Libology Blog

(Note regarding this post:  When you read this post, be sure to read the comments as well.  I did not state my case as well as I should, and end up sounding as though I don’t feel that LibGuides has as much value for libraries as they obviously do.) 

I don’t normally post “negative” about web sites or services; if I am not impressed by something being offered, I simply don’t blog about it. However, I have noticed a really interesting Library 2.0-related offering, and feel that it should be mentioned here.

LibGuides is a truly interesting and useful product. It offers a way for a library to implement many Web 2.0 tools via a service that is remotely hosted and configured, with content and features that you select.

It looks great, in many ways. They include tools for Facebook integration (great for academic libraries), showing RSS feeds on LibGuide pages, and built in instant messaging (IM) capabilities.

Why am I not happy with this offering? Two reasons.

Reason one is their pricing model. According to their FAQ page, their “annual license fee ranges from $899 to $2,499″. This, to me, is packaging Library 2.0 like a database subscription. True, they have done some excellent work in setting up page templates and integrating tools, but why should a library spend that amount of money to rent those services?

Let me provide an example. This blog is run on a hosted web server. The annual fee for this server is less than $50. This provides 1 GB of disk space, plus quite a few built-in tools such as a MySQL database, full e-mail management including listservs, site statistics, and a comfortable amount of site traffic. I have run several different websites on this company’s servers, and have been happy with their service.

What have I run on these sites? Standard web sites, wikis, a blog, a content management system (CMS), listservs, discussion forums, and custom search pages. There are only two things that I have wanted to install that I haven’t been able to, based on their security settings: I can’t host a WebDAV calendar (for shared group calendar software), and cannot install a library automation system, like Koha or Evergreen (so I have to play with Evergreen using a virtual server on my home computer).

Most Web 2.0 software has open source options available. This means that I can select a blog software, download it, install it to the web server, configure it, and there it is. Is this easy to do? Yes and no. Configuration, especially the database settings, can be fairly detailed. WordPress has very good instructions, and if you are comfortable with copying files from one place to another, and can follow a written guide you won’t have much trouble getting a blog up and running.

Wiki? Same type of installation. Want to run a listserv? Don’t need to install anything, just go to the sites control panel and set it up. What I am trying to say is that for $50, time, and some effort, your library can create a web presence that is just as rich as what is being offered via LibGuide.

Reason two, for those of you who are still with me, is their license agreement (Pdf). You pay them, they provide the service on their servers for one year. They can change anything about the agreement, and all they have to do to make you comply is notify you. You own your own data, and they will provide it to you within 30 days of cancellation, if you ask.

These are pretty standard clauses for many services and software. It is actually quite mild compared to some. It still doesn’t sit well with me that open and interactive services are packaged and controlled like this.

Sure, you could try them out for a year, decide not to renew, and only have an xml file with your content and data to show for it. Or you could get a hosted site, start a blog and a wiki (or a CMS with both built in) and build your site from scratch, adding content here and there, adding new programs and technologies as you go.

Even if you hire someone as a consultant to do the installation and initial training (find people in your area who do this, or want to learn… try contacting web design instructors at your local community college for potential contacts), you can do a great deal in a relatively short time span. Even if you spent $500 for someone (and you shouldn’t even need to go that high), once set up the software and technology is yours for just the annual web hosting fee. Just be sure to learn as much as you can about how everything works, and learning what your site’s potential can be.

And after all of this, if you don’t want the hassle or cost of the hosted web service, you can still do many Library 2.0 functions through other sites. Blogs are available simply by registering at Wordpress or Bloglines. Similar options exist for IM. You can find hosted wiki and CMS sites, but these are mostly paid solutions.

I strongly suggest that every library examine their options for the range of 2.0 technology, and adopt those which will best fit your environment. It doesn’t need to cost much; it doesn’t need a limiting license agreement; it does need to give you the flexibility and the power to connect your services with your customers.

And if you want to see a positive review of LibGuides, which highlights the great points of the site, check out BiblioTech Web

The 2008 Open Access Calendar (Pdf), created by Alma Swan (her blog is here), is available for download.  Although the calendar is not set in the familiar 7×4 (or 5) grid, it looks fantastic.  If there is enough interest, they may do a print run of the calendars at about $16 per copy.

found on Open Access News  

isbndb.com is one of several websites that allow you to search for books by isbn, as well as the usual title/author/keyword searching. 

Give it a try:  grab a nearby book (if you are like me, there are quite a few nearby, aren’t there?) and run a few searches.  What you can get is a summary of the book’s content, links to online retailers, and even a general Dewey and LC classification.  No MARC records, unfortunately….

I have used ISBN.nu for several years, and one thing it offers that this new site doesn’t seem to is links to other versions of the book.  I am likely to use both of these sites when searching for book information in the future.

from Karen Coyle, via the OpenLibrary listserv

GRDDL, a new recommendation from the W3C, is short for “Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages”, a means by which software can extract semantic information from a variety of web pages.

In other words, rather than having to rely on the code (table structure, metadata, microformats, etc.) used by whoever created the page, GRDDL will attempt to align the content it finds with other existing data structures, and turns this into RDF. The content can then be compared and used with content from other sources.

For perhaps the best means of understanding how this can change the way we find and use information, check out the Scenarios that the W3C give as examples for how this could be used (scroll down to the various “Use Cases”).

I am a big fan of Microformats, and I see this a means to create a microformat checker service, similar to how web page creators can check their html/xhtml/css code. It would be neat to be able to run one’s pages against this in order to find out how best to structure and mark up the information contained within.

found on Catalogablog

This seems to be fresh news, in that I can only find it on two sites:  The New York Times is opening their web content to everyone, eliminating the subscription model that has existed for years.

Not a bad piece of news…

The other location I found this on was the Metafilter blog

The Streetwise (pdf) column in the September 2007 issue of Strategic Finance contains a summary of a report titled “The Informal Organization”.

The focus of the report is that formal management structures are not how organizations actually work.  Informal organization, self organizing groups with the goal of getting a particular task completed, is the key to success.

The organizations with the highest success will be those who recognize and encourage informal organization, and encourage feedback and communcation among and between all levels of the management structure.

The complete report is available by mail at no charge by sending an e-mail to Alexandra Corriveau ( Alexandra@sommerfield.com ).  I have ordered my copy, and I suspect it will be a beneficial read.

Writing at Five Miles per Hour is a post by the always interesting Karen G. Schneider. Reading it makes me feel as though I have been given a glimpse at a piece of my future.

Let me explain: in writing, as with any project, finding the time, energy, and correct frame of mind is all-important. I have moments, even days, where all three come together and I am, as I like to say, Productive.

However, some days, even weeks, just won’t give the time that is needed for proper writing. On top of that, one needs to have enough energy left over from the other demands of the day. And finally, the phrase that I often use for the frame of mind is “the ability to wrap my brain around” whatever I am creating.

Hitting that trifecta is tough unless one’s environment can be adjusted. I have been working on making such an environment for myself over the past year. It hasn’t happened more often than it has, but it is getting better. Oftentimes there are things left undone in other areas (”Hey… there’s a floor under this stuff!”) and there always seems to be stress. I understand why so many books are dedicated to significant others… if they don’t help make the environment happen, the environment oftentimes won’t.

And so the book gets written slowly but surely, and blog entries continue to be posted. And it is good to know that other people struggle to make this work, as well.

Office Software Shootout is an article/post on Linux.com that compares the latest versions of OpenOffice.org Writer (2.3) and MS Office Word (2007) across several categories.

The result? Each program has strengths and weaknesses, but the reviewer concludes that OpenOffice.org comes out ahead.

My take on the results: I have not used either of the versions reviewed (I use OO.org 2.2.1 at home and via a flash drive Portable Apps package, and MS Office 2003 at work), but prefer OO.org for most tasks. Access still clearly beats out Base, but Base is good enough that I see that changing within a couple of upgrades.

The best part: OO.org is free. Download it, install it, and do whatever you need. Want to put it on all of your public access machines? Go ahead, there’s no charge. Staff machines? Same thing. Give it away to your patrons? Public relations!

The document converters work fine 99.9% of the time (letting you open, edit and save .doc and .xls files) and the learning curve isn’t too bad (especially considering that Microsoft changed many things in Office 2007, giving that program a similar learning curve). If you decide that you don’t like it, then go ahead and purchase another product.

Unshelved, the web comic based in the fictional Mallville Public Library, just published its 2,000th comic!

By the way, we all know the comic isn’t fiction, don’t we?  They have cameras and microphones hidden somewhere in each of our libraries.  You just can’t make this stuff up….

Oncology by OncologyStat is an experiement by Elsevier to see if they can provide access to scholarly journals for free using an ad-based revenue formula.  In addition, they offer many resources for medical staff, patients, and families.

The press release stresses that their target audience is “US oncologists, hematologists, oncology nurses, and all other healthcare professionals involved in the treatment, care and diagnosis of patients with cancer”, but when you go through the registration process it is clear that students, Librarians, and even the general public are able to avail themselves of this service.

If your library serves those who need current scholarly information for oncology, you have another good resource to add to your collection!

found on Open Access News

I find myself thinking about copyright and fair use more often lately. As our use of technology to disseminate and retrieve information grows, the limits and freedoms of copyright and fair use, very intertwined, become less and less defined.

Georgia Harper’s guest blogger, Carlos Ovalle, writing for the Collecanea blog, has a post titled The Rhetoric of Fair Use. She discusses the lack of definite understanding, even in legal circles, of what fair use actually is. Is it an individual right when using copyrighted material? Is it a defense against charges of infringement? Is it both? What does it mean for it to be either, or both, of these?

She also links to a C|net column by Patrick Ross, Executive Director of Copyright Alliance, titled Fair Use is Not A Consumer Right. Much of his argument, to me at least, seems to be along the lines of “if major league baseball’s copyright statement were enforced, we wouldn’t be able to discuss Barry Bonds around the water cooler”, but since people aren’t charged with infringement for doing so, then things aren’t out of whack.

What do we do? We know that some claimed restrictions are overstated. We know that there is a great deal of copyright infringement, especially on the internet. We even suspect that, in today’s legal climate, that if public libraries didn’t currently exist that it would be a major copyright battle to create an institution dedicated to freely allowing people to borrow copyrighted materials.

We, and this includes me, need to learn more, to better understand what copyright is, and what fair use is. It is one of the best tools we have for learning and sharing what we learn.

We need to teach others how to properly respect copyright, including insisting on and taking advantage of fair use.

Think of it as free speech, but supported by someone else’s creation. This may sound like we are users, but ideas were meant to be shared. That is the only way they can grow into the world-changing paradigms they all have the potential to become.

Take a few minutes and re-watch (or watch for the first time, if you haven’t seen it yet) The Machine is Us/ing Us. Watch for the reference to copyright near the end. Understand that we do need to rethink what copyright means and how we will use it. And then we need to talk about it. Ask questions. Understand that even the really smart copyright lawyers don’t know where all of this will go, or where it should go. Understand that we need to work on this as a group, a very large group.

LibWorm is a fantastic resource for those who are interested in libraries and blogs.  It is a search engine for library-related blog content, drawn from 1400 RSS feeds.

The following links were posted to the Web4Lib listserv by S.Sripriya, a librarian for a dental college in Bangalore.  There are quite a few good links, many of them Indian-related, and I thought it was worth it to just post the whole shebang: 

Ohio Public Library Web Sites Information on this table has been supplied to the State Library of Ohio by Ohio public libraries.  http://winslo.state.oh.us/publib/libtable.html

Library of Congress : State Library Web Listing  http://www.publiclibraries.com/state_library.htm

Browse Lists of Canadian Library Web Sites and Catalogues  http://www.collectionscanada.ca/gateway/s22-200-e.html

Great Web  Sites for Kids (ALA)  http://www.ala.org/gwstemplate.cfm?section=greatwebsites&template=/cfapps/gws/displaysection.cfm&sec=22

Libweb currently lists over 7700 pages from libraries in 145 countries.  A global directory of library home pages.  http://lists.webjunction.org/libweb/

Libdex - Index to 18,000 Libraries.  World index of library sites with over 18000 database entries. Includes a list of libraries by catalog vendor.  http://www.libdex.com/

Leeds University Library  Sites  http://www.leeds.ac.uk/library/sites/

State Library Web Sites  http://dpi.state.wi.us/pld/statelib.html

Wisconsin Public  Library Websites  http://dpi.state.wi.us/pld/wis_lib.html

LibrarySpot.com, a free virtual library resource center for educators and students, librarians and their patrons, families, businesses and just about anyone exploring the Web for valuable research information.  http://www.libraryspot.com/

Virginia Public Library Web Sites  http://www.lva.lib.va.us/whoweare/directories/valib/libweb.asp

A to Z List of Useful Reference Sources  http://www.lib.utexas.edu/refsites/

Indian library websites  http://www.india-newsbehindnews.com/b-library.html , http://www.indiaedu.com/libraries/

NATIONAL LIBRARY WEBSITES  http://www.library.uq.edu.au/natlibs/websites.html , http://www.nlindia.org/collection.html

World Wide Web Virtual Library Sites  http://www.cwis.org/wwwvl/indig-vl.html

The best online library of references & facts  http://www.sandarbha.com/

Important Reference Sites  http://library.puchd.ac.in/ors.html

Library of Congress Office, New Delhi,  India … Other South Asian Materials Web Sites.  http://www.loc.gov/acq/ovop/delhi/

Links to the latest news in the library and information science world  http://in.dir.yahoo.com/Reference/Libraries/Library_and_Information_Science/

Some Useful Resources for Library and Information Professionals in India  http://www.ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/raja/lib-info-sources.htm

National Library of France  http://www.france-in-india.org/en/article.php3?id_article=929

American Centre Libraries in India - website of the USIS library network in India  http://www.india-newsbehindnews.com/b-library.html , http://americanlibrary.in.library.net , http://www.search4i.com/14806/Directory/American+Centre+Libraries+in+India.aspx

Important Reference Sites  http://library.puchd.ac.in/ors.html 

Indian Libraries  Websites Directory  http://www.dinesh.com/India/Arts%10Entertainment/Libraries/

The Library of Congress Office, New Delhi  http://www.loc.gov/acq/ovop/delhi/

Worldwide Web Links  http://muscat.bl.uk/collections/orientalwww.html

Library Networks - India  http://www.information-professional.netfirms.com/directory/lanind.htm

Libraries in India  http://www.findouter.com/Asia/India/Reference/Libraries , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Libraries_in_India

American Information  Resource Centers in India  http://www.searchindia.com/search/Education/Libraries/index.shtml