Superpatron - Friends of the Library, for the net

Archives wiki - global directory of archives locations and information

Archives Wiki is an example of a wiki maintained by a professional association.

Archives Wiki is sponsored by the American Historical Association. It is intended to be a clearinghouse of information about archival resources throughout the world. While it is primarily designed to be useful to historians and others doing historical research, we hope that researchers in many disciplines will find it useful.

Notable qualities that distinguish this wiki from the equivalent sort of effort within Wikipedia include:

All contributors must log in, and are expected to use their real names and make a link to some biographical information about themselves.  This adds to the idea that the people contributing to the site are professionals.  Contributor guidelines make it clear what the expectations are, and the people adding in information look like they are primarily archives people and not wiki people.

Unlike some free hosted wikis, there is no advertising visible.  The sponsorship of the AHA pays for the system.  This means most importantly that there are no inappropriate ads - the occasional Dungeons and Dragons ads or World of Warcraft ads that decorate free hosted sites, or the weird Google Adwords ads that show up from time to time.

The wiki itself has a definite structure, with a design that makes it obvious where to add pages around the globe (by state and country), and with a template that you are expected to follow when adding a new entry.  Many wikis are freeform and chaotic; this one doesn't feel that way.

The "recent changes" part of a wiki is an indication of signs of life in a system; how many people are contributing on a regular basis, and what are they adding in?  Archives wiki has about a dozen pages in the last week added to, and they are reasonably complete on observation - the site has quite a bit of variety in depth, but some of the pages are very clearly very complete and useful.

The hardest thing about wikis like this one are that they are very clearly a global effort, requiring both knowledge by people around the world and the capability to do something that needs ongoing maintenance.  There's some "contributors to pages" ratio that needs to be right so that enough people care enough that it stays accurate enough.  As a model, though, of a directory style wiki maintained by a professional association it's a good one.

The Undigested History of the Nantucket Atheneum

from Common-Place v2 n1 Oct 2001

The Undigested History of the Nantucket Atheneum
Lloyd Presley Pratt

Tearing up floorboards in search of hidden treasure is a bad idea. A messy process, it seldom yields anything of value. As a rule, attics are a better bet. [...]

As construction began, floorboards came up, walls and doors came down. Eventually the building itself was lifted off its foundation as the crawl space was turned into a ground floor. But to my mind, the removal of the floorboards marked the turning point of the renovation. For as it happens, the space beneath them sheltered a collection of over five hundred nineteenth-century pamphlets.

It continues with a wonderful story of the destruction of the original Atheneum in the Great Fire, a call to citizens up and down the East coast to restore the library, and the presumed use of less valuable materials (today's equivalent would be the leftover magazines at the public magazine rack) to block out the drafts from the winter chill.

Thanks to Dan Drake for identifying the bit of Ann Arbor to Nantucket serendipity that led me to this.

Technorati Tags: nantucket, archives, history

arXiv API - via Peter Suber's Open Access News

Bill Tozier suggested that I look up Peter Suber from Open Access News - here's a recent article from that blog about a new programmable interface to the arXiv archive of physics and math preprints:

The goal of the API is to allow application developers access to all of the arXiv data, search and linking facilities with an easy-to-use programmatic interface. This page provides links to developer documentation, and gives instructions for how to join the mailing list and contact other developers and maintainers.

For more information about the arXiv API, please see our arxiv-api group, join the mailing list, look at the API FAQ, or join a discussion in #arxiv on irc.freenode.net....

The blog (more news than comment) has this intro:

Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature on the internet. Making it available free of charge and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Removing the barriers to serious research.

Things I want to write more about here - categories A-G

Every so often I run into corners of the world that I want to explore. Here's some list of the things I'd like to write more about, even if I don't have a full blog-length posting for any of them written right now. I'm keying off the categories I've set up.

This is part 1: Amazon through Google Book Search.

Sorry no links yet....will hyperlink as I have time to edit, but I thought I'd get this out into the world.

Amazon - about the book cover and album cover art database they have; how to set up an affiliate bookstore that actually works; on using Amazon to do wish lists that are then fulfilled through your library (via Jon Udell); on using Amazon as a book finding system and then using Book Burro or similar to connect back to your library; much more I'm sure.

Ann Arbor - plans for a new library downtown; reviews of all of the branches; reviews of other Washtenaw County libraries; special libraries in town like the Ford Presidential Library

Archives - an interview with the folks who run the Labadie Collection; an interview with the Prelingers; an interview with Brewster Kahle; some discussion of the peculiar nature of archives in the digital age

Archival Television - Jeff Ubois blog of the same name; the loss of the video record; clearing and securing rights; bootlegs on Youtube; museums of the broadcast industry

Beyond big vendors - this was the title of a talk I gave; an exploration of consolidation in the integrated library systems space, and some understanding of new alternatives

Book Burro - at least an annual post on what it is (repetition is the soul of the net); a screencast showing how I use it; documentation for online book finding system developers to get them to have Book Burro pop up on their book screens; a discussion of how tools like this can be funded by affiliate revenues

Book covers - as finding aids; variations between editions; in online book finding and book inventory systems; search by contents of the cover, not contents of the book

Book trading - more reviews of any book trading systems I find; some stories about book swap clubs that meet in person; children's birthday parties where everyone brings a book and everyone gets a book

Bookins - how they advertise new inventory on Twitter; comparison with other book swap sites; integration with LibraryThing

Books - more book reviews, lots of book reviews would be welcomed; the book publishing industry as a whole; old books; smelly books; pretty much anything is fair game.

Books sorted by color - more discussion of cover art, illustrations, other metadata about the book captured in the cover art but not indexed by typical book finding systems; the book illustration business; how covers are designed; history of binding systems; algorithms to determine which color a book is; art and photographic illustrations of installations where books have been sorted by color

Bookshelves - compact shelving, buying shelves for personal libraries, reviews of bookcases, shelving for libraries, innovations in book shelving, reviews of books about bookshelves, how to build your own, built in shelving, what to do when yours fill up

Code - more code! software that does interesting things with book and library data; mashups, data extraction, search algorithms, recommender systems, page layout, interactive design, home grown alternative views of the library

Collection development - impact of patrons on collections; controversial materials and how they are added to the collection and perhaps subtracted from the collection; metrics used for weeding and deaccessions; building your personal library from another library's discards; libraries as endangering printed materials

Electronic collections - library originated book and non-book collections; hardware, software, and systems for managing and cataloging same; preservation of digital relics; copyright, fair use and international implications of same; the proper provenance of enthusiast collectors

Events and exhibits - individual events and exhibits, and also ways by which libraries can improve their ability to bring people through the door by hosting book-themed events. Compare libraries to bookstores and see how they stack up; facilities building and planning with events in mind.

Film - libraries for film; collecting video and film; archival television (via Jeff Ubois); rights, copyrights, and the like; stock footage libraries; impact of digital distribution on the circulation patterns in public libraries that have big DVD collections

Friends Bookshop - relationships between Friends groups and libraries; examples of particularly fun bookshops; self service bookshops; using friends book inventory to do outreach; purposes of friends bookshops - to entertain people who want to run a bookstore, or to raise money, or both

Friends of the library - about national and local organizations; demographics of friends groups; "Friends of the Library, for the net"; library advocacy; when friends groups turn into haters groups

Games - games in the library; word games; something more about Eli@AADL; Wii at the library. Games in the kids room - ice cream truck. Learning from games.

Google Book Search - contracts, restrictions on use of data, inaccuracies within, quality of scanning, quality of metadata, shout out to Ben Bunnell, aftermarket greasemonkey hacks to fix issues with, comparison with Microsoft et al, comparison with Open Library, Distributed Proofreaders

Google Scholar - library use and access to, Andrew Odlyzko on open publishing, relative frequency of citation of non-internet publications, Math 40 yr history of increased collaboration via Patrick Ion, quality of data, quality of metadata, use by scholars as replacement for vita

EPA invites doubts with library closings (Minneapolis StarTribune editorial)

From the Minneapolis Star-Tribune 9/14/06:

Most Americans, even most American scientists, will never have cause to visit one of the regional technical libraries maintained by the Environmental Protection Agency. But to environmental scientists in Minnesota or any of 14 other states, working inside or outside EPA, the pending shutdown of these repositories will be a serious blow.

The general public, too, should be concerned about what this means for EPA accountability, which has come under repeated challenge in recent years -- most notably over unduly rosy postdisaster assessments in lower Manhattan after the 9/11 attacks, and in New Orleans after last year's hurricanes.