Superpatron - Friends of the Library, for the net

Espresso Book Machine - photo set

2008-10-12T21:30:10-04:00

Suzanne Chapman took a nice photo set of the University of Michigan Library's Espresso Book Machine in action - worth a look through the whole set if you're curious. Photos used with permission (thanks!), some rights reserved.

Reading on your phone (from The Book Is Dead)

2008-10-12T16:10:12-04:00

as noted on read20-l

from the weblog The Book is Dead, where the author describes the experience of reading an electronic book on the iPhone.

So I spent 6-7 hours reading on the iphone - probably the longest continuous stint I’ve done - and it was fine! In keeping with the state of the brain 30,000 feet up, this was no high-literature, but a page-turning saga featuring the cliched activities of one Jack Reacher. But I digress. In between meals and kid-wrangling, I read the whole thing, and the only time I remembered it wasn’t a paperback was when I could slip the iphone into my shirt pocket rather than trying to cram it into the overstuffed seat pocket (why do airlines insist of giving you printed drinks menus, shopping guides, entertainment guides etc - leaving no room for the stuff you really *need*). And by keeping my screen brightness low (but still plenty bright enough in the half-light of a plane cabin), the battery was still two-thirds charged on arrival.

I don't think I could have done all of this on my phone (screen too small) but it's an interesting observation: there is some set of literature that works pretty well on mobile phones, at least in the very rare case where you are sitting with nothing else to do for six hours and you're disconnected from the net.

My typical travel pattern is the bus, not the airplane, and for that the mobile phone is a perfect companion. What would be the literary canon for this size device? You should be able to put something that someone else would welcome being read to as well.

I consulted my companion of the afternoon, and he suggested The Cat In The Hat.

I looked for an authorized ascii edition of The Cat In The Hat, and didn't find one; but I did find an ever so slightly imperfect bootleg from 1987 in the archives of the newsletter of The Cult Of The Dead Cow. A quick cut and paste to my personal wiki, and I was all set to sit down and read it. And, what do you know, it worked pretty well. The three year old in question had seen the pictures enough times that he didn't need them to enjoy it, and it was short enough at about 1300 words to fit on one page.

More to follow - and while I'm not sure how this turns into a market for picture-less picture books, I know that I really could make good use of this in a lot of situations.

Cartographic Beasts - open house at U Michigan Map Library

2008-10-12T14:55:07-04:00

From the announcement - more about the U of Michigan Map Library from their web site.

Map Library Open House
4:00 PM-7:00 PM
Thursday, October 16, 2008
825 Hatcher

On the third Thursday of every month, the U-M Map Library holds an informal open house. This month's event celebrates "Cartographic Beasts," which refers to the often strange and unusual creatures and animals that are portrayed on early maps. Some were drawn as descriptive illustrations of newly seen animals and others are used as symbols of strength, power, and knowledge. Even more interesting are the strange human-like faces that were often used in decoration. Join the Map Library staff for a fascinating cartographic adventure.

This is what they say about themselves:

The Map Library, located on the 8th floor of Hatcher Graduate Library, is the principal collection for cartographic materials at the University of Michigan, with an emphasis on both historic and modern mapping, including digital resources. It supports teaching and research activities of faculty, staff and students in many disciplines. Spatial and Numeric Data Services (SAND) provides assistance with finding and using data, geographical information systems, and statistical software, and is located on the 2nd floor of the Hatcher Graduate Library. The Clements Library has extensive historic maps and atlases, and the Bentley Historical Library also holds works with a focus on Michigan history.

and what they don't say is that the view from the 8th floor of the grad is awesome.

Espresso Book Machine - first look

2008-10-10T17:24:51-04:00

I got to the UGLI in the afternoon, not the morning, so I didn't see the U of Michigan's Espresso Book Machine running. But I did get to see it just sitting there, and they had a handful of printed copies from their inventory for review. Here's some notes.

More info at http://lib.umich.edu/ebm .

The books

Some of the collection they had was early 20c books, original print dates 1915 or so. The originals had black and white plates, and the reproductions printed those photographs poorly - lots of gray where there had been some kind of fine shading or white. I didn't go back to the original scans or the original works to know at what point this loss of quality happened, but it was very noticable, to the point where there was clearly a loss of fidelity.

I can imagine a PDF post-processing step that corrects for this, to make the images better; I'm sure that the printer itself can do a better job.

There are ISBNs on the backs of the books, but no front matter or back matter inserted to give a new copyright notice; the covers in this sample collection are from a couple of series, and the notes say "Over time, we'll build up a stock of cover template that users can choose from".

The printers

The equipment looks to the naked eye like a bunch of stuff bolted together (sorry, that's what it looks like to me). There's a long main feed which looks like the assembly line that does the binding, with two printers bolted onto the side to feed stuff in.

The page printer is a Kyocera FS-9530DN, a 51 PPM black and white printer. The printer driver from OpenPrinting says "one of the few printers from Kyocera that does not understand PCL or Postscript". Stated resolution 600x600.

The other printer (which I think does the covers) is a Konica Minolta Magicolor 7450 (review from PC Mag). It will handle large format color printing up to 12.25 x 47.24 inches, though in practice the EBM maximum print size in this configuration is 8.5 x 11".

The comments

The other person looking at the machine with me wished there was some medieval lit in the collection, so that she could use a book instead of a laptop for reading.

Mining ideas from Google Book Search

2008-10-03T14:34:01-04:00

via read20-l

Bill Schilit's Forum talk on the work at Google on using quotations to establish hyperlinks between scanned books, and going beyond that to "idea mining", is now available.

Abstract: http://www.parc.xerox.com/cms/get_article.php?id=772

WMV: mms://216.93.180.194/parc_forum/v1232.wmv

the abstract

Scanning books, magazines, and newspapers is widespread because people believe a great deal of the world's information still resides off-line. In general, after works are scanned they are indexed for search and processed to add links. In this talk I will describe a new approach to automatically add links by mining repeated passages. This technique connects elements that are semantically rich, so strong relations are made. Moreover, link targets point within rather than to the entire work, facilitating navigation. Our system has been run on a digital library of over 1 million books (Google Book Search), has been used by thousands of people, and has generated the world's largest collection of quotations. I will also present a follow-on project based on the theory that authors copy passages from book to book because these quotations capture an idea particularly well: Jefferson on liberty; Stanton on women’s rights; and Gibson on cyberpunk. These projects suggest that mining quotations for links and ideas are an important mechanism for understanding the knowledge contained in books.

the paper citation

Generating Links by Mining Quotations.
Okan Kolak and Bill N. Schilit.
To appear in Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, June 19-21, 2008). HYPERTEXT '08. ACM, New York, NY.
PDF

(thanks to Bill Janssen for the announcement text, which I copied exactly because it captured an idea particularly well)

arXiv.mobi - physics preprints on your mobile phone

2008-10-01T15:19:56-04:00

arxiv.org is a notable collection and publishing place for papers in physics and allied fields. I could say more, but you'd be better reading this interview with founder Paul Ginsparg on the receipt of his MacArthur Foundation award.

arxiv.mobi is "Made by Brad Chase 2008. Not officially related to arXiv." It's designed for the iPhone. It's super fast and simple, and it looks good.

From what I can tell he's building this site by harvesting OAI records from the arXiv API so this is an independent development built on top of the site's programming interface.

(Note to self; can your patrons download the full records for all new books, so that they can recreate your new books shelf or acquisitions shelf on their own?)

Stephanie Zimmerman, "The Cyber Smorgasbord", presentation to the South Central Chapter of the PA Library Association

2008-10-01T13:05:40-04:00

This caught my eye (since this blog is mentioned!) - a screen shot of superpatron where I write about the video game library going in at the U of Michigan is on slide 24. A complete set of notes and links is at Stephanie Zimmerman's blog entry on the LCSC Training weblog.

The Cyber Smorgasbord

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

Frankfort, IL library abandons Dewey system

2008-10-01T01:55:46-04:00

from the Southtown Star: Dewey Overdue for a Makeover, Librarians Say:

"We know it's a little radical, but that's OK," said Melissa Rice, head of adult services, who along with reference librarian Joanna Kolendo is leading this revolution. Frankfort is the first library in the United States to retrofit its collection and go "Dewey-free," eliminating numbers and categorizing nonfiction books by topic, she said.

It's an idea so new, the Illinois Library Association was not even up to speed on it.

"You're telling me they are throwing out the Dewey Decimal System? What are they doing? Organizing books by size?" said Bob Doyle, the association's executive director. "This is the first I heard of it."

(of course, you don't sort by size, you sort by color!)

Aha, of course, there's a blog: Freeing Dewey:

Let me introduce you to Dewey de Frankfort.

and the "Mission" quote:

Mission

As with all work performed by librarians, our aim in initiating this project is to help our patrons locate information in an easier and more timely manner. We hope to empower our users regardless of their age, education, etc., and make them as comfortable as possible in our library.

And with this goal in mind, we feel that it is our duty to alter our practices, which include the alteration of our current classification system, if a preferable system is created. Thus we are choosing to adapt a more intuitive and individualized classification scheme, that might not necessary work in all libraries, but is the most beneficial to our community.

We are simply taking yet another step in implementing a customer-focused business model; We are truly trying to make it all about the patron.

Worth a look!

Grand Rapids, MI library up on Evergreen

2008-09-30T14:52:07-04:00

from MICHLIB-L, Ruth Dukelow

Congratulations to Grand Rapids Public Library (GRPL) Director Marcia
Warner and her staff! We at MLC are happy to announce that GRPL went live
on Evergreen yesterday, joining Branch District Library in the Michigan
Evergreen shared system. For details, see the article posted on Library
Technology Guides:
http://www.librarytechnology.org/ltg-displayarticle.pl?RC=13553

We believe that GRPL - with 925,000 bib records and a population of
197,000 - might be the largest individual public library to adopt
Evergreen as its ILS. So much for the myth that open source ILS software
is only for small libraries! Plus, Equinox said that this migration was
the easiest they've ever done, due mostly to the dedication and expertise
of GRPL's Bill Ott who maintains the Michigan Evergreen database and
servers. Thanks, Bill -- we're lucky to have you on board!

More later when I get a chance to do a review; I'll wonder out loud how easy/hard/impossible it would be to graft John Blyberg et al's SOPAC2 on top of Evergreen.

Video game library and at the U of Michigan

2008-09-23T23:41:46-04:00

Video Game Librarian, via a post on the Ann Arbor Chronicle:

Dave Carter, a librarian at the University of Michigan and the writer behind the blog Eaten by a Grue, wants everyone to know that the Computer and Video Game Archive is now open to the public! One might say it's currently in beta as Carter calls this the "Preview Opening" with the official Grand Opening coming in November.

But for now, the Archive is open during weekday afternoons and offers a ton of gaming opportunities as seen in the pictures in the post.

It's some kind of awesome to know that if I want to relive the mis-spent Atari 2600 days of my youth that I know where to go. I wonder if they have any old terminals set up to play Lunar Lander or any of the other classic BASIC games from David Ahl. There really should be some old VAX in the corner set up to play ADVENTURE. ...