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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Some interesting visualizations that some may want to check out.
Summize
The first is from an online shopping site called summize.
Rather than build yet another price comparison shopping site - which are great once you know what to buy - we’ve taken a reviews-first approach: we crawl the web for product reviews, aggregate those reviews, select [...]
I’ve mentioned Wesabe’s Data Bill of Rights before. John Battelle has now posted on his formulation of a bill of rights:
So, I submit for your review, editing and clarification, a new draft of what rights we, as consumers, might demand from companies making hay off the data we create as we trip across the web
Some [...]
Via the Bokardo blog:
I think that social features are bigger than many people view them. They are a long-term strategy that takes lots of resources. You can’t simply bolt on a feature here or there (well, unless it’s article sharing or something super simple like that) and expect to realize the benefits of making a [...]
Or full cataloging in this post. Library Juice compared Last.fm and LibraryThing and describes the benefit of having both controlled and user data.
The real functionality of both Last.fm and LibraryThing, though, rests not on user tags but on the standards-based metadata for the objects in it - books for LibraryThing and music tracks for Last.fm. [...]
Once referred to as “tripletags” supposedly but now called Machine Tags, due to Flickr’s adoption of their use for geocoding, etc. From machinetags.org:
Machine tags, or triple tags, are tags that are made up of three parts (namespace:predicate=value) in order to give extra information. Machine tags have been in use for a while now on sites [...]
I’m way behind in lots of things right now but I might as well post something. The keynote on the first day of Code4Lib 2007 was by Karen Schneider who writes at Free Range Librarian, among other places. You can view a video of her presentation on google and download links should be available soon [...]
From Roy Tennant:
So what should you do? I’m sorry, but you get paid a lot of money to figure that out, so you can hardly expect me to give it away for free. But it may be sufficient to say that you can’t simply provide incremental changes to your legacy code. You need to think [...]
There’s a nice post over at Infomancy about OPACs:
The AADL SOPAC is, at its heart, an OPAC. And therein lies the problem. The purpose of an OPAC is to connect users with MARC records. Even if we connect them in a socially empowered environment, we are still connecting users with something that has no value [...]
There’s a nice interview over at Nelsonville Public Library about their move to Koha back in 2003. Here’s a quote I think is worth reading:
It’s important that libraries do not look on Open Source as free software that they just download, press a button, and all their problems will magically be solved. Open Source requires [...]
As usual I try something and then wait so long to post that you’ve probably read about it in 100 other places. One of the recent things I’ve been experimenting with is Wesabe a social financial site in it’s early stages.
I try to keep tabs on my money and have managed to stay out of [...]
A followup to a recent article I commented on. These replies are of course more thoughtful then mine. The first is from Personal InfoCloud:
This assumption that the author of the “Beneath the Metadata” makes that taxonomies are great and help people find things by providing the authoritative terms is wrong. Taxonomies are always less than [...]
Nice post over on Beth’s blog about a library in a box idea (and not the closed black boxes some libraries buy):
Library-in-a-box is coming at these problems from several directions. One goal, for example, is to make an easily distributable CD (it could be distributed, for example, in a box!) that can install Evergreen or [...]
There’s a new issue of Dlib out with an article called “Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy“. There has been some discussion in the library blog arena about it. Here is a round-up and some thoughts. The article goes over traditional cataloging and folksonomy and concludes:
The choice to use folksonomy for organizing information on the Internet [...]
I spent one of my days off this week at the Future of the Integrated Library System Symposium in Windsor. As with most things Art plans, it was worth the time. I’ll probably be posting some more about some of the ideas that came about there but here’s a brief run-down.
Where we are
Thanks to [...]
The Inquiring Librarian has a nice post entitled More Structured Metadata. She puts nicely what I’ve been meaning to say or maybe have said in the past. There really is a need for some good structured metadata in addition to what is already in the catalog. Ideally you’d have full text to also work with [...]
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ebyblog is the blog of Ryan Eby. The opinions contained in are my own and likely the opposite of my employer and everyone else.
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