Wow… library blog land is abuzz tonight with the release of LibraryFind… and it does look fantastic!

It is an open source federated search engine that is fully customizable, and the price is right.

Check out the Oregon State University Demo to see what it does.

from (in time stamp order): Web4Lib post (5:52 p.m.); One Big Library (6:15 p.m.); OSS4Lib (6:31 p.m.); ResourceShelf (6:35 p.m.) — makes my later-than-9-p.m. post seem kind of late, eh?

With a name like that, it could be many wacky things, but Psychic Whois is simply a Whois lookup with an auto-complete feature.  Nifty if you are looking to create a new website and need a URL.

from ResourceShelf

Digital versions of books by and about Abraham Lincoln, brought to you by the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) and the Open Content Alliance.

from ResourceShelf

Usability in the Library is a web site created by the University of Michigan that contains a smorgasbord of links and references relating to, you guessed rightly, usability in the library.

I especially liked the Resources section of their site (scroll down for a lot of web-based resources).

posted on Web4Lib

Google’s Moon Shot is the title of an article in the current New Yorker magazine.  The title refers to a quote that likens the Google Book Project to Nasa’s Project Apollo.

Quite a bit of interest in this article, including the estimated number of books in WorldCat:  32,000,000 (note that the WorldCat site indicates “over 1 billion items”.

posted on Web4Lib

RSS just became a bit more universal with Page2RSS.  Simply put, they allow you to enter a URL, and they will generate a feed for your RSS reader whenever the site changes; it doesn’t matter whether or not the site generates its own feed!

from BiblioTech Web

Weed of the Month doesn’t have anything to do with gardening (although that topic is covered) but with weeding library materials.  Organized by Dewey Decimal Classification, it is an excellent overview of de-selection issues by topic area.

from Catalogablog

I think we are now in a position where a re-examination of copyright law needs to take place. If the current law cannot allow for orphan works to be used through some process (what we have now is a Catch-22), then these works aren’t benefiting anyone.

Here is a news article on the topic; here is the court opinion (pdf).

side note: I would worry about congress revisiting copyright law, too. I suspect that the major media corporations would make it their top priority to shift the law in their favor, which might do much more harm than good. (My own opinion…).

from ResourceShelf

Libraries facilitate open access to information with open source software is an interesting article posted on Linux.com.

I have opened my Open Source Software and Libraries with the same observation that the open source movement and libraries share many of the same ideals.

from NewsForge

As part of their real estate search area, Yahoo has debuted a School Search feature that provides information and reports on schools throughout the country.

from Search Engine Land

Google Librarian Central is a blog created by the Google team that is meant to be an open, interactive means of providing information to those of us in LibraryLand.

from Search Engine Land

Link Evaluator is a Firefox extension (now being called “add-ons”) provided by OCLC that, as the name suggests, evaluates the links on a web page using a color-coded system.

from Catalogablog

David Oldenkamp of Indiana University has put together a Google Custom Search (see my post here) called International Documents that searches selected Intergovernmental Organization’s (IGO) web sites.  Very handy when you need that type of information.

Someone ought to collect a bunch of the Google Custom Search links on a site, so as to make it easier to locate what you need, when you need it.

Hmmmm…. perhaps LibrarySupportStaff.org ought to do this….

from James Jacobs, via Web4Lib

The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2006 (3MB Pdf here), the third annual report, has been released.  These have been very informative reports, containing information on a broad range of student/IT interactions.

thanks to Bill Drew for posting this at Web4Lib

A new report by the Urban Institute, Making Cities Stronger:  Public Library Contributions to Local Economic Development (Pdf), details the ways that an active and involved public library benefits local economies.

from ResourceShelf

The purpose of this proposal is to provide the means to differentiate between authors with the same or similar names.  One thing I really like about it is that it would be able to be updated and maintained by authors, librarians, and other users.

The Pdf of the proposal is here.

from ResourceShelf

LibraryVideos blog is just what it sounds like:  a blog devoted to videos related to libraries.

from BiblioTech Web

Time to change your links… the site formerly known as FirstGov.gov is now USA.gov.

The search page is USASearch.gov.

Easier for people to remember, once they get used to the change!

from ResourceShelf

This article’s abstract:

The Arizona Health Sciences Library has collaborated with clinical faculty to develop a federated search engine that is useful for meeting real-time clinical information needs. This article proposes a technology mediation role for the reference librarian that was inspired by the project, and describes the collaborative model used for developing technology-mediated services for targeted users.

There is as much to be learned, if not more, by how others make decisions, as by the decisions they actually make.

from ResourceShelf

Just in time for my 200th post, Unshelved has created a poster for ALA’s online store based on their (Unshelved’s) “Read Responsibly” theme (I have the shirt, and it is one of my favorites).

from Librarian.net