Superpatron - Friends of the Library, for the net

Book finding systems on your Blackberry web browser

I'm collecting instances of online book finding systems that either work well by design or by accident on Blackberry web browsers. I do this for a couple of reasons:

- I have a Blackberry
- There's some idealistic views of what a mobile book finding device should be
- Most of those idealistic views are wrong
- Some of the actual uses are interesting (and easy)
- Two people clicked on a Feedburner ad for Blackberry in my RSS feed

Here's something like a run-down.

Purpose built systems from libraries

There are some library book finding systems specially designed for small screens. I don't have a huge list of them (yet). This is an announcement from Black Hills State University:

http://iis.bhsu.edu/lis/pda/

Patrons on the move can now stay connected with the BHSU Library. The E. Y. Berry Library-Learning Center at BHSU recently launched a new website for PDAs and other handheld devices such as Blackberry, to cater to the needs of the growing number of mobile users. Users can now search the library catalog, check their library account, and see library hours while they are on the move.

As far as I can tell this runs on a South Dakota wide network on top of the Aleph system. A second one from Ball State

http://www.bsu.edu/libraries/mobile/

Through our mobile Web site users can search the library catalog and serials collections; and see library hours, contacts, and information on our various collections and services while on the go. The site was designed for ease of use and navigation for mobile devices with their constaints on bandwidth, screen size and memory.

Non-library book finding systems that have mobile interfaces

My poster child for this would be LibraryThing Mobile

http://www.librarything.com/m/

http://www.librarything.com/blog/2006/06/announcing-librarything-mobile.php

The idea is simple—you get the most important features of LibraryThing through your cell phone's "internet" feature. So you can check whether you have something—by title, author, tag or ISBN—when you're in the bookshop, browse your catalog, and read your reviews. You can even accesss your "Pssst!" recommendations. But I don't know anything about cellphone security, so you can't add items, and you can't look at private libraries—even your own.

Like the other systems mentioned to date, this is a read only interface - it helps me figure out what I own, or perhaps what I aspire to own if I've tagged it right, but it doesn't handle the need of scribbling down the name of a title that you want to remember for later or to look up something and add it to your list of books to read.

Mobile non-library non-book finding systems of general use

Here we escape the bounds of the library world and even the book world and look at systems which solve a more general problem of mobile personal recall and mobile search without necessarily being tethered to a particular book oriented problem.

Google

Google Mobile has to be mentioned here - if you've stashed away a book list in your Gmail, you can search for it from your Blackberry's Gmail interface, and find it whether or not you had explicitly dumped it into a book finding system. This is the most general kind of search, and depends entirely on your personal ability to squirrel away useful information.

There's no mobile version of Google Book Search that I know about, and no mobile Google Scholar, more's the pity. The Google search engine is OK on a mobile phone but suffers from providing primarily pointers to non-mobile content, so you lose a lot.

Yahoo

Yahoo's delicious service fills the bill here too, if you have already decided to use it to bookmark books. It's pretty easy to construct a browser bookmark that would be something like
http://del.icio.us/vielmetti/toread
and then refer to that next time you were wandering through a bookstore or library looking for ideas. More elaborate URLs and more elaborate tagging supports more precise memory systems.

Twitter

This last one probably should be first, because it's so awesome. Twitter has three mobile interfaces - an SMS based one if you have a cheap SMS plan, a Jabber based IM interface to go with Google Mobile Talk, and a mobile browser interface that I use because it has $0 additional fees and is acceptably fast.

Step one: collect a few hundred people in your Twitter friends list; make sure to include some librarians.

Step two: Post the question
I'm at the library. What should I read next?

Step three: Get personalized suggestions from people, or a reference interview if you aren't careful. Iterate until you find exactly what you want.

Step one in this is the obvious critical step - if you want good book finding, you need to build the set of people who will give you good recommendations.

Technorati Tags: mobile, search, book-finding-systems, blackberry

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.

| View | Upload your own

AADL is hiring an Information Desk Clerk - from MICHLIB-L

as posted to MICHLIB-L:

The Ann Arbor District Library is accepting applications for an
Information Desk Clerk position in our Access & User Services
department. Applications postmarked or received at one of our locations by 9:00pm on Thursday, November 1, 2007, will be eligible for consideration. The job description for this full-time position and an employment application are available at each of our locations and on our website at
http://www.aadl.org/aboutus/employment/jobposting/display/?jid=22.

This is a 1.0 FTE contractual position; hiring range $27,095 - $32,514.

Contact Jennifer Brown with any questions.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Jennifer Brown, Human Resources
Ann Arbor District Library
343 S Fifth Avenue
Ann Arbor MI 48104

734.327.8304

WorldCat review in Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools

The Cool Tools blog run by Kevin Kelly (of Whole Earth Catalog fame) has a review of WorldCat:

WorldCat is a publicly accessible online interface to the holdings of all types of libraries throughout the world: currently 57,000 libraries in 112 countries. Tell it what book you're looking for and your zip code or city, and it will pinpoint the nearest library that has the book. Same goes for magazines and journals, video and audio formats. The ability to locate an obscure book is invaluable; but it's also tremendously useful for anyone living in a region with more than one nearby library. California's Bay Area is blessed with an abundance of excellent public and academic library systems and a majority of them are represented in WorldCat, so in my case, it's a real time saver (I do a lot of sleuthing)

My own typical use of WorldCat is through Book Burro, which integrates with Open Worldcat:

By entering your zip code, Book Burro uses Open WorldCat’s web service to display local availability. I currently display the closest 5, although an option to display only libraries within a certain distance might be useful.

The Open Worldcat FAQ has more details.

Google Librarian newsletter for 12/2006

The Google Librarian newsletter for December 2006 is out. Highlights include directions on how to create your own custom search engine that searches only the sites you are interested and interviews with the people behind Google Book Search and Google Scholar.

Google U.S. Government Search

Google U.S. Government Search:

Welcome to Google U.S. Government Search.

It comes pre-loaded with White House, Washington Post, and Armed Forces Information Services news, and has easy to load options for a bunch of other newsfeeds. Nicely done in a simple way, based on the "personalized home page" part of Google.

Thanks to Chris Poterola for the pointer.

UPDATE 7/06: the Washington Post weighs in on the service in a 6/15 article:

"People are moving away from directory access to enter these sites," said Kevin Gough, product manager for Google U.S. Government Search. "They just want to type in a few words to pinpoint the information they need."

The modern reference desk, or where to go when Google fails you

A friend of mine over lunch was talking about a problem he had searching Google for a particular item. He had read in the NY Times obituaries some years back about a pilot who had single handedly stopped the then routine practice of pilots dumping fuel before landing commercial aircraft. His Google searches for this turned up lots of stuff but not enough detail.

What is the role of the reference desk in the age of Google? I'm guessing that it's the place to turn to when your own search efforts on Google or the other databases you know fail you, because the people at that desk should know that much more about all the non-Google parts of the net than you do and pin down an answer.

I'm fond of electronic reference desks, though I guess I prefer the email based ones to the interactive chat versions because I'm old school and like to express questions in complete sentences. If you had to launch this question at exactly one library, where would you go?

a little searching - "faa library reference desk" - comes up with the Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center Library reference desk page. The library is not open to the public ("due to limited staffing"). There's a commercial site Aviation Reference Desk with a ton of links. The Internet Public Library reference collection for transportation has almost 100 links, though it's a keyword search and not curated.