Superpatron

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

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

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.

Google Librarian Central weblog launches

Google has a new Google Librarian Central blog going, written by their librarian outreach team. They're aiming it at

the vast majority of you heard about the Librarian Newsletter and Librarian Central website through listservs or blogs run by fellow librarians and other colleagues. (We hope you'll also tell your colleagues and friends about the new Librarian Central blog). You also told us where you work: mainly in university and school libraries, followed closely by public and special libraries.

of course, a few patrons will be listening in....

Technorati Tags: google, superpatron, library, librarian

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.