Superpatron - Friends of the Library, for the net

Google Book Search bibliography from Charles Bailey

via read20-l:

Charles Bailey's Google Book Search Bibliography, Version 2 is now
available from Digital Scholarship.

http://www.digital-scholarship.org/gbsb/gbsb.htm

This bibliography presents selected English-language
articles and other works that are useful in understanding
Google Book Search. It primarily focuses on the evolution of
Google Book Search and the legal, library, and social issues
associated with it. Where possible, links are provided to
works that are freely available on the Internet, including
e-prints in disciplinary archives and institutional
repositories. Note that e-prints and published articles may
not be identical.

--

scanners ahoy!

MeL Databases - research, newspaper and history databases free to Michigan residents

This slideshare (courtesy of Suzanne Robinson from the Michigan Library Consortium) gives updates and details of databases available for free to all Michigan residents through the MeL databases collection.

The session was given at the MLA annual conference in Lansing - here's the session description:

Thursday, November 8, 8:45am-10:00am
Room: 201
T04: MeL Databases: New Gems and Trusted Standards
Track: Collections Presented by: Library of Michigan
Sponsored by: OCLC in honor of Sandra Yee
Speakers: Sheryl Mase, Director of Statewide Services, Library of Michigan; Suzanne Robinson, Databases Training Coordinator, Michigan Library Consortium
What’s new? How have your favorite databases changed? What cool new features can you show your patrons? This is your chance to get detailed information on new features and enhancements for the new three-year slate of MeL databases. Discover new and innovative ways to use the MeL databases in your academic, public, school, or special library. There will be time for your questions.

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Ben Bunnell on Google Book Search

from their Google@School series:

Technorati Tags: google, googlebooks, search, ben-bunnell, goog

Duke University's Library Hacks blog

Duke University has a (new? new to me) blog called Library Hacks

Library Hacks is a place to find out about tools, resources, services, and ideas that can help make the library more efficient for you. It’s written mostly by librarians, but we’ll also have occasional student and faculty guest bloggers.

Our inspirations are blogs like LifeHacker, LifeHack, and ParentHacks, and book series like O’Reilly’s Hacks Series.

Recent articles include links to their podcasts page as a source of primary sources for audio materials for research, details on how to view Census data updates via RSS, a review of the citation generator Zotero, and a review of Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries.

Not all of these materials are available in every public library, but the descriptions are clear and useful, and if you have an academic or research library that has a ton of special purpose data resources you would do well to surface them from time to time through this blog format to give people a heads up on how and when to get to them.

Technorati Tags: library, blog, duke, durham, north-carolina, hacks

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

Wordie

New words, old words with definitions, for word lovers, flickr without the pictures.

Wordie is a lot of fun.

Technorati Tags: wordie, neology, words

Google Book Search data metadata quality check

Google Book Search list of books printed between 0-100 A.D. At this writing, 2315 works.

I only noticed this because there was a search I did with a date range trying to get very early books that turned up a bunch of books from the year 0019.

Metadata is hard.

I've reported this to Google - the response I got back from Ben was "We're working to make the metadata better across the board."

Technorati Tags: metadata

LibraryThing's new Common Knowledge

From their newsletter:

We're excited to release a new and addictive feature, "Common Knowledge." Basically, we've added a slew of fields to every author and book page, so anyone can add book awards, character names, biographical details on authors, book descriptions and more. It works like a wiki -- any member can add information, and any member can edit or revert the changes.

See the blog post about it.

I can vouch for the addictive part of it. The appropriate game is to identify a place where authors live (e.g Ann Arbor, MI) or a university they have gone to (e.g University of Michigan) and work your way through the world of LibraryThing filling in the gaps in their data. The easiest browser to see where the new data is coming in is the gender list; see new male, female authors.

Visibly missing is only an RSS feed for each of the new common knowledge pages (should be easy enough to do?). The authority control problem is making sure that all of the various variant ways to enter city, state, country get properly sorted together; is it "Ann Arbor, MI" or "Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States of America"? Autocompletion helps here.

Technorati Tags: librarything, authors, metadata, crowdsourcing

Google Scholar: Anurag Acharya interviewed by Barbara Quint at Information Today

Google Scholar in the news, an Anurag Acharya interview:

In its own quiet way, Google Scholar has become a major force in scholarly communication. For many researchers, faculty, and students, it is the first search tool used, challenging the popularity and utility of veteran databases licensed—often at considerable cost—by academic and corporate libraries. Yet announcements about changes in the constantly evolving service seem to occur rarely and with little ballyhoo. For example, did you know that Google Scholar has launched its own digitization project, separate from the high-profile Google Book Search mass digitization? Or what about the new Key Author feature? Or the expansion into non-English languages and non-U.S./Western European content? A conversation with Anurag Acharya, the designer and missionary behind Google Scholar, helped us catch up on the latest developments.

Anurag Acharya old home page at UCSB.

Anurag Acharya interview on Google Librarian Central:

TH: What is your vision for Google Scholar?
AA: I have a simple goal -- or, rather, a simple-to-state goal. I would like Google Scholar to be a place that you can go to find all scholarly literature -- across all areas, all languages, all the way back in time. Of course, this is easy to say and not quite as easy to achieve. I believe it is crucial for researchers everywhere to be able to find research done anywhere. As Vannevar Bush said in his prescient essay "As We May Think" (The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945), "Mendel's concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential."

Rik Belew did a review in 2005 about the quality of Google Scholar

Attempts to understand the consequence of any individual scientist's activity within the long-term trajectory of science is one of the most difficult questions within the philosophy of science. Because scientific publications play such as central role in the modern enterprise of science, bibliometric techniques which measure the ``impact'' of an individual publication as a function of the number of citations it receives from subsequent authors have provided some of the most useful empirical data on this question. Until recently, Thompson/ISI has provided the only source of large-scale ``inverted'' bibliographic data of the sort required for impact analysis. In the end of 2004, Google introduced a new service, GoogleScholar, making much of this same data available. Here we analyze 203 publications, collectively cited by more than 4000 other publications. We show surprisingly good agreement between data citation counts provided by the two services. Data quality across the systems is analyzed, and potentially useful complementarities between are considered. The additional robustness offered by multiple sources of such data promises to increase the utility of these measurements as open citation protocols and open access increase their impact on electronic scientific publication practices.