Stephen Francoeur's Commonplace Book

Pull quote: “Discovery is not the tool for every task. Controlled vocabularies don’t federate well, and the student asking very specific questions of the literature is better off going straight to the disciplinary index. Known item searches proceeding from partial information are a recurrent challenge. We must be careful with the way we describe the scale of discovery to students. In our attempts to market discovery as convenient and easy, we may in fact be selling them on a product that doesn’t exist. In the absence of a clear purpose, convenience is not convenient.”

Pull quote: “The librarians, facing stiff and seemingly insurmountable competition, found a mechanism that takes advantage of the library’s Achilles’ heel, that makes a virtue of its anti-virtuality. My local library is bricks and mortar. It’s a very actually place in a very real world. This allows it to stage events that matter in ways that digital experiences cannot.”

Pull quote: “The much-tweeted news from the conference was that some publishers are realizing that DRM is frustrating their customers and may be counterproductive. You really didn’t have to go to a conference for that insight. We’ve been telling you that for quite a while. The most puzzling thing I’ve encountered in tweets from the conference, though, is the gee-golly enthusiasm for hot new things: discovery is key! Metadata is awesome! And, hey, sharing information about readers would be really swell!”

Pull quote: “Art, architecture and design centers in colleges and universities have begun creating material libraries that rival the depth and usefulness of book libraries.”

Pull quote: “In the instant cost-benefit analysis I do every time I see a QR code, it has yet to make sense for me to fire up the decoder app I have installed on my phone.”

Pull quote: “Develop and deploy the killer app for Federated Searching — something that would allow for search and retrieval across all the various silos of content (Library Catalog, licensed databases, e-book packages, digitized collections, etc., etc.); AND would have an awesome interface that would make sorting through the inevitable massive results lists intuitive and intelligent. (Note: I think there is tremendous potential for Linked Data to eliminate the need for federated searching; but that is a very, very, long term project.)”

Pull quote: “You can’t really plan for a launch. Things always happen that you don’t expect. It helps to have had a good night’s rest, but other than that…”

Pull quote: “In short, the Code doesn’t provide answers; it provides tools that help librarians ask the right questions.”

Details on the announcement by the Modern Language Association’s opposition to the Research Works Act.

Pull quote: “Despite its well-meaning mission, the code is not devoid of controversial statements: It says explicitly that it was not negotiated with rights holders. Mr. Butler said the group chose not to include them because negotiations between rights holders and professional communities often result in what he called ‘really weak tea.’ The groups usually only agree on principles that scratch the surface of what they really believe, he said. And the librarians thought it was essential to articulate some common fair-use principles, even if there are risks involved.”