Superpatron - Friends of the Library, for the net

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.

MLibrary 2.0: The Future is Now / Peter Morville, Jessamyn West, Kristin Antelman

The U of Michigan Libraries are doing a series of Library 2.0 events this summer - I gate-crashed today's event just long enough to talk to a few friends and grab a bagel, and I think that some of the talks will be online in one form or another.

MLibrary 2.0: The Future is Now

The Kickoff Session will provide an overview of the major trends and issues that are emerging and shaping today and tomorrow library services and resources. Peter Morville will talk about ambient findability the way today's users find the information they need and how libraries can better enable their users to interact with their resources. Jessamyn West will share examples about how libraries are adopting and incorporating 2.0 trends them into their services. Kristin Antelman will lead us through an investigation about how libraries are adapting their OPACS to facilitate user interaction. This session serves as the kickoff for the MLibrary 2.0 activities throughout the summer.

Thanks to Patricia Anderson for giving me the heads up, and I'll be doing my bit for libraries worldwide this evening by feeding macaroni and cheese to Jessamyn.

(will be updated later with links)

Technorati Tags: library, michigan, umich, annarbor, superpatron

Library Lookup for MeLCaT - Michigan interlibrary loan network

MeLCat is the Michigan statewide library interlibrary loan network. From the ASDAL newsletter

At the very first MeLCat user's meeting there was a comparison made between the costs of traditional inter-library loan and this new delivery system. Traditional ILL costs between $17 and $30 dollars per item, with deliver time of up to two weeks; while MeLCat costs are between $1 to $5 dollars per item, with delivery times of one to three days. Pretty fantastic!

Indeed, with borrowing rights now at research and public libraries across the state, there's hardly ever a book I might want to look at that isn't somewhere a few days away. The trick then is finding it before you give up on your search, and for that I turned to Jon Udell's Library Lookup project. A few tweaks to my older Ann Arbor District Library lookup script created a new MeLCaT Amazon Linky (Greasemonkey needed) which embeds search results in your Amazon pages.

Thanks to superpatron Jon Udell for the original insight that led to this, and to Pittsburgh area blogger "Inner Bitch" who was the proximate cause for me revisiting this in her "Taking a can opener to Amazon" post.

The next natural step is to revisit the Google Books library lookup script I did for Google and Ann Arbor and mash that around again so it hits the whole state - I hope to have that ready in time for when Google's Ben Bunnell visits the Ann Arbor District Library on November 30 2006 (see upcoming.org for details).

UPDATE: Google Books MeLCaT library lookup just updated.

Technorati Tags: amazon, google, judell, librarylookup

Library catalogs have represented stagnant technology for close to twenty years

David Bigwood's Catalogablog has this lovely citation:

Toward a 21st Century Library Catalog by Kristin Antelman, Emily Lynema, and Andrew K. Pace (2006) appears in Information Technology and Libraries 25(3):pp. 128-139.

Library catalogs have represented stagnant technology for close to twenty years. Moving toward a next-generation catalog, North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries purchased Endeca's Information Access Platform to give its users relevance-ranked keyword search results and to leverage the rich metadata trapped in the MARC record to enhance collection browsing. This paper discusses the new functionality that has been enabled, the implementation process and system architecture, assessment of the new catalog's performance, and future directions.

The article neatly skewers most 1980s-vintage catalog technology, noting that all major vendors are shipping systems that are virtually unchanged in their basic search structures from the systems that were in place 20 years ago. They then go on to talk about their new Endeca system in detail, with some use cases like these recommender systems:

Two features in Endeca that have seen a surprising amount of use are the “most popular” sort option and the “more titles like this” feature available on the detailed-record page for a specific title. Both relate broadly to the area of recommending related materials to patrons.

The “most popular” sort option is currently powered by aggregated circulation data for all items associated
with a title. While this technique is ineffective for serials, reference materials, and other noncirculating items, it provides users a previously unavailable opportunity to define relevance. To date, the “most popular” sort is the second most frequently selected sort option (after publication date, at 41 percent), garnering 19 percent of all sorting activity. Most-popular sorting was trailed by title, author,
and call-number sorting.

UPDATE: TrotskyProletariatLibrary is fired up or frustrated about the problem of hard to use online catalogs.

Jeff Ubois on the Google / U of California Library secret agreement

Jeff Ubois from archival.tv has an excellent analysis of the recent Google / UC library system agreement up at Google "Showtimes" the UC Library System

The University of California’s secret agreement with Google for book digitization promises to improve access to parts of its library collections, but the contractual restrictions UC has accepted may enrich Google’s shareholders at public expense.

Digitizing the world’s books, films, video, sound recordings, maps, and other cultural artifacts could, to quote Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, provide “universal access to all human knowledge, within our lifetime.” So it’s troubling to see public institutions transfer cultural assets, accumulated with public funds, into private hands without disclosing the terms of the transaction.

Jeff has a bunch of questions he (and I) would like to see answered about this deal.

* What more might UC be able to do if its scanning project were funded by the legislature or foundations, rather than by Google?
* UC says the “digitized books will be searchable through Google Book Search.” Can anyone else build services that access this data? Or is it another case of “Google can crawl everyone else’s data, no one can crawl Google’s data?”
* What quality assurances will Google provide? How can we ensure this won’t be a repeat of the microfilm experience?
* Will UC have copies of the full, high quality scans, or will certain information, such as image positioning data needed for searching, be kept by Google alone?
* What restrictions will be placed on UC’s use of those scans?
* What will be the different treatments for material in copyright, or orphaned, or in the public domain?
* Is it reasonable to ask the public to pay a second time (or watch ads) for material already purchased, simply because it’s now necessary to convert the format in which it is stored?
* Why haven’t the Regents appointed a panel of advisors on this matter?

UPDATE 8/25/2006: The Chronicle of Higher Education now has the agreement online thanks to FOIA; Jeff Ubois notes

The library community knows, or should know from the Showtime deal, that perpetual restrictions on the use digital copies are not in the public interest.

UPDATE: comments closed, they started to attract spam.

Technorati Tags: google

Google Library, University of California agreement

Google and the UC library system are joining forces for more book scanning.

Some reaction:

CBC News has an AP-sourced story, University of California joins Google's virtual library

The University of California is allowing Google's ambitious book-scanning project to access its academic libraries even as the venture fights allegations of copyright infringement.

The deal, to be announced Wednesday, is a major boost for popular search engine Google in its effort to convert millions of library books into digital form. It's also the biggest expansion since a group of authors and publishers launched a lawsuit last fall. California has 10 campuses — including in Los Angeles and Berkeley — and 100 libraries.

"We think this is a pretty significant step forward," said Adam Smith, the group product manager overseeing Google's book-scanning initiative.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, U. of California System's 100 Libraries Join Google's Controversial Book-Scanning Project:

The University of California is already involved in a competing mass-digitization project, the Open Content Alliance, which includes 30 universities as well as Yahoo and Microsoft (The Chronicle, January 27). Mr. Greenstein said the university plans to continue working with that project as well.

The word used by officials at both Google and the university to describe the project's benefits for academe is "discoverability." Allowing scholars to search the full texts of millions of books quickly, officials argue, will make it possible for researchers to discover books that might help their research but that they wouldn't have known about otherwise.

That, in turn, "will allow library users to make connections between information and ideas that were hitherto inaccessible, driving the pace of scholarly innovation and enhancing the use of our great libraries," according to a fact sheet prepared by the university about the project.

Of course, "discoverability" is just an infelicitious version of findability, and you would expect that more libraries would mean more findable books.

(add this to the "mass digitization" category)

MIT Libraries beta releases to make access to information easier

The MIT Libraries have a few information access tools in beta test. Included are an MIT edition of the Firefox LibX library toolbar, an MIT library lookup greasemonkey script, and their Dewey research advisor for business information.

Noted by Saurier Duval, who says "Museum of Modern Betas meets Superpatron".

PennTags - When card catalogs meet tags. Many-to-Many:

David Weinberger on PennTags - When card catalogs meet tags. Many-to-Many::

University of Pennsylvania’s del.icio.us-like PennTags project allows readers to tag catalogued items. It’s a great way to track resources for a research project and simultaneously make the results of your forays available to future researchers. In fact, it seems just plain selfish not to do so.

Integrating tagging with the book catalogue (and therefore with the book taxonomy) instantaneously provides the best of both worlds: Structured browsing leads you to nodes with jumping off points into the connections made by others who are putting those nodes into various contexts, and tags lead you back into the structured world organized by experts in structure.
...Anyway, PennTags looks like a great project.

(U of Penn’s Library Staff Blog is here. And here is the newtech category of that blog. On a quick browse, this looks like a terrific resource if you’re interested in libraries, taxonomies, folksonomies, tagging, etc.)

Good to see innovation!

UPDATE 7/7/06: A few reviews are coming in. Pisceslibrariana calls the front page "confusing" and "random", and suggests that citation services like RefWorks make tagging the catalog irrelevant.

John Wilkin on the Google Digitization Project

Andy King from Web Site Optimization has a review of John Wilkin's presentation to the Ann Arbor District Library on the U of Michigan Google Digitization Project. Andy writes in part

Mr. Wilkin spoke about his involvement in the massive digitization project that Google, U-M, Harvard, and other universities are undertaking. Google is sponsoring U-M to digitize seven million bound volumes to make them available online both at books.google.com and the University of Michigan. The project started in July 2005, and John estimates it will be completed within six years (from the date of his talk).

Before Google stepped in, the U-M was digitizing books at a rate of 5000 to 8000 per year, receiving 100,000 new volumes per year. At that rate it would take over 100 years to digitize the 7 million volumes in U-M libraries. The University needed someone like Google to speed up the process. John is under a non-disclosure agreement with Google, but he did say that they've seen several doublings in the number of volumes scanned, and within six months they'll be six times faster at scanning.

The whole thing is worth a read - John is a great speaker and really knows his stuff. I worked with him at the UM Humanities Text Initiative in the mid 1990s when Michigan's own digitization efforts were getting started.