ebyblog students and information

Knights of Cydonia

Song that’s been playing on the local college station that’s by Muse. Here’s the video, even has a unicorn:

Lucene Summit: Discussion on Lucene

The summit ended with some pow wow’s on whether more meetings should be planned and what common problems people are having and focuses of such meetings. It was determined that many libraries and related fields are playing with Lucene and it would likely be worthwhile to have some sort of gathering. Some notes:

Generalibility is an [...]

Lucene Summit: Erik Hatcher

The co-author of Lucene in Action, this presentation could probably have been termed a keynote. Erik is working with Lucene and Solr in quite a few projects and some of the displays are fairly interesting. Most of these projects are listed under patacriticism.org though there is another called Juxta which also used Lucene though mostly [...]

Lucene Summit: Librarian’s Internet Index

This presentation was done by Karen Schneider which was done virtually and was about the Librarian’s Internet Index. I’ve been hoping to see Karen present and this was another reason to go. The presentation focused on the change of LII to Lucene which is still forthcoming. Some notes:

Users expect full text search
Most don’t use boolean [...]

Lucene Summit: Next Gen Catalogs

This presentation was by Beth Jefferson of Bibliocommons, neither of which appear to have a website. This presentation was one of the reasons I went and was well worth it. Unfortunately she doesn’t seem to breath while speaking so I couldn’t keep up. Here are some notes:

Opening quote: “The Ark was built by amateurs, the [...]

Lucene Summit: Peel Prarie Provinces

The next presentation at the Lucene Summit was regarding the trials and tribulations of the Peel’s Prarie Provinces project. Here are some notes:

Started with OCLC’s SiteSearch
Outsourced digitization to OCLC and Olive, which gives xml based information with pixel positions of words in the images
Nice timeline view when doing a search (facet)
xml -> cocoon -> xsl [...]

Lucene Summit: Elsevier

Art was kind enough to let me attend a Lucene Summit he was having in Windsor and since it was close I went ahead and attended. The summit started with some brief introductions of some of the problems Knowledge Ontario (the organizer) is having with some of their digital search projects. Most were using Lucene [...]

Ask A Librarian how to get around

An interesting outreach mechanism for on campus. The ASU libraries set-up tents around campus with signs for anyone that was lost or had trouble finding the class. Also gave out bottled water. One way to show your presence on campus and a little more useful then the usual tent that asks you to sign up [...]

Hail Storm in Northfield, MN

There’s a rather amazing photoset on Flickr of a hail storm in Northfield, MN with hail the size of softballs. Quite a bit of damage, including a greenhouse destroyed. Community photos look to be organized by a local citizen group.

The Reference “Desk”

Alan has a nice post on his library’s hopes of changing how reference is provided. They hope to move away from the reference desk and move more towards a “pod” approach which I understand to be more open and allow patrons to sit right next to the reference librarian for help. No more barriers between [...]

Hot Library Smut

Came across an post with the name Hot Library Smut and just had to click. It’s about a photography book of libraries around the world. The post includes some pictures from the book and it does look great. Definitely worth a look.

Amazon Page - has title and author wrong
OpenWorldCat - which also seems to have [...]

Some quickies for Aug 21 2006

A few things that are worthwhile pointing to outside of del.icio.us but not worth thier own post.

First, the submissions to Talis’ Mashup contest are in. Art has been working on a Google Desktop mashup and he has a nice writeup about it now.

Planning for a free web-conference called Five Weeks to a Social Library is [...]

AIDS at 25

Seed Magazine has a coming issue on the 25th anniversery of HIV/AIDS and of the XVI International AIDS Conference. I’m still trying to get my library to subscribe (great science magazine) but they have a lot of coverage online. There’s some nice infographics in a recent post and some other great posts as well.

Round-up of [...]

Books4Code

Image was created using the Web2.0 Logo Creatr.

A sort of informal book club it taking shape. From the code4lib post:

So a bunch of us in #code4lib are thinking of starting up a book club to read tech books together, learn from each other in the process, and hopefully use a bit of peer pressure to [...]

Library Geeks Episode 2

The second episode of the Library Geeks podcast is now out. From the site:

Jessamyn West joins Ross and I to discuss communities virtual and real, and how her work as a librarian intersects with each; Ross also provides an update on the umlaut.

Library 1.0 Problems

Alan Gray has a post on his new blog (subscribe now) about Library 1.0 vs Library 2.0.

Customer Service is Library 1.0. Period. Full stop. You need to go back to Go if you think putting in some Web 2.0 tools, and taking notes at Jenny and Michael’s Road Show, will get you finally to [...]

The DRM Wars

A series of posts by Ed Felton regarding the changing arguments for and against DRM.

First, they argue that DRM enables price discrimination �¢â�¬â�� business models that charge different customers different prices for a product �¢â�¬â�� and that price discrimination benefits society, at least sometimes. Second, they argue that DRM helps platform developers lock in their [...]

Libraries Thwarting Mashups

If thwarting open-access wasn’t enough, it seems that access to electronic form of classification systems is quite prohibitory. Tim writes over at the LibraryThing blog about his research into classification systems, and why he’ll likely have to go with little known classifications to do what he wants. I personally found it rather surprising that such [...]

Telling a Life’s Story

Probably one of the most amazing uses of YouTube that’s I’ve seen. A 78-year-old man tells his story. Probably something that would fall under DOPA.

Check out his YouTube profile for more of his content and to see how quickly he’s adapted to the technology. Are any libraries helping document local stories?

via Waxy links

The Audience

Some quick stats to think about for my library. Some of this is older data available online.

Library professional staff: 70+
Library support staff: 120+
Faculty and academic staff (including library): approx 4,500
Support staff (including library): approx 6,000
Graduate students: approx 9,500
Undergraduate students: approx 36,000

Not sure about the number of community borrowers.