self-­publishing services for authors and small publishers."

I sincerely love the idea of these book machines and have ever since they've become available. I don't know why every library doesn't have one (aside from cost).

An interview with William Noel, curator of the Walters Art Museum, which recently featured the Archimedes palimpsest in its collection-- both physical and digital.  What's wonderful about that is that its digital collection is under Creative Commons license. I'm a bit confused as to why Noel thinks that libraries don't want to advertise their collections, unless he's referring to the fact that libraries typically contain copyrighted material in their collections.

Oh, and you can get to the digital exhibition of the Archimedes palimpsest at http://archimedespalimpsest.net/. It's not terribly user-friendly (to quickly look at the images, select "Google Book of the Archimedes Palimpsest"), but being able to access the raw TIFF images is pretty darn cool.

This project is moving along...

I'm going to investigate this. Not sure how well it would work for a real workhorse web server, but in theory it looks legit.

This timeline shows 30 years of Banned Books. A really neat visual that takes a look at books that have been banned over the years.

China, unlike much of the rest of the world, is experiencing a boom in publishing, helped a national outlook that has embraced learning and is commercializing publishing. The comments in the article noted that some e-readers are popular in China, but otherwise doesn't say much about the state of e-publishing.

A fairly concerning article about how a student taking a course with his wife didn't see the need to buy a second textbook for the class. However, with the textbook came a mandatory access code for supplementary materials and also to get access to the online discussion board and homework submission system. The student was unable to purchase the access code itself. This highlights an ongoing problem with software and digital access; publishers may legally be in their rights that every user is only granted access to a work and then to only one person, but users expect to be able to buy used books, old software, and so on. By essentially and artificially eliminating the secondary market of used/older materials publishers may increase their revenue per user but also increase user dissatisfaction and distrust.

This is a good read after looking at the previous Git flow.

Oracle is suing Google over the use of their Java API's in Android. This should be an interesting case. Google argues that while you can copyright a finished product, you shouldn't be able to copyright the computer language used to build the product - just like a novelist can copyright a book but nobody can copyright English. Oracle disagrees and says that if the language is unique enough, then it should be protected. They cite Klingon as an example. I read through Oracle's filing and it actually looks pretty strong. I didn't bother reading Google's because it's pretty clear that Google is missing the point that Oracle isn't upset that they used Java, but that they bundled all the extra API's. I really feel for the judge and jury having to hear this case. Oracle's brief isn't exactly light on the technical details...

Creative Commons weighs in on OCLC's recommendation that its members adopt the Open Data Commons Attribution license (linked in the article) for the catalog metadata they share in OCLC.  While CC commends OCLC for encouraging the sharing of data, it points out that a license, even an open data license, can prove problematic when it comes to reusing and recombining data found within OCLC with other sources.  

Probably more enterprise oriented than we'll ever use, but an interesting website to visit to get an idea of current trends and developments.

I'm just learning of this today. Apparently they are only offering 1GB of free storage, which puts them at half of what Dropbox offers for free. That said, Dropbox is painfully slow at upload and download and Google storage is insanely cheap. I just bought 20GB of storage for my photo archive and it costs me a WHOPPING $5/year - and the extra storage is shared by all my Google apps which I'm guessing will include Drive.