About Herbs, Botanicals, & Other Products has been launched by the Memorial Sloan-Ketterling Cancer Center.

This is a great starting point for finding definitive information on medical use of many nature-derived products and natural healing techniques, including:

• Zinc (and many other vitamins and minerals)
• Willow Bark
• Massage Therapy

The alphabetical list of their articles is a great starting point.  The articles focus on cancer treatment, but the information and resources will offer insight for a broad range of questions.

found via ResourceShelf

Love that New Book Smell?  Or do you prefer Classic Musty Smell?  Perhaps your preference leans towards Crunchy Bacon or Cats?

Smell Of Books has got your scent (and Sensibility!).

found via LISNews

Today, 12 June 2009, would have been Anne Frank’s 80th birthday.  I think that’s worth a moment of reflection, don’t you?

found via LISNews

Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest is a New York Times article about blogging, specifically about the study showing an estimated 95% of blogs have not been updated in over 4 months.

Does this signal an end to blogging?  The death of a communication tool?  Not at all.  As the article points out, much of the information conveyed through blogging can also be conveyed through other tools, such as Facebook and Twitter.

As with all tools, users will seek out the tool that best fits their task (or at least the best that fits their skill set, and will still accomplish the task).  Blogging was an early “web 2.0″ tool, and was adopted and adapted to serve many purposes.  Through a combination of better tools for specific tasks, loss of interest/time/support for the creators, and the limits of readers to follow more than a given number of blogs on a particular topic, it is no surprise that many blogs are going into hibernation.

There is also a discussion regarding the expectations of the blogger.  If one strives for fame, fortune and glory, go for it… but a majority of bloggers will not achieve that level.  I suspect that more than a few people set goals beyond what the market could provide their particular skill set and audience.

When I set out to start blogging, I simply wanted to utilize a forum that would allow me to collect thoughts and ideas that I felt were important, and to use it to organize my own interests and actions, as well as to convey what I posted to those who might be interested.  Over time the focus has expanded to include more of my thoughts and ideas (I still cringe a bit when using the word “I”), but still focuses on what is happening in the library technology world.

Blogging has been harder to maintain than I originally thought, but it has also been far more rewarding.  I am still searching for the balance between all of the activities that demand attention, but I suspect that Libology will remain in the “active” category for some time.

found via ResourceShelf

Web 3.0 Concepts Explained in Plain English is a collection of presentations, all striving to describe the next phase of web activity and development.  If all you look at is the single slide that sums up the differences between the three web generations, you will likely have a better grasp of what is coming than before.

found via Stephen’s Lighthouse

Libology is now available in an audio version.  This is made possible through a service called Odiogo, which works with content providers to enable a streamlined means of creating downloadable audio files of web sites.  What this means for readers is that you can download and listen to posts read by a machine that sounds like Stephen Hawking’s suave younger brother.

While the voice definitely is computer generated, the inflections are quite natural, and the content very understandable.  In addition, I hold any WordPress add-on to the golden rule:  thou shalt not break validation for XHTML, CSS or RSS.

Odiogo found via a post on Catalogablog

This has been a busy week; so much so that the previous post, HTML 5, Google Wave, and the Future of the Web was started last weekend, with some editing and additions each day, and them actually posted yesterday.  Note that it says “posted”.  I realized last night that I hadn’t actually finished it.  So, if you read it and wondered what the heck did HTML 5 have to do with the rest of the post, here is my wrap up:

You may be wondering why I started this post discussing HTML 5.  The newest version of HTML has been in development for years, and has had its share of controversy.  Many developers and users have spent years pushing for effective use of web standards, with an eye towards XHTML use and support, which emphasizes the separation of content and style.

HTML 5, according to some, muddies the content/style waters too much, and will make it harder to preserve the gains that continue to be made.

However, with the timely announcement of Google Wave, it seems clear that HTML 5 is a game changer with serious potential, and that it will make many things easily possible that currently require a great deal of work and computing power.

For the next few years, at least, we will be working with web pages that, at best, will be coded to two fairly different standards.  XHTML and HTML 5 will co-exist, and if web developers approach their task with an understanding of each, we can design sites around the standard that suits them best.

Perhaps the next iteration of HTML will be a unification of the standards, allowing everything to exist within one framework.  I don’t know if that is possible (and don’t know HTML 5 enough to have a grasp of the differences between them), but I for one will be very happy to have two powerful and well-created standards to work with, and look forward to seeing what lies in the future.

Amidst a great many other topics, HTML 5 has been on my mind the past couple of weeks.  It started on Tuesday, May 26th, with Kevin Yank posting HTML 5 : Now or Never? on the SitePoint blog.  He was floating the question of whether or not they should look into publishing a book on HTML 5 now, or if they need to wait until it matures enough for developers to use with confidence.  If you read his post, and especially if you look over the comments, you will see that there is a full range of opinions (including that HTML 5 should never be implemented) by developers about the topic.

This remained a relatively minor, background issue until two days later, Thursday, May 28th.  On that day Google announce the existence of a new project called Google Wave.  My initial thought was that Google was simply creating their version of a FaceBook/Twitter/Blogging style platform.  The more I looked, the more I realized that this was much different, and much more important, than a differently branded service.  Wave is something that has the potential to change many, many aspects of how we use the internet.

What is Google Wave?  I have spent a good part of last week trying to distill it into a couple of paragraphs, and am not having much success.  The overall essence of it is something that I haven’t yet wrapped my head around, but here are a few aspects of it that will hopefully illustrate some of it:

It is a communication platform that allows users to send, receive, and use a variety of information (think communications like e-mails, IM, tweets, feeds, etc.) in a way that offers greater control, speed, and usability.  Messaging becomes “real-time”, with your keystrokes being sent live to the person you are communcating with (unless you select to hold the message until you are ready).  The effect of this is that it becomes possible to hold a real-time conversation with others utilizing a variety of communication forms simultaneously.  You can incorporate text, images, documents, and other digital formats into the conversation in a free-flowing manner that saves time, effort and reduces confusion.

To quote from the introduction to an interview, “Email is asynchronous conversation. Instant messaging, by contrast, is synchronous. Wave is both.“  Possibly the best general description of Wave could be that it lets users and groups easily communicate and collaborate in one interface, using whatever editing/communication/collaboration techniques fit the task at hand.  Think of it as a collaboration mash-up tool.

A few places to find further info:

• Went Walkabout : Brought Back Google Wave. (Google Blog)
• Google Wave Drips with Ambition. (TechCrunch)
• Video Interview with the Google Wave Founders (TechCrunch)
• Live with the Google Wave Creators (TechCrunch)
• Sergey Brin : Google Wave Will Set a New Benchmark for Interactivity (TechCrunch)
• Google I/O A Real Eye-Opener (SitePoint)

Watch for the technological shift from these developments.  This will not only give us new and improved tools to perform tasks and work together (think of the possibilities for online meetings and conferencing), but will set standards for what will be expected from web presences.  Our OPACS may have some new goals to aim for.

Note added later:  I have had a busy week, and forgot to actually address the relationship between HTML 5 and Google Wave.  I do so in another post, Why HTML 5.  Apologies for not getting it right the first time!

Got an update from Linda Hulbert via SERIALST regarding their issues with Wiley (which I posted on Libology last week).  Wiley demonstrated that they could be flexible, and in doing so has allowed a library to continue to provide their content, and allows them to continue to be the company providing content.  This is a win-win situation, in which everyone makes adjustments in a way that ultimately benefits all involved:

I am happy to report that Wiley got back to me directly the day after the original post. The other happy news is that St. Thomas will be treated as a single site permitting us to sign the BAL license (Basic Access License) and not be required to use the EAL (Enhanced Access License).

We have looked at the language of both licenses closely to see what best serves the University of St. Thomas. We are grateful for the opportunity to choose rather than be locked into a kind of license because of a multi-site designation. I wish that everyone had the choice.

It appears to us that the BAL will meet all of our needs. We’ve read the license, the EBSCO license detail and looked at the Wiley FAQ. The only difference we can tell is that in the BAL, ILL is not explicit, but it is inferred and electronic course-packs are not explicit but they are also inferred. More than silent on the matter, the language permits the activities without so naming them.

We worried about two more areas: access in perpetuity for the content purchased (to obviate the need for purchasing paper, too) and usage data. The license, the FAQ and EBSCO’s review all indicate that we have access in perpetuity to subscribed data either by their supplying archival copy or continued access online. I would imagine, although it is not stated, that as long as we have any online Wiley content we will have access to purchased content online. While we subscribe we have access back to 1997, if available. I would not expect them to continue access to unpurchased content after cancellation.

Usage data: This is a change. At one point the EAL was required for usage data but that is no longer true. Both the FAQ and the license indicate that BAL license users will have usage data.

The benefits they list at their FAQ for all subscribers: Free access to Counter-compliant usage data; unlimited concurrent users, free course-pack and walk-in user access; content back to 1997 where available and perpetual access to content back to 1997.

We have a few things to negotiate with Wiley – our institution prefers licenses to be silent on governing law if we can’t have Minnesota and we would like to have a co-signed license. But in all the important ways, we are thrilled with the BAL.

So, these are our experiences. This is all good for UST.

I thought I would share some of the comments I got back from colleagues from various lists. Because some were directed just to me, I am going to have them all be anonymous.

Overall, what I see is that Wiley has replaced Elsevier as the least valued ‘partner’ in the scholarly communication chain. Because we have a choice, we are comfortable doing business with Wiley.

Her e-mail, with comments from her colleagues, can be found at the SERIALST Archive.

OnlineColleges.net has a post listing their Top 10 Commencement Speeches for Tech Lovers, containing descriptions and links to speeches given by, among others,  Bill Gates (Microsoft), Steve Jobs (Apple), Larry Page (Google), Eric Schmidt (Google), Melissa Mayer (Google), and Ray and Tom Magliozzi (Car Talk on NPR).

thanks to Kelly Sonora for the e-mail tip!

– additional comment:  Kelly Sonora is fictional; the person most directly responsible for the content of the above linked post is Jessica Merritt.  This isn’t a problem, the blog is valid and the information is worthy of our time; just wanted make the credit more accurate….

The National Library of Australia has launched the beta of their new search interface, SBDS Prototype (SBDS stands for Single Business Discovery Service, I think), and the search experience is not only better than any other library-related search I have used, it is faster than most of them as well!

Other reactions:

• Roy Tennant at LibraryJournal.comt
• Roy Tennant at HangingTogether.org
• Lorcan Demsey (1)
• Lorcan Demsey (2)

This is an excellent example of what is possible today, and what we should all strive for in our search interfaces.  There is such a diversity of resources, and unifying these into a usable and fast single-search service is a credit to the developers at the National Library of Australia.

A post on the SERIALST list yesterday by Linda Hulbert, Associate Director of Collection Management and Services at the O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library in St. Paul, Minnesota details one library’s response to contractual conditions being imposed by Wiley.  I found it interesting because it highlights the challenges facing not only libraries, but content providers, and the perils of inflexibility.

The entire post can be found on the SERIALST Archive; I am including a large part of it in this post:

Another company is looking at the Elsevier model and using it. Unfortunately, unlike Elsevier where a library might get more content than they could pay for and unlike Elsevier which does not require that a library participate, Wiley is requiring all multi-site libraries to have a no-cancellation, minimum life time spend. Add insult to injury, we are not a multi-site library by any other vendor’s definition! But Wiley has designated us so. Without recourse.

So, I am sending this letter to many people at Wiley and in the library community. Please, help resist these kinds of publisher practices.

*****
I am writing to you today in your capacity as someone concerned with [higher education, customer service] at John Wiley and Sons.

Wiley provides an EAL license which has three major features: two year agreement, a guaranteed minimum spend (no cancellations without adding titles) (ala Elsevier) and, for that ‘lock-in,’ libraries will have a cap on the annual inflationary increases. Wiley requires multi-site libraries – which they have declared we are – enter into an EAL license for electronic journal content.

We have two problems with this rigid requirement:

1. Wiley is now treating my university as a multi-campus university. Let me assure you that all other vendors treat us a single site because, while we have libraries in Minneapolis and St. Paul, we have a single IP address, single president, and a single Accounts Payable for all campuses (including Rome which has 4 seminarians studying abroad!).

2. The EAL license is required for all online journal content we purchase from Wiley/Blackwell in 2010. Currently, our online-only spend is about $3,000, our print +online is over $33,000, and our total spend is about $66,000 for journal content with Wiley. What does that mean for the University of St. Thomas? We would not be able to cancel – i.e. lower our ‘current’ spend. That means that as tuition dollars dry up, as the university’s contribution to the libraries shrink, we cannot cancel titles in the Wiley contract. It’s ironic that while we would be locked into a multi-year contract during these incredibly unpredictable and difficult financial times, Wiley could change their title list at will – buying or selling titles as the market dictates.

We have spoken with your representative, Diane Conroy, and there are no alternatives IF we want online journal content from Wiley. She is adamant.

Hence, our only option is to cancel all of our online content. I assume that is not Wiley’s goal but the only one we see available to us since we cannot agree to a multi-year, dollar spend commitment. We will cancel what we can – I can see about $30,000 in cancellations (27 titles) without too much pain. We will purchase print-only in the cases where we have had print +online and we will cancel our online-only and move back to print-only. As we all know, even good content that is print-only will become marginalized by our users and as it does, we’ll easily be able to justify canceling the remaining print titles. And, of course, we will not be purchasing new journal content from Wiley.

When September comes, if we have no agreement with Wiley for 2010 permitting cancellation and permitting single year subscriptions, we will have to take these draconian steps.

I will be sharing this letter with the Wiley board of directors, others in Wiley management, the serials community, the licensing community and other colleagues in the library community.

Thank you for your attention.

We in the library community need to be prepared to bend, but not to break.  If a vendor isn’t meeting us halfway, then we need to consider walking away.  There is always more than one way to achieve our mission, and we have to have that in mind and act accordingly. I hope Wiley takes notice of this library’s action, and looks to see how it can best serve both their customers, as well as their company’s, needs.

Open Jurist is a great add-on to the free case law resources I wrote about a few days ago.  Consisting of over 600,000 opinions from the federal court system, including the United States Supreme Court and the Federal Appellate Courts.  This looks to be a great resource for research into federal court cases.

One minor negative:  one of the first searches I performed, Bush v. Gore (the Supreme Court decision regarding the 2000 presidential election) didn’t work as it should have because the case is listed as “George Bushs v. Albert Gore“.  The “s” at the end of the word kept it from the first page of results.  I initially thought it might have referred to the plurality of petitioners (“et al.”), but a Google search actually produces no results when the “s” is included.  I looked for a way to notify those who run the site, but only found an e-mail address that was to be used “if you have access to more cases or know where we can get more of them”.  Any website meant to offer a service should have (at least) a method for general contact.

(Note:  see comment regarding the “one minor negative” paragraph!)

found via ResourceShelf

The Center for Social Media at American University’s School of Communication has a PDF guide available for download titled Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video.

To both illustrate and promote the practices, they have just released a video called Remix Culture : Fair Use is Your Friend.

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Blip.tv video.

found via Lessig 2.0

Feedmil is a search engine for RSS feeds.  It does this specific task very, very well.  Search for feeds relating to any keywords you wish, and modify your results using a set of slides that emphasize/de-emphasize words that show up in your results.

I wish they had a more detailed “about” page, especially information on how they determine popularity, authority, quality, and relevance.

found via RSS4Lib

Common Chemistry is a resource from Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) which allows one to search for chemical information using a variety of search terms, whether the terms be common names (aspirin, table salt), basic chemical names (acetylsalicylic acid, sodium chloride), or even the official CAS registration number (50-78-2, 7647-14-5).

Although this does not search the entire CAS database, it is an excellent starting point for most of the chemical information questions posed students and the general public.

Note the link to the Wikipedia entry (just above the disclaimer) for many, but not all, results; not many “authoritative” resources are confident enough in their users to connect them with resources developed and maintained by the crowd.

found via ResourceShelf

The Legal Technology blog on the Law.com website recently listed ten resources for free case law, detailing their respective strengths:

Get Your Free Case Law on the Web (link updated 2 Dec 2009)

found via ResourceShelf, crediting Law Librarian Blog

Eric Shonfeld at TechCrunch writes:

“Once again, the Internet is shifting before our eyes. Information is increasingly being distributed and presented in real-time streams instead of dedicated Web pages. The shift is palpable, even if it is only in its early stages.”

Twitter.  RSS.  Facebook.  Digg.  You-Name-It-Feed.  It is becoming apparent that this is the next big shift in internet usage, and, as with the previous shifts, it is hard to guess what the effects will be, and who will be affected.

And this, like previous shifts, will not supplant previous internet use trends.  HTML, or some form of it, will still be very dominant.  Blogs and Wikis will continue to exist, and will be useful tools for certain types of communication and interaction.  Integration will continue to be the norm, with the “now” infusing itself throughout.  How will this change be considered dramatic?

“Traffic occurs in bursts, depending on what people are paying attention to at that second across a variety of services. Someone might notice an obscure blog post on Twitter, where it starts spreading, then it moves to FriendFeed and Facebook and desktop stream readers such as Tweetdeck or Seesmic desktop and before you know it, a hundred thousand people are reading that article. The stream creates a different form of syndication which cannot be licensed and cannot be controlled.”

This “cannot be licensed and cannot be controlled.”  Think about this.  How much of your web presence is based on control:  control of layout, content, contributors, and most of all, control over the rate at which change occurs?   For a library web site, how much of this control is able to be ceded before the concept of a library web site itself changes, without controls?

As with many future technology issues, now is the time to begin thinking, discussing, understanding all of this.  We cannot begin the process of deciding or planning, because none of us can predict how this will play out.  What will we have in place to deal with this, to anticipate this, to harness this?  One benefit of this process will be the inevitable inspiration that some will have about the potential of streams; a future must-have library web site technology might come from this.

Start thinking!

Cory Doctorow has an interesting take on the differing attitude of copyright between those who wish to wish to honor a creative work and those who wish to diminish it.  An excerpt:

“The upshot of this is that you’re on much more solid ground if you want to quote or otherwise reference a work for the purposes of rubbishing it than if you are doing so to celebrate it. This is one of the most perverse elements of copyright law: the reality that loving something doesn’t confer any right to make it a part of your creative life.”

An added bonus is a reference to a Firefly-based fan fiction that I hadn’t encountered before, titled My Own Kind of Freedom.

found via Library Link of the Day (16 May 2009)

Wolfram|Alpha is a new type of internet resource that has just gone “live”.  Many are calling it a new type of “search engine”, which it technically is, but it isn’t a search engine in the way we are used to envisioning one.  Others are calling it an “answer engine”, which isn’t a bad description.  Wolfram takes the user’s query and builds a response from a variety of resources that resembles what one might get from an almanac or or encyclopedic resource.  Wolfram’s own “about” page avoids any particular label.

Right now it has a relatively limited set of resources.  It does well with towns, states, people, movies, word definitions and many scientific questions in the areas of mathematics and chemistry (which is understandable considering that it was built using Mathematica as the foundation.  It doesn’t do well with music, books, television shows, and abstract concepts.  Much of this has to do with the data sets and methodology that is in place, and I expect to see much greater depth and breadth represented as time goes on.

I have spent a bit of time last night and this afternoon playing with it, and am fairly impressed.  Try a few queries, and be sure to view the “Source Information” link at the bottom of the results.  This provides a fairly generic listing of the resources used for that type of query.  Not all of the sources were necessarily used for your particluar query, but were the sources from which the data was extracted.  One can see that with the addition of additional resources, Wolfram could become powerful first step for research.

Some sample queries:

• DeKalb, Illinois
• World According to Garp (movie)
• World According to Garp (novel) [note that this one fails... no resources yet for literature]
• Heaviest Gas Element [many variations of this don't work, an example of syntax, I suppose]

and it doesn’t know quite how to handle leading articles, either:

• The World According to Garp (movie)

This is going to be a great reference; it needs time to mature and for additional data sets to be included.  This is certainly one place where the use of library cataloging information would be very, very beneficial.  Imagine being able to connect the dots between books, authors, publication dates, settings/locales, etc. and other data sets.

There are many sources of data that are mostly silos waiting to be tapped, Infochimps.org being one example.  How quickly and effectively they are able to incorporate useful data will partly determine how successful this resource becomes.  Improving their context recognition (i.e. figuring out what a person wants to know based on their typed input) is the other, perhaps harder, challenge.

Other sources of commentary and information:

• Resource Shelf’s Brief Users Guide to Wolfram
• Quizzing the World’s First Answer Engine
• MetaFilter’s entry, and resulting discussion/commentary
• Wikipedia’s Wolfram Alpha entry

In closing, I like their nod to 2001, A Space Odyssey in their load exceeded error screen:

I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that...