I'm in the Powerlabs Community!

Powerlabs is the playground for Powerset, a natural language search engine company. Like so many other companies, right now, they are trying to mash up huge vats of full text with some kind of linguistic knowledgebase to produce a search engine that does more than keyword searching. They opened up to beta testers recently and I applied.

They have a very interesting and extremely well done site. Members get 'karma' points for making comments, having their suggestions implemented and so on. You have to vote on the results of any search you do before you can do another search. You vote on other people's comments, etc. The point is it encourages people to participate. OK, it encourages a certain kind of person to participate. People who are so competitive that they'll go all out for something as insubstantial as extra karma points. :~)

Right now I'm ranked #8303 of 8342 community members and I have a 4 karma. I'll report more as I explore.

Why doesn't everything work like google?

Here's a rant about how movies make it look like all computers should be easy to use--anyone can just walk up and use it:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/film-ui-bloopers.html

Interesting catalogs & mea culpa

I've not written here in waaaay too long. It finally dawned on me that a lot of what I would normally post on Scrapple I've been adding to a library wiki we have here on public interface issues. So I've just picked up what's currently in our 'interesting catalogs' section and pasted it here for your entertainment. We're really on the OPACS suck jag -- at least I am. (but n.b., catalogs have lots of cool structured data)

A friend from Texas directed me to the WordPress OPAC (WOPAC). It's kind of a cool idea. Although these days I'm more in the put links in Google and Amazon camp than I am fix the OPAC. What do you think?

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For your consideration

• Pine -- Georgia Libraries Public Information Network....like browsing the catalog; offers several suggestions for where to go when you didn't get many hits and ways to refine your search; faceting.
  
  
• NCSU -- Endeca front end to their now famous catalog http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/catalog/
  
  
• Queens Library -- http://aqua.queenslibrary.org/ It uses Aquabrowser http://www.medialab.nl/
  
  
• Howard County Public Library -- It uses Aquabrowser and has a visual search display (sometimes)
  
  
• Rochester University Library -- separate search area for videos -- http://www.library.rochester.edu/index.cfm?page=videos
  
  
• The catalog that puts SFX data in the record [University of Huddersfield|http://library.hud.ac.uk/catlink/bib/396146/cls/]
  
  
• University of Canterbury http://library.canterbury.ac.nz/
  
  • customized new title list with many options
    
  • subject portal (one place to find all kinds of information)
    
  • catalog tutorial in HIP (find help where is needed)
  
  
• Hennepin County Library
  
  
  • author alerts (how about subject alerts?)
    
  • new title list by format
    
  • different styles for different audience (check the kids and teen pages, we can have different portal for undergraduate and graduate)
  
  
• Harford County Public Library http://www.hcplonline.info/
  


• separate tab for audio, movie & music (how about dissertation?)


• Evergreen -- open source catalog from the Georgia libraries
  
• Penn State uses tabs to show brief and full record, also they use SFX to display holdings http://cat.libraries.psu.edu/
  
• WOPAC -- an opac that uses WordPress! Very simple, very interesting. The more I look at this the more I like it.
  

h5. Library projects using SOLR
|SOLR is an open source project that does similar to what Endeca/NCSU does. It has not yet been used for a large scale library, but is being used for several 'digital initiatives' type projects.

http://peel.library.ualberta.ca/index.html
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