ALA In Focus

Posted on 4 June 2007 by Rick Mason

The first segment of “ALA In Focus”, an online video detailing the inner workings of various areas of the American Library Association, features Gwendolyn Prellwitz, Program Officer for the ALA Office of Diversity & Spectrum.

The video is fantastic to watch, but what has really caught my attention is the interviewer.  His name is John Chrastka, and I had the pleasure to work with him when I was the webmaster for Reaching Forward South.

John was (still is?) involved with the $39 support staff membership for ALA, which is directly tied with their efforts to recruit library-folk who happen to not-be-librarians.  This is still one of the best deals that ALA has offered, and John is a really pleasant and friendly presence.  His personality and enthusiasm really shows in the video segment.

As an additional note, videos like this are much more interesting to me than the polished, professional productions that organizations usually craft to show off their projects and people.  This truly feels like a casual conversation between two people who enjoy what they do.

found on The Shifted Librarian

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Google’s Algorithms and the Library Quest

Posted on 3 June 2007 by Rick Mason

Jonathan Rochkind has an interesting commentary on this New York Times article about Google’s Algorithm titled Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine.

I really don’t have much to add, except for the thought that we are too mired in the “algorithm” we currently have, which was built around small index cards in drawers, and need to recognize that there are many parts, facets if you will, to how we store and provide information. We need to be open to each of these facets and the ways we can use them.

Storage, Search, Presentation, Categorization… these are all parts of what we do; they do not have to all reflect the same structure, they just need to be able to interact.

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Follow-up: Elsevier and the arms business

Posted on 2 June 2007 by Rick Mason

A couple of months ago I wrote a post about the publishing company Reed Elsevier and their involvement in the world arms trade. Editors and writers from several of their journals, including The Lancet, were arguing that it was unethical to publish medical journals, then assist those selling arms and munitions worldwide.

The arguments seem to have won over, as Reed Elsevier announced yesterday that they will phase out their involvement by the end of this year. The Lancet’s response is here.

Kudos to all involved with the effort, including the editors, authors, press, and bloggers who presented their case, and those at Elsevier who examined the situation and made the right ethical choice.

from Open Access News

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Border Patrol, Library Style

Posted on 31 May 2007 by Rick Mason

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

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Giving Knowledge for Free

Posted on 30 May 2007 by Rick Mason

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

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Freebase article on OpenBusiness

Posted on 29 May 2007 by Rick Mason

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

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Pipl

Posted on 29 May 2007 by Rick Mason

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

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Wide Open Education

Posted on 26 May 2007 by Rick Mason

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

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Geonames

Posted on 26 May 2007 by Rick Mason

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

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Advice to a slightly less experienced geek librarian

Posted on 25 May 2007 by Rick Mason

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

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Plantfacts

Posted on 25 May 2007 by Rick Mason

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

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Cross Language Web Search

Posted on 24 May 2007 by Rick Mason

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

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BibMe

Posted on 24 May 2007 by Rick Mason

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:

Book: Amazon Books
Magazine: LookSmart FindArticles
Newspaper: Yahoo! News
Website: Proprietary Web page parser
Journal: CiteULike Academic Papers
Film: Amazon DVD & VHS

from BiblioTech Web

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Libraries and Zombies

Posted on 21 May 2007 by Rick Mason

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

Video Contest Submission-Allen County Public Libraryfrom blyberg.net

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It’s a Wiki… It’s a Skymap…

Posted on 19 May 2007 by Rick Mason

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.

Posted in Maps, Online Databases, Open Access, Space, Wiki | Tagged | Comments Off on It’s a Wiki… It’s a Skymap…

Encyclopedia of Life

Posted on 16 May 2007 by Rick Mason

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

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LibraryThing for Libraries

Posted on 14 May 2007 by Rick Mason

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

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Bibliographic news

Posted on 7 May 2007 by Rick Mason

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).

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Lighthouse Library

Posted on 7 May 2007 by Rick Mason

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:

Lighthouse at Mosquito Inlet

 

Library Box

Lighthouse library description

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Ok… not on hiatus

Posted on 7 May 2007 by Rick Mason

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.

Posted in Blogs | Comments Off on Ok… not on hiatus