June 2012
2 posts
8 tags
Steve Kolowich, "Studies shed more light on... →
Pull quote: “Consistent with earlier ERIAL findings, the students in the new study tended to use every tool’s search function box as though it were a Google search box. And they tended not to adjust the default settings.
Therefore, the efficacy of each discovery tool often depends on how well the criteria written into the default search algorithm of that particular tool accords with the criteria...
5 tags
Jon Udell, "Calendars in the Cloud: No More Copy... →
Pull quote: “The notion that the URL points to a data feed is another major conceptual hurdle. If you need something from me, a million years of evolution taught us how that must work. I hand it over to you. If I also need the thing that you need, then I make a copy, hand over the copy, and keep the original. When the thing in question is a chunk of information we reify it as an exchangeable...
May 2012
84 posts
2 tags
Mita Williams, "Collective action for ebook... →
4 tags
Jason Griffey, "Heresy and Patron Data," Pattern... →
Pull quote: “Because when I think about what other thing of value that libraries have that could potentially be traded to publishers in order to get an equivalent set of value back from them in the way of ebook rights, I keep coming back to one thing:
Information. Information about our patrons, information about our circulations of individual books, and demographic information about our...
6 tags
Mita Williams, "My god, it's filled with lists!"... →
Pull quote: “I asked the question again, ‘Which one of these is the University of Michigan’s Libraries Psychology page?’ Instead of answering the question, I barrelled straight to my recommendation: libraries should merge library subject guides into library subject pages so there are only two primary ways to explore subjects: by searching and by browsing.”
Love of the Creative Commons People →
3 tags
Jill Cirasella, "Take our poster, please!," Open... →
Pull quote: “For Brooklyn College’s Faculty Day Conference this week, a few colleagues and I made a poster illustrating just that predatory behavior and introducing open access as an alternative. But we didn’t make the poster for in-house use only! No, we want to share the files with you. Change them a little or a lot and use them for your educational campaigns about open access!”
4 tags
Abigail Gogen, "Open Access Tenure: A Letter to... →
Pull quote: “What changes are coming with the tenure process to reflect this commitment? Will there be recognition that authors may have chosen OA over a Big Name? Does the administration openly support this? Are there any altmetric considerations of impact being considered?”
3 tags
Andy Burkhardt, "Ask The Right Questions,"... →
Pull quote: “If questions like these are the ones that guide our thinking we’ll do extraordinary things. These questions aren’t trying to solve problems or even merely discover what we are already doing. These questions paint an optimum vision of the future and propel us towards it. Instead of trying to solve problems, put out fires, or simply stay afloat we are asking how can we create the...
8 tags
Matt Enis, "Library of Congress Announces Modeling... →
Pull quote: “The Library of Congress (LOC) has contracted with Zepheira, a semantic web development company, to accelerate the launch of its Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative (BFTI). A major goal of BFTI is to replace the MARC 21 exchange format with a new Linked Data model.”
5 tags
Paul Deschner, "Quality Rules," The Harvard... →
Pull quote: “One of the primary challenges in this work is getting data describing books and periodicals (catalog records) to relate to data from non-library sources, such as data about book talks on YouTube or to NPR broadcasts of author interviews or to archival collections. It’s all about connections in the data. The barer the data, the less described it is, the more it falls flat.”
4 tags
Fred von Lohmann, "Transparency for copyright... →
Pull quote: “For this launch we’re disclosing data dating from July 2011, and moving forward we plan on updating the numbers each day. As you can see from the report, the number of requests has been increasing rapidly. These days it’s not unusual for us to receive more than 250,000 requests each week, which is more than what copyright owners asked us to remove in all of 2009. In the past...
4 tags
Alexis Madrigal, "How Google Can Beat Facebook... →
Pull quote: “But think about Scholar as a latent social network. Each paper contains its own social network that Google already crawls. Every bibliography is filled with other social networks. And people searching Google Scholar are likely to be as interested in connecting with the researchers who created those papers as they are with the papers themselves. Why isn’t Google making it...
4 tags
UCSF Implements Open Access Policy →
Pull quote: “The unanimous vote of the faculty senate makes UCSF the largest scientific institution in the nation to adopt an open-access policy and among the first public universities to do so.”
2 tags
Lisa Kurt, "Design 101: design elements, part 1,"... →
3 tags
Brian Herzog, "Library Anytime: Highlighting 24/7... →
Pull quote: “We wanted to create a webpage that really focused attention on all of our library services that patrons can use without having to come into the library. Good idea, right? We went round and round coming up with a name, but eventually settled on Library Anytime.”
2 tags
Tristan Cooke, "Humans in the Design of Door... →
humansindesign:
The best designs speak without words.
Physically, intentionally, or otherwise.
3 tags
Lynda Kellam, "Mad research skillz: Workshop on... →
Pull quote: “Image captioning: I use images a lot in my class, but I would like to do an activity each week where I show an image related to the week’s readings and then ask them to create a caption for it on an index card. This is a different skill from the usual and requires the ability to synthesize information. Plus I can use it as a mini-reading quiz.”
4 tags
Robin Pogebrin, "Changes Planned at N.Y. Public... →
Pull quote: “Despite Mr. Marx’s assurances, the panel’s critics remained skeptical of the plan. ‘Having heard it so eloquently defended,’ Mr. Nasaw said, ‘I’m more than ever convinced that it has to be scrapped or changed.’”
4 tags
Trevor Owens, "The Crowd and The Library," Trevor... →
Pull quote: “I suggest that we think of crowdsourcing not as extracting labor from a crowd, but of a way for us to invite the participation of amateurs (in the non-derogatory sense of the word) in the creation, development and further refinement of public goods.”
7 tags
Chris Bourg, "Library Concierge Project: Initial... →
Pull quote: “To recap, our Library Concierge project is an ambitious initiative designed to promote exceptional public services across the Stanford Libraries, and to empower and equip all staff to provide that service. It refers to both a service perspective and a set of training experiences for all library staff. The training experiences are designed to increase staff familiarity with the...
4 tags
Curt Hopkins, "Future U: Library 3.0 has more... →
Pull quote: “Although many libraries are slow to change, the expectations of today’s children make that change a certainty.”
6 tags
Karen Coyle, "Google goes semantic," Coyle's... →
Pull quote: “We treat library users as if they are all-knowing; as if they know each author in our catalog, as if the title of the book and the number of pages is sufficient for them to decide if it is a good read or has the information they need. This is so obviously false that I am at a loss to explain how we continue to work under this illusion.”
5 tags
Donna Lanclos, "Space Hacking and Student... →
Pull quote: “Now, faculty can choose to despair at the image of students at the end of the semester just figuring out the utility of the practice problems in the back of the textbook. Or, they can choose (as I do) to be struck by the tableau of students teaching students not just the course material, but techniques for success in class, techniques that they can then take out of the current...
3 tags
Lisa Carlucci Thomas, "Library Evangelists: At... →
Pull quote: “Making new contacts at SXSW is critical to this mission. Libraries may choose to outsource expertise to implement new technologies and programs, or bring in technologists and entrepreneurs to enhance library teams. ‘We’re looking to hire,’ says [Eric] Frierson. As more libraries include digital media centers, hacklabs, and maker spaces, so expands the need for...
3 tags
Kevin Smith, "Complexity, Copyright, and... →
Pull quote: “Instead, copyright law tries to balance exclusive rights with exceptions crafted to encourage certain uses of copyrighted materials that are considered particularly beneficial to society. Thus the rights become qualified and the exceptions are larded with rules and requirements that narrow their application. Balance is required for fairness, and fairness inevitably leads to...
4 tags
James Grimmelmann, "Orphan Works and Error Costs,"... →
Pull quote: “If users knew with certainty whether copyright owners would emerge and object to possible uses, there’d be no orphan works problem, because every search would lead either to genuine negotiations or to use without fear of suit. False negatives that expose users to the risk of being sued and copyright owners to mistaken uses; false positives chill use without benefitting copyright...
3 tags
Meredith Farkas, "Setting Priorities," Information... →
Pull quote: “I don’t know if there have been studies on this, but it would be interesting to figure out at which level does it make the most sense to provide face-to-face instruction and at what level would students benefit most from learning objects. It seems like most suites of learning objects designed to replace face-to-face instruction happen at the Freshman level, but that might just...
5 tags
Jon Udell, "The Web Is the Cloud's API," Cloudline... →
Pull quote: “If you drill all the way down to an individual item of data, though, you’ll get the same result either way. Lindsay Shonteff’s name, for example, has ‘its own homepage’ in Netflix’s web of data. Here is its URL: http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/People(85334)/Name/$value In this case the mechanism for ‘automatically providing a hypertext view’ of the...
3 tags
We Made Some Matches, Lighting Them is Up To You →
Pull quote: “If you want to reward creators who made the books that you love instead of feeding a voracious supply chain that manages to spit a few pennies of royalties to an author for every $14.99 out of your pocket, then now is the time to send a message to that publishing establishment.”
5 tags
Gary Price, "What ProQuest’s Udini Means for... →
Pull quote: “The bottom line is that much of this material is available free through public libraries. The existence of a market for Udini may further expose libraries’ failure to market their database resources adequately (attend LJ’s upcoming webcast on this subject), not to mention to let the public know that many articles are available free on the web at the library or at home.”
3 tags
Annie Jo Cain, "Awesome Box Pilot," The Harvard... →
Pull quote: “The Harvard community now has the chance to declare something Awesome. Just by dropping it in a box. Amazing, useful and entertaining library materials can now be returned to the Awesome Boxes in Widener and Lamont.”
4 tags
Marie Kennedy, "thinking beyond the... →
Pull quote: “the e-resources world is a fragile ecosystem because we rely so heavily on a variety of data sources (e-journal and e-book MARC records likely come from different suppliers, holdings information from possibly another supplier) and services (openURL, statistics reporting), and having those merge seamlessly with our e-resources management system relies on quality metadata. if any...
6 tags
Beverly Goldberg, "Open Access Spreads to Miami... →
Pull quote: “‘The adoption of this policy will allow librarians here to gain first-hand knowledge of how facets of open access work, which will greatly improve our outreach efforts to faculty on campus,’ said Jen Waller, interdisciplinary research librarian and chair of the Libraries’ Scholarly Communication Working Group.”
7 tags
Andy Baio, "Criminal Creativity: Untangling Cover... →
Pull quote: “But there’s something strange about this begging-for-forgiveness approach to copyright. It’s like driving without traffic signs, only finding out you broke the law when you’re pulled over. The real question: Why is it illegal in the first place? Cover songs on YouTube are, almost universally, non-commercial in nature. They’re created by fans, mostly...
4 tags
T. Mills Kelly, "Serial Killers, Beer, and Lies... →
Pull quote: “As with the previous incarnation of the course, the students all walked away from the course with a firm belief that research counts and that accepting whatever you find online at first glance is a bad policy. I was really pleased to see that they extended this lesson beyond the Internet to pretty much all historical sources. As one student said to me, from now on she was going...
4 tags
Bonnie Swoger, "Wikipedia + Journal articles,"... →
Pull quote: “Researchers can put another line on their resumes indicating the original published article, while also contributing to the public knowledge available on Wikipedia, reaching a wider audience than the original journal article. And the topic pages are not that different than a typical review article, a concept that tenure and promotion committees are already familiar with. The...
9 tags
Jennifer Howard, "Long-Awaited Ruling in Copyright... →
Pull quote: “One part of the ruling could be problematic for librarians and others trying to work out fair-use policies in academe. Judge Evans proposed a 10-percent rule to guide decisions about what constitutes fair use in an educational setting. For books without chapters or with fewer than 10 chapters, ‘unpaid copying of no more than 10 percent of the pages in the book is...
3 tags
Aaron Schmidt, "Consider the Checkout Slip,"... →
Pull quote: “Just remember: the details matter, especially when these checkout slips are the most visible output of your library that most users will see.”
3 tags
Robert Darnton, "In Defense of the New York Public... →
Pull quote: “Even if that money could be found, however, the underground stacks would soon be filled. No research library can expand its collections indefinitely without shifting an increasing proportion of them to offsite storage. The Library of Congress, Harvard, Yale, and the University of California have learned to accept that hard reality, and all house depositories located miles away...
10 tags
Barbara Fister, "The GSU E-Reserves Decision:... →
Pull quote: “It’s worth noting that of the five infringing uses, four were from SAGE publications, and SAGE is the only one of the three plaintiffs that licensed permissions routinely for all of their books. There is now every incentive for publishers to assume all rights, leaving authors with little but the privilege of being published, and make payments slick and easy. It also...
6 tags
Dave Pattern, "A week on Summon (revisited),"... →
Pull quote: “I guess the big question here is why the disconnect between the ‘students don’t use facets’ mantra and the actual usage data?”
10 tags
James Grimmelmann, "Inside the Georgia State... →
Pull quote: “My bottom line on the case is that it’s mostly a win for Georgia State and mostly a loss for the publishers. The big winner is CCC. It gains leverage against universities for coursepack and e-reserve copying with a bright-line rule, and it gains leverage against publishers who will be under much more pressure to participate in its full panoply of licenses.”
9 tags
Karen Coyle, "RDA, DBMS, RDF," Coyle's InFormation →
Pull quote: “It is possible that we can skip the relational database phase of our data development and move directly into a semantic web model. However, to think that data created following RDA instructions, which is not even suitable for a relational database, could be made usable on the semantic web without major modifications is simply wrong. If we create a bibliographic framework that...
4 tags
Alex Verstak, "Our New Modern Look," Google... →
Pull quote: “The new modern look brings you improved aesthetics and easier access to frequently used search features. You can now search for recent papers with a single click in the sidebar. You can access advanced search features (for example: search by author) without leaving the search results page by clicking the arrow in the right of the search box.”
3 tags
Matthew Reidsma, "Single Sign on with EZProxy:... →
Pull quote: “Now we’ve managed to use EZProxy to log into a system we built, which means our users don’t have to remember 13 different passwords to do their jobs. It also means we have a lot less code to worry about, since EZProxy does the heavy lifting for us.”
3 tags
Lane Wilkinson, "Librarians are experts on... →
Pull quote: “A librarian need not be an expert on the subject matter at hand to be a reliable source for knowledge. We just have to provide and guarantee an ‘appropriate connection’ to the knowledge in question so that patrons are connected to knowledge in the appropriate way. Though I may not know a thing about computational whatchamacallit, I can provide a student with the...