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.
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.
Here’s the third and final debate. You can also watch the original Windows Media stream.
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
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.
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.
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 "
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 an iffy title
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 the librarian and the patron. It will be interesting to see how the design turns out and what tweaks they make.
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 underway. They are requesting proposals for presentations currently. Led by a great group of people and likely to turn out just as great.