Libology Blog

The debate about OCLC’s revision of their Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records is heating up.  The core issue appears to be the licensing of WorldCat records and the limitations imposed, namely that “data extracted from a WorldCat Record” cannot be used in anything that “substantially replicates the function, purpose, and/or size of WorldCat”.

Aaron Swartz, with the Open Library project, has posted a really interesting overview of OCLC, although his intro suggests that he feels that the 800 pound gorilla comparison is closer to the mark.  He followed up with quotes from and comments about Karen Calhoun’s post to OCLC members.  He did not have a link to Karen’s post, and I wasn’t able to locate it via a search.

There is a podcast on Panlibus of Karen Calhoun and Roy Tennant discussing the policy.  I haven’t had a chance to listen yet.

Karen did post comments on November 4th on OCLC’s Metalogue blog.  Read the comments, especially Jonathan Rochkind’s (Nov 5, 1:41 p.m.); then check out his own blog posts on the topic (I would link to individual posts, but there are quite a few, and they are all worth reading — scroll back to November 3rd and read forward).

I am still fairly certain that OCLC is taking on the tiger’s role:  territorial and instinctive.  The more thought I give to it, however, the stronger the argument for opening the records and information becomes:  the data doesn’t belong to anyone (and if it did, it would belong to the libraries that created it in the first place) and OCLC is playing a losing game if it insists on full ownership and control.

The Tech Static is, as stated on the site, “Your collection development resource for technology titles”.

They are using a blog to house reviews of technology books and resources, and are planning to publish monthly.  It looks as though they will become an excellent resource not only for collection development, but for personal selections as well.  I am looking forward to their reviews!

from Librarian.net

100 Free Open Courseware Classes About Open Source Everything is a post on the BSchool.com Blog.  Their list is quite comprehensive, with something for just about anyone.

In addition, the blog has a thing for “100 Free…” lists, from resource for doing business in China, to Ivy League business courses.  They just started up last month, but I think this might be one of those resources that will provide answers for questions beyond the obvious business school related information.

found via an e-mail from Kelly Sonora (affiliated with BSchool.com blog)

Walt Crawford has posted his list of 607 library-related blogs (this one included).  This is as definitive and current a list as one is likely to find, and Walt has done an excellent job compiling and checking the links.

If you cannot get your fill of library blogging from this source, then you are more hard core than I.

found via Walt at Random (also included)

Google Books can now be embedded into a web page in a similar way that a YouTube video is able to be embedded.

Besides the “nifty cool” aspect of this, I can see one element of this that should make anyone involved with library web pages interested:   what a wonderous add-on to an OPAC!  No longer would we be limited to a link to the book in Google, but our users can potentially browse through a book during their search!  Examples here and here.

According to the Embedded Viewer API Developers Guide, identifiers for the books can be ISBN, OCLC, LCCN, and Book Search Volume numbers, or the Google Book Search URL for one-off uses.

Here is an example for a particular item being presented in WordPress. Do a search for “Wilbur Wright” to see why I chose it:

via LISNews and Technology Bites for WP solution

Walt Crawford (”The Library Voice of the Radical Middle”) has created a list of nearly 600 library-related blogs.  It is interesting to scan the list and marvel at how many are unknown to me.  I suspect that I could spend hours simply browsing through them…

Libology is in there, btw (kudos for being current!).

thanks to LISNews

Great post over at RSS4Lib about placing Creative Commons licensing information into your RSS feed.  This is a fantastic idea because the entire purpose of RSS is to let others have control over how they receive your content.  This allows you to convey your wishes for how people can use what you create within the medium itself.

This reminded me to update the footer information for this blog (look at the bottom of the page if you are viewing this on the Libology web site)

found via Catalogablog

Not the death of this blog, but of the ending of The Patry Copyright Blog, which has been consistently informative, educational, and timely.  I truly hope that William Patry returns to blogging at some point, as I can only guess at the amount and quality of information that I won’t gain from him in the meantime.

On a “making lemonade out of lemons” note, he is “creating a file with most of the posts (weeding out really trivial one)” and offering it up to all who ask.  I have responded, and am planning to host the file on Libology.com.  Other people have indicated their interest, as well, so it is likely that his blog will be accessible in some form.  How the posts will be presented on Libology remains to be seen (I don’t even know what format the file will be)… I hope to present them in some way that makes them more easily accessed and used.

In the time it has taken to transfer the domain, I have been thinking about the blog, especially what its focus is and will likely be.

I am, as of three minutes ago, changing the name of the blog from “LibrarySupportStaff.org” to “Libology Blog” and am adding another layer of discontinuity to what was meant to be a behind-the-scenes change of hosting services. It makes sense, however, to do this now instead of later, and make July 2008 the “month the blog went kabloee! and everything changed”.

A major focus of this blog, and my interest, will be library support staff and how they can improve library services.  The blog is more than that, however, which is why I think the name change is ultimately a positive thing.

There is a lot I have to do to clean up the blog, the main being updating the links that point to other posts.  Until then, please bear with our mess.

One of my plug-ins has caused instability in the database structure of the blog when it froze during a re-indexing of data… I have attempted to fix it (attempted to re-re-index, removed plugin, etc.) but am still having troubles.  I think it is time to see if the backup plug-in does what it is supposed to do.

If you are seeing this message, it means I haven’t fixed it yet (since this wasn’t part of the backup).

Oh, and by the way, this is a great reminder of the idea of backing up often.  I had backed up the entire database just before running the re-indexer doohickey.  I should have all the posts when restored.

Until then, sorry for things not working well….

Read Lori Ayre’s blog post at TechEssence to find out what she means by “Learned Helplessness”. I think she hits the nail on the head, then drives it home. I will be watching her future posts….

After more than a year, there has been a bit of activity at the Google Librarian Central site, though not what was hoped for when I heard that they were preparing an update.

What they announced in a post titled “Endless Summer” was that they were closing down the Librarian Central Blog and communicating via their newsletter. Comments and suggestions will be handled by a web form submission.

Ouch! Double-Ouch!! This is better than the dead silence of the past year, but just barely. We have been moved back in time, relegated to Web 1.0.

They could have kept the blog alive by posting the individual newsletter items one-by-one. They could have used the blog for items posted or discussed elsewhere, but posted there because of their interest to libraries. They could have opened things up a bit and asked for volunteers to coordinate topics and ideas for better incorporating Google into libraries. Any of these would have been about the same amount of work, and would have preserved or improved the dynamic and social aspects of the site. They backed away instead.

We are left to wonder why.

100 Unbelievably Useful Reference Sites You’ve Never Heard Of is the title of a post on the TeachingTips blog. And yes, there are a lot of interesting and useful links to be found (though I suspect you may recall hearing about a few of them before…)

found via LISNews

In February, I wrote about the shootings at Northern Illinois University, which happened about 100 yards away from a former co-worker (and current friend). I stressed that until something like this happens in your community, it seems remote and somehow not fully real. However, we must strive to remember that these things happen in real communities, to real people, and that individuals, organizations and institutions (such as libraries) can do much to be better prepared for tragedy.

Jessamyn at Librarian.net writes about a horrific murder which indirectly involved the local public library, and how they have reacted. As you read her post, and the news articles she links to, ask yourself what your library or organization can do now to be prepared for not only this type of event, or a shooting, or a book challenge, but what you can do to simply be prepared.

Once you have thought about it, discuss it with your co-workers and community members. Solicit ideas. Take the best ideas and put them into action. You may never need this, but if the unthinkable happens you will be in far better shape than if the only response is “we never imagined it could happen here!”

Do it this time, starting today… because you cannot predict where, or in what form, the next horrific event will occur. At worst, you will be prepared for something that may not happen; at best you may save lives.

Marketing Your Library is a blog chock full of ideas, lists, and links for marketing, you know, your library!

from LISNews

An interesting situation is brewing over at the TechCrunch blog.  Michael Arrington, upset over the Associated Press going after bloggers who quote from AP stories, has argued that the AP is not taking Fair Use into consideration and has declared that he will not report on stories distributed by AP.

Extreme?  Not if you take into consideration the APs rate schedule for online quoting of their articles.  If your quote of an AP source contains just five words, you are supposed to pay them $12.50!  I doubt that there are many AP articles short enough to make a five word quote not fall into Fair Use (plus, I assume under this fee schedule that quoting just four words is free).

The new twist is that an AP article about the controversy contains a 22-word quote from the TechCrunch blog that Arrington says was “in clear violation of their warped interpretation of copyright law”.  His response:  his lawyer is submitting a takedown request and a bill for $12.50, in order to hold the AP to their own standards.

I have written about “copyfraud” before, most notably here, but this is a fantastic example as it involves a company that derives tremendous benefits from the application of Fair Use.

OCLC: A Review (PDF here) is the title of an essay by Jeffrey Beall that is included in a book titled Radical Cataloging: Essays at the Front.

First, let me reiterate my own attitude about OCLC: They are, for good and for bad, the 800 pound gorilla of the library world. Decisions that they make, and the approach they take towards librarianship, effect us dramatically, and there is not much that we can individually do about it.

They have done great things, from WorldCat.org to providing as complete a set of bibliographic records as exists in the world. Among the negatives are the cost barriers that can eat away much of the budget of smaller libraries, as well as the one-way trip that bibliographic information seems to make into their system.

This article, however, is a strong attack on OCLC that simply overreaches. Many of the projects run by OCLC, including WorldCat, have benefitted from their monolithic approach, and while I would much prefer to see them be more open and flexible, I still appreciate their scope and vision.

One example of the style of his argument: He opens the article with criticism for the title of Karen Schneider’s posts on ALA TechSource (”How OPACs Suck” (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)). He states that her title is “specious, of course” because “they have quietly and efficiently been linking researchers and others with desired information for about twenty years.” He does not address the main concerns of the posts, which is how library search tools have fallen behind, and that the search capabilities that people have grown to expect are lacking in many of the major ILS OPACs.

It would be interesting to see an article that addressed each of her points in detail, explaining how the results she retrieved from various libraries in Part 1 are both valid and desired. What we get is his calling the TechSource editor “spineless” for allowing “such rubbish to be published”.

Near the end of the essay he also takes on Lorcan Dempsey, OCLC Chief Strategist and Vice President of Research. Again, he doesn’t quote, doesn’t give specifics, and doesn’t keep it on an opinion level:

“Have you ever tried reading one of his articles? They are some of the most incoherent and desultory articles in the history of information.”

“…of course, has a blog. He lives for new technology. It seems as if he thinks that any new library or information technology is automatically better than the technology that predates it and it must be implemented immediately, especially if OCLC has a hand in it.”

I use these two examples because I have been reading Karen and Lorcan’s blogs for some time. I saw Lorcan Dempsey present at the Ohio State University Library 2.0 Seminar last year. I can vouch that they have substance behind what they write, and that they are well worth reading. His blanket portrayal of OCLC as existing only to “separate libraries from their money” reminds me of a library director I met who once referred to the OCLC logo as a “swastika”.

And so, about this essay? Read it and recognize that there are some very valid criticisms contained within. Some of these are criticisms that I have expressed over the years. However, beware the hyperbole and the personal nature of his criticism, for they strongly overshadow that which is worth stating.

found via ResourceShelf

Teaching a Dog New Tricks is a post by Michelle Boule on ALA TechSource that contains a great overview of what good Web 2.0 tools have in common.

A great, thought-provoking post on the OpenStudents blog : Open Access meets Undergrad Research… Please?

If I were to be researching a paper on a topic that has a strong open access presence (and the easiest way to see these topics is to check out the main page of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), open access would be my first choice for articles.  Not only is there no hassle in accessing them (you only need a live web connection), but you can be sure that your paper’s readers would have the same, easy access.

Making open access a part of the research process, whether it is coming from an instructor, library reference, or peer, will serve to strengthen people’s research and to add a large group of resources to those we already offer.

found via Open Access News

This post by The Limnal Librarian is, simply put, a must for everyone to read and understand (even if you don’t agree).

I worked in a pharmacy as a technician for 8 years. There were great, and not so great, times to be had, and I learned a lot (especially about working with and for people). One of those lessons was that the person walking up to the counter didn’t know that I wasn’t a pharmacist and didn’t care that I wasn’t a pharmacist; they wanted their question answered rightly or their medication filled properly.

Libraries are the same. We are all librarians. Any other unifying name or term to define those of us who work there is an attempt at futility: people see us all as librarians. This is not to take anything away from the MLS degree; I have seen the power that a good library program gives to a person inclined to help others find and use information… nothing can replace that (only reduce it). There is a very good reason why the MLS should be required for library administrators, and that it should be a generous part of any well-sized library’s staffing.

We all, however, represent the same entity to the patron. Nobody, in any position, should hesitate to say “let me get someone who can help you with that particular question”. That someone might be the high school page who you know to be a fan of graphic novels; or the support staff who knits as a hobby, or the director who’s husband has the same medical condition (though the patron never need know if the director doesn’t want them to).

The linked essay should be read, understood, printed out, posted, and perhaps even left on the desks of those needing the reminder most.

Tapping into your staff’s knowledge doesn’t diminish anyone’s position; only ignoring it does.

found via LISNews

(added later) — it may be that part of the original post that this post was a response to (I don’t know, it was deleted) involved Dean Giustini being upset that Tim Spaulding of LibraryThing won a Library Journal’s Movers and Shakers award this year.  If so, there is an added reason to strongly respond:  we are a profession that is seeking it’s purpose in an era in which much of our traditional purpose may be shifting to the internet (i.e. instant reference and access to information resources).  Anyone who can help to merge the two and provide a combined path forward is worthy of recognition; they needn’t be part of the traditional library family to do so.