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 [...]
Jeremy Frumkin has a nice short article in OCLC Systems and Services:
So, we need to forgo our own need to push our library expertise onto our users, and instead use that expertise to do the heavy lifting for our users….
However, in order to do all of the above, behind the scenes my digital library without [...]
There have been some great projects lately about moving information control into the hands of users such as Move My Data. In that vein there is the idea of profile data using microformats. For example you have a list of your friends marked up on hcard on your blog. When you sign up for a [...]
I’m in the process of researching information on services to distance learners since that’s my primary job focus. I personally think there is more then plenty of room for improvement. The research seems a bit sparse as most articles focus on teaching and pedagogy over other services. What I did find is that many of [...]
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 [...]
Some brief searching on Google Local over at SEO by the SEA for major libraries brought up some disappointing results. I’m not overly surprised with the findings.
I’ll probably look at some more libraries to get a better sense of what is going on with Google Local Search and libraries, but it appears that the [...]
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 [...]
There’s a nice resource called ANTS (ANimated Tutorial Sharing Project) which hopes to create screencast tutorials for library resources that libraries can share and use.
Over the years, libraries have witnessed a significant growth in their number of online resources; matched with an increasing demand for 24/7 information literacy. At the same time new software [...]
pbinkley writes about the problem with OpenURL resolvers and how augmenting them with outside data may help. I do like some of the things Umlaut is doing and I’m hopeful that things improve. Worth a read.
Give me good detailed metadata and my resolver should nail it for you first time; give me vague or faulty [...]
Came across a post over at Business Logs (great blog) called The User Experience Bar Is Now Sky High which showed off some of the upcoming interfaces to some web apps. Definitely some interesting things being done and it will be interesting to see how many of these become common place. The one that stood [...]
Article worth a read though I’m not sure if I belong to a specific camp:
This concept, often referred to as progressive enhancement, means starting with the actual content, which normally consists of text and sometimes images. Once that is in place you add styling to make the content aesthetically attractive to those who can perceive [...]
Not completely my opinion but there is an op-ed piece that is worth reading. It’s also worth reading the comments/responses. From the piece:
Rather than build an expensive new library downtown in the mistaken belief that such a monument to 19th century information technology will bring the community together, the city of Lawrence needs to consider [...]
Recommendations and relevency can be big business. Netflix is offering a prize for someone who improves their recommendations based on sample data. Datamining has the potential of helping libraries increase relevency and help people find books that might interest them or even just relationships between items. However, there is a big privacy issue involved when [...]
A couple of ajax-type web apps have added “infinite scroll” implementations. The infinite scroll being that when you get near the bottom of the results page it dynamically loads more results. There’s no real paging, just loading.
The two apps I’ve seen it in now are the new Google Reader when viewing a subscription and the [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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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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