Libology Blog

The New York Public Library will be obtaining a print-on-demand press called the Espresso Book Machine, which can create a paperback from a PDF file in about 5 minutes.

The machine, which costs about $100,000, has the potential to change how libraries could provide materials.  Imagine a WorldCat-like opac that lets you choose an item, which is printed while you wait (and 5 minutes spent finding a book is not unusual for a larger library), and is able then to be checked out.

I wonder what percentage of a library’s collection could be held digitally?  This could solve much of the space crunch facing many libraries, in the long term.

from NewsForge

The open coursework offered by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has been translated into Chinese and made available for study in China.

The effort was headed by Lucifer Chu (perhaps best known for translating The Lord of the Rings into Chinese) using a program called Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System (OOPS).  This signals an internationalization of open access, with many potential benefits for teaching and learning.

An excellent article about the work done by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), including how they worked with their libraries on the project, can be found here.

from Open Access News

All right then, begin the list:

1) An article spotted in this morning’s paper that offers a great summary for those not familiar with the archive: Content of Dead Sites Lives in Archive .

2) They earned a 2006 Education Award Laureate from the Tech Museum Awards (also contains additional information about what they do). (from Open Access News)

3) And they started a blog earlier this month which showcases interesting content and their activities: What’s New at the Internet Archive. (from ResourceShelf)

This article, dated a few weeks ago, on a Chicago news radio station’s website makes it sound as though libraries are more dangerous than they are.

I suspect that many of the “thousands of files” depicting the crimes were either a question of interpretation (”I know pornography when I see it”) or relatively minor issues that, perhaps like my former place of employment, the staff wouldn’t initiate calling police unless we actually witnessed it ourselves.

If you are not familiar with it, though, check out Illinois’ Library Records Confidentiality Act for yourself. I think it benefits more than harms, and that in a criminal investigation, obtaining a subpoena for things such as telephone and library records would be part of an established process. Why should it have taken 2 days to obtain one in this case?

By the way, the act does not cover a library hiding criminal activity, as the article suggests, just circulation and usage records.

Google has updated their interface for reading the books found using Google Book Search.

Here is a sample. And another.

from Official Google Blog

An intriguing idea:  As you write a paper/essay/whatever software would scan your text for search terms and run those searches, giving you additional sources and ideas as you write.

Write While You Search: Ambient Searching of a Digital Library in the Context of Writing.

(pdf)

from ResourceShelf

Social and Cultural Foundations of Education will be an interesting course at Old Dominion University, as the coursework will not be taken from the textbook, it will be the textbook.

In what may be a first for an undergraduate class, the project for the semester is the creation and editing of an open access textbook that will be used and further edited by future students of the course.

I, for one, suspect that the students will learn a great deal more this way than by the traditional methods of learning. It is definitely tougher when you are creating that which will be used by others, than by simply using it.

from Open Access News

According to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, the EPA is trashing a significant portion of its library collection. If the article is accurate, then we risk losing a significant amount of environmental information and research.

from ResourceShelf

Cucumis is an interesting exchange project.  It involves people willing to translate text from one language to another.  A person earns points by providing translations, then “spends” those points by having others translate documents for them.

No money, no profit, just an exchange of services.  Interesting and neat (unless you only speak one language and need a translation).

from TechCrunch

Kind of an interesting merger in the library ILS world:  Endeavor and Ex Libris are merging.  Until recently, I worked in a library that used Endeavor’s Voyager ILS, and was impressed with many things that it could do, but also frustrated with many of the things it should have been able to do.

This could be good, depending on what is retained from each of the companies.  It seems that, from an Endeavor viewpoint, this will give much more of an international reach to Voyager customers, given Ex Libris’ worldwide base.

The big picture, however, is going to be how the big players respond to the rising influence and quality of Open Source ILS, such as Evergreen and Koha (LibLime, too).

Another web-based option for automatic generation of bibliographic citations is OttoBib, in which you get a MLA, APA, or Chicago style citation by entering a book’s ISBN.

from MetaFilter

The Nelsonville Public Library in Athens County, Ohio has just gone live with the latest update for Koha, an open source Integrated Library System (ILS). The OPAC is clean, fast, and shares more than a passing similarity to the OPAC for WorldCat.

Will WorldCat be the equivalent to Google in the library OPAC world, in that new designs will incorporate the basic elements of WorldCat?  (not to say that WorldCat isn’t derivative of other designs… imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, they say).

from Catalogablog

Remember Mazlow’s Hierarchy of Needs?  Karen Schneider’s take on how that relates to the library universe is an interesting overview of some of the problems with our current automation systems.

from ALA TechSource

The National Library of Medicine has a unique feature on their online file conversion site, DocMorph:  one of their options is to convert a file to synthesized speech.

Think about the option of providing your online materials in an audio format, without having to take the time to read and record them.  Meeting minutes, bulletins, newsletters could all be available as audio files.  Not a bad idea!

from ResourceShelf

Need to find an earlier version of Adobe’s Acrobat Reader for that 200MHz computer that slows to a crawl when you try to use the current version of the software?

Never fear:  previous versions of dozens of software programs, open source as well as proprietary, are available for download at OldVersion.com.

from ResourceShelf

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a terrific resource containing, in their words, access to “free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals.” If only they had a full-text search tool (they do have a “Find Article” search, but it covers less than 1/3 of the journals they list).

Well, now they have a search tool, in a way: LukeTheLibrarian has set up a Google Custom Search tool for DOAJ journals. It seems to work fairly well, based on a couple of test searches. Give it a try: This may be the tool that gives traction to the Open Access Journal movement!

from Open Access News

An interesting site for comparing and contrasting the many various diet offerings exists on the site called Diet Television.

Adjust the sliders along the left side of the screen to show the relative importance of various diet-related issues (speed of weight loss, eating out, feeling hungry, and various food choices), and the ranking of diets changes to reflect the responses of people who have used those diets.

I found it just a tad strange that it popped up with one particular diet plan’s rating at 100%, but it seems to choose the various diets randomly, so you can reload the page to see different diets and how they were ranked.

from TechCrunch

Similar to MediaConvert, Zamzar is an online site that lets you convert a plethora of file types to a bunch of other file types.

They don’t seem to have as many options (or perhaps just different ones… I haven’t done a detailed comparison), but they do accept file sizes up to 100 MB, and they deliver the file as an attachment to an e-mail account of your choice.

from Monkey Bites