ebyblog students and information

Library Camp 2008 at AADL

Save the date: March 20, 2008

From Ed:

We have space for about 100 people, up from the 40 or so that squeezed into the first Library Camp.

More info and sign ups in the near future.

SAFE Act

via jblyberg:

The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a bill saying that anyone offering an open Wi-Fi connection to the public must report illegal images including “obscene” cartoons and drawings–or face fines of up to $300,000.

That broad definition would cover individuals, coffee shops, libraries, hotels, and even some government agencies that provide Wi-Fi. [...]

Eco-Lib

AADL has tried a few things in the eco area though I haven’t looked into it as much as I probably should. A few I know about are the tree removal at the new branch site and the change to reusable bags.

A couple things that came across the reader recently were Eco-Libris (via LibrarianInBlack) which [...]

Serialized or Time-release Syndication

The Librarian in Black has a post about a service that provides time-released RSS which they call AutoResponder. The price seems a bit steep but it is centered towards business.

A number of potential uses are listed on the service’s website, some of which might be useful for libraries: delivering a training course one chunk at [...]

Twopointopians

A post worth reading over at Annoyed Librarian. She does seem annoyed:

But the twopointopians definitely do. For them, disagreement lets them show how self-righteous and “user-centered” they are, while showing how clueless and selfish everyone else is. You see, the twopointopians “get it,” while the rest of us just don’t understand. They’re like religious converts [...]

Social Games

One of benefits of gaming that fits well with libraries, is the social aspect. The library provides a neutral place for gaming that allows for competition while remaining sane. While most seem to be focused on console games it’s nice to see places like UAH Library also do a LAN Party.

As for the social aspect, [...]

Bad Reviews

One of my favorite science magazines is Seed which also hosts a great collection of science blogs. Today, via boing boing, I found out that they are being sued due to a negative book review. Hopefully it turns out well but it is something to keep an eye on.

That said a negative review has been [...]

Bibliographic Ontology

Haven’t had time to mess around with it but looks like it might be promising. From the wiki:

The Bibliographic Ontology Specification provides main concepts and properties for describing citations and bibliographic references (i.e. quotes, books, articles, etc) on the Semantic Web.

There is a draft of the ontology available on the wiki as well. For those [...]

Random House Insight

A new API from random house to search book contents and retrieve digitized page views. Looks potentially useful though I haven’t checked out all of the terms:

Through the Insight Service, keyword searches can get inside actual book content and find matches against the full text of the book. Insight can then serve up the pages [...]

Geocaching and Gaming Libraries

There’s a nice post over at LibraryTechtonics about geocaching and the problem with associating literacy with just books:

Geocaching teaches problem solving skills, environmental awareness and conservation, health and exercise, treading lightly on the earth, and using the internet and gadgetry (quickly becoming an everyday fixture in people’s lives). Geocaching is information literacy as much as [...]

What’s the LC subject for fun to read?

A recent post by Anil Dash is worth reading and goes over the use of “toread” as a tag:

The most beautiful thing, though, is that we have the tools to make manifest this part of human nature that’s always been with us. In our idle hours, we can look at the wanderings of the minds [...]

DBpedia and URIs

Found quite a few new things today via Planet RDF which included a post about using URI’s to identify music items:

The question I had: what URI should I use for J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier? This is a non-trivial question if one wants to use, say, the Music Ontology in cataloging one’s music: indeed there is [...]

Financial API Lessons

Speaking of Wesabe and their Firefox Toolbar, one of the other benefits of the add-on is that it allows you to automate the uploading of bank exports if the bank allows downloading of Money/Quicken files even if they don’t support automatic downloads. There’s a recent article on O’reilly Radar about some of the benefits of [...]

Zen OPAC and COinS

I’d been thinking about a Zen OPAC idea for quite awhile and now see that dchud thinks similarly. My first thought was to use some of the requirements being that it uses markup similar to what current template set-ups allow in commercial OPACs. I then scraped that and thought should be from scratch and try [...]

LibraryLookup Vendor Request

John Udell has a few requests for catalog vendors, including making it easier to search by ISBN and for related ISBN’s. Peter Murray commented that the url should probably be a bit more restful and mentioned PatREST. Talis responded that it would be quite simple except for the xISBN which could cost a lot with [...]

Floating Reference

The idea of mobile reference was first brought to my attention by Alan Gray at Darien who has a nice post on the topic on his blog. He terms the current desk situation as siege warfare.

What they’ve decided is that we are NOT going to have a desk or any kind of barrier, but that [...]

Ending a free web service

Sifting through the 200+ starred items in Google Reader I meant to blog months ago. One of the things I’ve always liked about Amazon was the versioned web-service. When they add features or change the structure your old application is still safe, presuming you’ve specified the version your using (I’ve made the mistake of not [...]

AADL Developer Blog

Its been radio silence here for awhile due to me switching jobs and getting up and running. I recently accepted the position of System Administrator at Ann Arbor District Library. It wasn’t an easy decision as I wasn’t actively looking for new employment, but sometimes you have to take opportunities when they come. I’m still [...]

Libraries and Outsourcing

There’s plenty of comments regarding the Gorman blogging but I like this snippet from within Clay Shirkey’s response:

Academic libraries, which in earlier days provided a service, have outsourced themselves as bouncers to publishers like Reed-Elsevier; their principal job, in the digital realm, is to prevent interested readers from gaining access to scholarly material.

Karen Schneider gave [...]

Dewey and DDR

A nice article in Escapist magazine about gaming in libraries. Hard to choose just a small section to quote but definitely give it a read. The issue can be downloaded in PDF as well.

Neiburger stresses that libraries should be places for recreation, too. Their size, resources and virtually unlimited membership mean they can do gaming [...]