The Haskell Free Library and Opera House has a somewhat unique situation:  it straddles the U.S.-Canadian border.

Now, according to this article in the Washington Times, the U.S. Border Patrol is cracking down on those who cross the border to use the library.  It is part of an effort to stop people from entering the U.S. illegally, but local residents are concerned about what this may mean for their community.

from ResourceShelf

Giving Knowledge for Free : The Emergence of Open Educational Resources (Pdf, 153 pages) is a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD)’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation which details the state of open access education.

This is definitely worth looking over if you are involved with higher education, because you are likely going to be working with open tools and methods, in some form, within the next few years.

from Open Access News

Freebase is a new project which I described in a posting last March.

OpenBusiness recently ran an interview on their blog with the sites founders.

from Open Access News

Pipl is a search engine geared towards finding people, but it casts a wider net than other people search tools. It searches social networking sites, job sites, and blogs.

As you might guess, there are usually a lot of results to wade through, especially with common names.  That aspect aside, this site can be helpful for tracking down someone, or for seeing what your own web presence is.

from Search Engine Land

Wide Open Education is a new blog from the Online Education Database.  Each of these links is well worth following:  you will find great information and resources related to the open education movement on either.

from Open Access News

Geonames is an online database of places.  Type in the name of a place, be it a town, city, geographic feature, or landmark, and you get a list of places with that name.

Want to know how many places in Colorado have the name Illinois?  Or whether Anytown really exists?  This is your resource!

The Advanced Search allow you to limit your searches by feature and continent.

from TechCrunch

Advice to a slightly less experienced geek librarian is written by Daniel Chudnov at One Big Library, and is an excellent essay with good advice for anyone exploring new ways to do things in libraries.  I can vouch for a few points that he makes, and will try to be prepared to follow the rest!

from One Big Library

PlantFacts is a resource from the Ohio State University which provides a wealth of information about plants and horticulture through a plant web search, an image database, how-to videos, a collection of over 800 FAQs, and an illustrated glossary.

from ResourceShelf

Google Translate has a new feature:  it will allow you to search foreign language pages using your language’s search terms, and translates the results on the fly.

As with all machine translation, the results will vary; the interface is well worth trying out.

from Google Librarian Central

BibMe is a great site for locating and generating bibliographic citations in MLA, APA and Chicago styles, which you can then download to your computer, or store on their server (if you sign up for a free account).

In their Help section, they provide detail as to where they get the bibligraphic information to generate the citations:

from BiblioTech Web

The folks at the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana bring you this public service announcement:

Video Contest Submission-Allen County Public Library

from blyberg.net

It’s WikiSky!

Ideal for answering the question “was that object in the western sky a star or planet?”, as well as  many other star / constellation type questions.  It also includes photographs from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), which means that you can view photographs of that same area of sky.

The Encyclopedia of Life is an ambitious new project aimed at creating an online reference for all 1.8 million species of life.  The encylopedia would have multiple user levels (from “novice” to “expert”), multimedia, and interactive means of exploring related species.

from Open Access News

LibraryThing for Libraries has launched!  Without needing to alter your existing ILS software beyond a few lines of javascript in your OPAC’s page footer, you can add the following functionality to your book catalog:

• Links to other editions and translations.
• Links to “similar books”.
• A Tag Cloud, which can do wonders to supplement our often obscure subject headings.

Features that are forthcoming include patron reviews and ratings. 

The first place to go live with this is the Danbury Library in CT.  Check out their catalog to see how well everything integrates.

How do you get this?  Well, for now at least, you just need to contact Tim or Abby at LibraryThing and take a bit of time to set things up.  If they get too swamped in requests, they may need to start charging a “setup fee”.  Their blog entry gives quite a bit of detail on what they’re doing.

from the NGC4Lib listserv

A couple things of note are happening in the realm of bibliographic information:

1. The Library of Congress will be holding their second regional meeting of the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control on Wednesday, May 9th.  This one will be held in Chicago.  Pay attention to the discussions at these meetings, and watch for the final report from the group later this year.  This group is touching upon the right issues, and the consensus for positive change is gaining momentum.  I posted about the group’s first meeting here.
2. The folks working on RDA and Dublin Core will be working together to make RDA more, well, friendly towards people who want to use library bibliographic information for various things.  This could be important, as we are falling further and further behind when it comes to being able to use the wealth of information contained in our electronic bibliographic records.  If we fall much further behind, we could become irrelevant; we are already fairly analogous to the Deep Web because our information can barely be used outside of our OPACs.  And most of our OPACs are not user-friendly.

My thoughts and ideas about these issues are becoming clearer.  I will write more on these topics later (hopefully soon).

Last summer I visited Daytona Beach in Florida. One of the many interesting places I visited was the Ponce de Leon Light Station at Mosquito Inlet.

They had an example of one of the “libraries” that were used by those who worked in the lighthouse service, which was essentially a wooden box filled with a variety of reading material. Supply boats would exchange the box for another with different books about every three months.

I thought I’d share a few of photos:

Due to some really time-consuming activities over the next two months, I had thought that it would not be possible to make time to update the LibrarySupportStaff.org blog as it should be.  However, after a couple of weeks away from it, I am convinced that much of the time saved from writing this blog does not benefit the rest of my activities.

Therefore, the struggle to find the time balance between the different areas of my life resumes, as does this blog.

My apologies for the past few weeks, and thanks for reading.

See the next entry….

The LibrarySupportStaff.org blog is on hiatus through July.