Superpatron

Firefox's Ubiquity, and the challenge: make searching your library as easy as searching Amazon

Aza Raskin has released Ubiquity, a Firefox browser plugin that adds a command line of sorts to Firefox and gives you very easy access to search from within your browser.  I haven't completely absorbed it yet, but the effect is that you type "option-space amazon blueberries for sal" and you get almost instant results within the browser like this:

Now, the question is as always: how do you make it so that your local library is as easy and as few keystrokes away as a major online book vendor?  I don't have the answer yet - writing Ubiquity commands involves Javascript, and I don't have a super simple tutorial just yet for this task - but it's a very reasonable ideal.

Melcat downtime (& explanation) for 28 August 2008

from MICHLIB-L in its entirety, headers and email addresses trimmed; if you need to know more or who to contact, you should already be on that mailing list.

--

From: Debbi Schaubman

 

As many of you may already know, MeLCat is still down.  We're currently
estimating that we'll be back up at around 12:30pm or so but that estimate
may get adjusted as the morning proceeds.  We will post updates as needed.

Please note that you can continue to do work on the DCB servers and your
local III servers; MeLCat-related transactions will be held in a queue
until the central server is up.

For those wondering what happened and why this is taking so long, read on
. . .

At approximately 4:30pm on Wednesday, we noticed that the system was not
behaving correctly -- MLC staff were not be allowed to login to one of the
administrative interfaces to the system.   At roughly that same time, an
automated monitoring tool notified Innovative Interfaces staff of I/O
errors.   Innovative staff then began investigating the cause of the
problem.     DIT staff verified that I/O errors had occurred and contacted
a technician from Sun.    Sun and DIT staff identified the source of the
I/O errors (one of the SCSI channels).  They suspect that the errors on
the SCSI channel resulted in an issue which knocked a few array mount
points offline.   They unmounted the corrupted volumes and ran file system
checks.  This work was completed at 8pm.

We thought we'd be right back in business at that point but we were wrong
-- the system refused to process transactions in a normal fashion. Further
investigation by Innovative Interfaces staff led to the discovery of
missing system files.  We  believe that these files must have been
corrupted and then dropped during the remount/file system checks.

Innovative Interfaces support managers advised that the best solution
would be to restore from backup.  However, in order to do that, we needed
to first run an incremental backup to grab all the database changes that
occurred since the last full backup 2 days prior.  The incremental backup
started at approximately 11pm.   It was completed at approximately
12:30am.   The data restore from the full backup began around 12:45am.
(Many thanks are due to the DIT staff who coordinated the change of tapes
at the hosting center.  Without him working way past his normal working
hours, we would be looking at another 24-36 hours of downtime.)

At this point, the full restore has completed, as has the restore from the
incremental.  However, that incremental backup had approximately 5.5
million transactions on it.  We need those transactions to be processed
before we can bring the system back up since we need to come back up at
exactly the same system point as when we took the system down.  Otherwise,
stuff will get lost and/or out of sync.

Innovative staff called at 8am to let us know that the system was
processing the transactions at a rapid pace but, due to the sheer quantity
of them, they anticipated another 4 hours of downtime.

Once Innovative tells us that things are caught up, we'll bring the system
back up and send out an announcement.  We will also closely monitor the
system to make sure that all is well.

DIT staff will be talking with Sun staff to unravel more of the mystery
and determine what steps should be taken to prevent this from occurring
again.

Thank you for your patience,

Debbi

Darlene Fichter on Law Libraries and Web 2.0

A presentation from Darlene Fichter at CALL 08 on Web 2.0 in law libraries; notable is slide 9 with the observation "I have no idea which database to pick" as the reaction to the existing state of law library database web use, compared with expectations of users accustomed to Google.

Law Libraries Reaching for the Sky: Practical Applications of Web 2.0 Technology

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: screencasting rss)

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.

Law library skills for spouses of law students

I'm sure that this is a fairly esoteric topic, but since it's relevant to me - to let you know that I'm on the lookout for guides to law libraries for beginning law students.  I'll post and update as I find them (comments and email welcome).

How to go mobile (from a newspaper point of view)

more in the mobile libraries thread -

here's a story and a research report on suggestions for newspapers in building mobile access to their news and reference content; looks like good reading.

Recently the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) released its development guide for mobile sites. This guide covers mobile content, revenue, and a few case studies.

Considering that the mobile landscape is still undiscovered country for many newspapers, NAA's guide is fairly comprehensive. The case studies focus on mobile sites for the New York Times, Tampa Bay Tribune, Cincinnati Enquirer, and Reuters.

It's not just about smartphones. I was pleased to see e-readers like the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader covered in NAA's research. These devices use a special electronic paper technology with very low power consumption (measuring battery life in days, not hours).

As seen on Poynter Online, via read20-l.

Casey Bisson on Scriblio (from CODE4LIB)

Casey gave this talk this spring at CODE4LIB - it's a rapid fire introduction to the Scriblio catalog, which is built on top of Wordpress.

"Send via text message or email" at Iowa City Public Library

Part of my mobile libraries series - and noted on a comment by Jason from the Iowa City Public Library on Jenny Levine's The Shifted Librarian blog:

The Iowa City Public Library has a "send via text message or email" button on their III catalog. It lets you send details of holdings status to your phone or inbox, and you'll note that when the library has holdings at multiple branches or multiple copies at one branch you can pick which one you want to be told about. That's important because otherwise there might not be enough space in a small message to get enough detail to get you to the right floor or the right stack.

Library and information school syllabus collection, 2008

It's back to school time, which means for some people it's back to or off to library school (or information school, depending on your place).

Here's a spot to collect a syllabus for any class that's interesting, to see what it is that people are being taught in school these days (and if you are lucky, to help shape that!)  It's incomplete but I hope to add to it.

LIS 753: Internet Fundamentals and Design (Kate Marek, Dominican GSLIS)

LIS 753 is an introduction to the fundamentals of the Internet, including its origins, evolution, current state, and future. Critical Internet issues such as privacy, copyright, and other related topics will be examined. Students will have a basic understanding of Web content languages and the Internet as a result of this course. Pre-requisites are 701 and 703.

INLS 490-154: Introduction to Information Retrieval System Design and Implementation (Chirag Shah, UNC)

Tools for organizing and accessing information have become indispensable. It is critical, therefore, to understand their design and operational foundations. In this course students will have an opportunity to learn about search engines, web crawling, and some Web 2.0 technologies based on hands-on experience and with a focus on techniques that can be used to access, retrieve, organize, and present information. Students will work with practical developmental tools and learn relevant concepts through experimentation. For instance, students will employ an open source search engine and learn about indexing, retrieving, and ranking techniques.

Comm 182/282: Virtual Communities / Social Media (Howard Rheingold, Stanford)

Instead of a fixed syllabus, the instructor is providing an annotated list of suggested readings. Each student is still expected to spend four hours each week reading in preparation for each weekly class meeting, but the student teaching teams chose each week's readings for the entire class from the instructor's list. Students are encouraged to add and/or substitute their own texts (which can include links to videos and other media) -- but must justify their addition/substitution in the context of the class theme -- identity and presentation of self, community, roots and visions of social cyberspace, networks -- social and technical, collective action, public sphere, social capital, virtual community and real life. Entire class theme categories can be added and/or substituted, but must be justified to the instructor in advance.

Communication, Media, & Society, ICM/JRN 522, Alexander Halavais, Quinnipiac University

The catalog description for this course is as follows:    

This course focuses on the historical and contemporary state of personal     and public interaction with popular media in the context of technological     developments and the impact of these developments on society and culture.     Students completing this course will study journal articles, survey the     research literature, and write papers on the historical trajectory of     information consumption from the emergence of mass-produced paper-     based texts to the development of the World Wide Web.

This has always struck me as an impossibly broad description. The advantage to this is that it allows some flexibility in what we focus on, and in previous versions of this course, I have successfully turned the planning of the course—to a greater or lesser degree—over to the participants in the seminar. (See the end of this document for a statement on the philosophy surrounding this approach to organizing the course.) Therefore, this initial syllabus is really only a temporary skeleton, to be fleshed out collaboratively on our first meeting. It is hosted on Google Docs, and we will be editing it on our first meeting. What is listed here initially is the “immutables”—things that due to the structure of the university, my own standards, or the description of the course must remain fairly strictly defined.

(more welcomed!)

Multilingual library catalogs for libraries of the world

A short conversation with Alejandro Garza from Tecnológico de Monterrey (itesm.mx) prompted a look at the design of library systems that handle multilingual collections and multilingual user populations.  He writes in a post Creating a Multilingual OPAC

Do you have students that speak different languages (say spanish, german, english) visiting your Library? Do you offer an OPAC in different language? Do you do keep subject headings in different languages in your MARC records?

As we are trying to build a new OPAC based on Drupal, and our users are coming more and more from other countries, what should we do?

It turns out that as Drupal has some great functionality for multilingual content, as well as doing some of that for categories. You can set up "automatic" translation for certain phrases (you tell Drupal to, say, always translate the english phrase "Chemical Engineering" for the spanish equivalent "Ingeniería Química"), and it just goes and translates wherever there´s a complete phrase (and case-sensitive) match.

One way around this issue, at least from a display side, is to use an external translation system.  The Ann Arbor District Library home page translated into Spanish by Google is probably not a shining gem of Spanish prose, but it allows some level of access to the collection in any of the languages that Google supports.  You still have to know the English words to search.

A quick search turned up several more systems: the E-Cats Multilingual OPAC catalog from Japan searchable in Japanese and English; Ryukoku University with search in both Kanji and Pinyin for Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and English materials; a paper by W Schallier on a multilingual search at KU Leuven in Belgium.

The most thorough survey of multilingual web sites that appeared is this report on multilingualism from the Minerva project in Europe. I won't be spoiling it by saying that it's illustrated with this Bruegel painting of the Tower of Babel.