Google has made the jump into supporting Microformats as well as RDFa, calling their implementation “Rich Snippets”!

This is great news on several different levels. Semantic markup within web pages provides a way to target searches much more effectively.  TechCrunch provides an excellent example:

“If I was to write a post that mentioned “The President” without naming him, Google probably wouldn’t realize that I was talking about President Obama – it might think I was referring to another US president, or perhaps the leader of a company. But using RDFa I could tag the words “The President” with “Barack Obama”. That tag would be visible to machines spidering the page for indexing (resulting in smarter search results), but wouldn’t be shown to users reading the post. In effect, it’s a way to tell search engines about your content without exposing your visitors to extraneous text.”

In addition, sites that provide well-structured metadata have the potential to be much more usable (and useful).  Library web sites, especially OPACs and Resource pages, should include structured information that details the context of the displayed content.  Using microformats in our web sites will benefit everyone involved over time.  As David Peterson notes on the SitePoint blog:

“Now that Google is supporting structured data it is high time to learn how to use this stuff.”

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) opted on Friday to delay implementation of many of their new testing and certification regulations for one year, to enable them to review what products and organizations should be covered under the law.

This allows libraries to keep offering services to children, as the CPSC had ruled that libraries were covered under the statute, and would need to individually test each item to certify that it does not contain unsafe levels of lead or phthalates, effectively closing most childrens’ libraries.

My previous post, with links to various sources, can be found here.

found through Publishers Weekly (includes information on a request made by supporters of the regulations to President Obama to replace the head of the CPSC)

Many people have a memory of the moment they realized that Barack Obama was likely to become president.  For some, the moment came during the primaries, perhaps when they heard the speech he gave after the New Hampshire primary.

Others, and I know several who were present, will point to his announcement in Springfield, Illinois that he was running for the presidency.

There are others who will go back even further and point to his Keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention.

My moment was a bit more obscure, but it had to do with libraries.  I recall becoming convinced that he would run for president, and would likely win.  I expected it in 2012 or 2016 (he was early in his first-term as a U.S. senator, remember), but the past two years has been eerily like what I anticipated that day.

In June 2005, Barack Obama spoke at the American Library Association conference in Chicago, Illinois.  I can’t find a video of the speech, but the transcript is here.  I did find a discussion of his favorite book, however.

Michael Gorman, former president of ALA, has riled up some people with his posts on Britannica Blog titled Web 2.0 : The Sleep of Reason (part I) and (part II).

He makes some excellent points about scholarship and the perils that accompany a lack of authority, but wastes his efforts by railing against the internet as a whole, and against those who participate in generating content (ironic, given that he is making these points in blog entries).

These posts are well worth reading, though, as they do make excellent points and raise valid issues. Unfortunately, you have to wade through the “traditional publishers good” vs. “web publishers bad” chaff to get to the wheat of his argument.

The goal is high quality information, no matter how it is created or accessed.

found on Free Range Librarian, also: good commentary on Librarian.net

Update:  Free Range Librarian has a follow-up post with an announcement from Britannica Blog….

Inside Higher Ed is running a op ed piece by Pamela Snelson, president of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) titled Libraries at the Cutting Edge.  It is one of the best brief summaries of the value that academic libraries add to their institutions that I have seen in a while, and I recommend that you take a couple of minutes and absorb what she has to say.

from ResourceShelf