And some more linkies for the reading, apologizes if some are old and overlinked: What is it like to eat on $30 a month. Is an API really needed or is structured content enough? Some ajaxitagging. Pulling in content from social sites on demand. I could see it being used on things like Umlaut to make the initial load quicker. You have umlaut right? Some resources on fair-use and copyright are always handy A nice article on improving libraries including the 48 hour delivery to shelf turnaround.

Continue reading →

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 is not a simple, straightforward decision, but one with important underlying philosophical issues. Although folksonomy advocates are beginning to correct some linguistic and cultural variations when applying tags, inconsistencies within the folksonomic classification scheme will always persist.

Continue reading →

An interesting lecture. The QandA is worth a watch. Reading: Q and A

Continue reading →

Another election cycle, another year of voting problems. Here are some recent posts that are worth a read and as usual the debate in the comments are worth it as well. Voting Technology and Security Last week in Florida's 13th Congressional district, the victory margin was only 386 votes out of 153,000. There'll be a mandatory lawyered-up recount, but it won't include the almost 18,000 votes that seem to have disappeared.

Continue reading →

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 smaller the city, the less relevant the results may become. Many libraries don’t have a web site associated with them, and if they have a web page on a site, the link displayed may go to the front page of that site.

Continue reading →

Here’s the third and final debate. You can also watch the original Windows Media stream.

Continue reading →

Here are the presentations that have been posted online. I’ve done some conversions on a couple to make them easier to use. Art's Introduction An overview of why we showed up Available as html slideshow Beth's Presentation My writeup of the presentation Powerpoint Version PDF Version - 5.3 MB Karen's Presenation My writeup of the presentation Powerpoint Version PDF Version - 930K

Continue reading →

Besides brewing my own beer, I also roast my own coffee. I find that it’s rather cheap compared to premium coffee with the added benefits of letting you choose the roast level, try many varieties and have actual fresh coffee. The green coffee beans keep quite well so you only need to roast what your going to drink while it’s fresh. I buy my beans from Sweet Maria’s which has a nice selection and takes homeroasting seriously.

Continue reading →

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 (including librarians) Most don't do boolean well (including librarians) Quite a few use quoted searches Very few use advanced search (including librarians) and those that do usually use it as a help page to see what can be searched White space can help with results Dropped LCSH - most was used poorly In testing search engines reused actual search queries of various types (boolean, misspellings, simple, advanced) Always test a non-beta version of vendor software Use testers only once - tainted from then on Turn off rank number - just confuses - relevant results should be at top, doesn't matter what number you assign Faceted search is useful Keeping browse and search together was a major driver for the change in search technology While my notes are short it was a worthwhile presentation, especially if you were doing testing of products.

Continue reading →

New issure of Ariadne that includes an Introduction to UnAPI and an article on library catalogs and discovery. Google Book search has added library catalog search. Most of the hits I got were OpenWorldCat. Similar to what I was hoping the "find in libraries" was headed but plenty of room for improvement IDEA 2006 is taking shape and will be hosted at the Seattle Public Library. Their site states its about "

Continue reading →