Automatically resolving OpenURLs -- any time, any place

Ross Singer at Georgia Tech has put up a powerpoint called WAGging Google Scholar: Localizing & Contextualizing the Web. Have a look. It gives a bit of a frame of reference for the Latent OpenURL concept.

The point is that many users won't come to resources we've licensed through the library's 'front door.' Whether it comes from an A&I service or someone's online bibliography (we're getting RefWorks, you know) or even a weblog--whatever way it comes -- we should be able to get our readers to the right copy or to our ILL form.

We need to find a way to use our OpenURL technology regardless of the source of the bibliographic citation.

This little guy

is why I've not been blogging much. Isn't he adorable (if I say so myself) :)

http://photos1.blogger.com/img/218/2856/640/IMG_0491.jpg

buckyballs batter bacteria

and they're bad for the environment too. This may be to sciency for scrapple, but I couldn't pass up a good buckyball story:

http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/esthag-w/2005/may/science/rp_nanocrystals.html

FastBit

Word-Aligned Hybrid (WAH) compression method promises to speed up searching of complex and massive amounts of data.

http://crd.lbl.gov/~kewu/fastbit/

Google Library project draws more criticism...

University-Press Group Raises Questions About Google's Library-Scanning Projecthttp://chronicle.com/free/2005/05/2005052301t.htm

The controversy just keeps going, and going, and going...

Google web clips -- yawn

If you've got GMail you can now add rss or atom feeds as a one-line windowette above your in-box. It's really kind of weird.

It isn't a feed. But then they don't claim that it is.
It isn't what Bloglines calls clips either. That's a kind of virtual verticle file of clips you want to keep.

This is just a one line above the in-box. It shows one feed entry at a time.
You get to other entries using the arrow keys to the right. With those you 'scroll' through through your list of feeds one entry at a time. And they don't even show all the entries for each feed together. First you see an entry for feed1, then an entry for feed 2 and so on. Arghh.

To my mind this misses one of the best features of feeds. With this you can't see a whole bunch of entries for a feed at one time. A drop-down like live book marks would be much better.

Back to the drawing board, boys and girls.

evil twins

No, not some cheesy USA movie...I heard about this a while back, but was reminded about it again on CNN Headlines last night:

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/01/20/evil.twins/

From the "You've gotta be kidding" column

Microsoft is going to offer an anti-virus software service. Think they'll use the revenues to make their operating system more secure against viruses?

mSpace

The School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton in the UK has developed a tool that attempts to combine the best of the features of the iTunes interface with the best of the features of the Google interface. The result is mSpace http://mspace.fm/.

Another Google story

More Than 100 Colleges Work With Google to Speed Campus Users to Library Resources

http://chronicle.com/free/2005/05/2005051101t.htm

More info from govt

Most popular baby names. Thanks to Social Security Administration.

It's amazing, sometimes, just how much of what we know comes from gov't reports and documents.

Not that there's anything wrong with it...

RedLigthGreen now has ads. The page I saw had an ad for The Gap.

It's odd how RLG always approaches things more like a public library than a research library.

AutoOpenURL resolver

Openly Informatics has come up with this very cool Firefox extension. It can call up your OpenURL resolver from any web page (i.e., ciatation coming from somewhere that isn't an sfx source!) as long as the citation follows the LatentOpenURL format, a proposal for this standard is being discussed on the GCS-PCS Listserv.

• Read about the extension here.
  
  
• Download it here.
  You'll need our SFX address info. It's something like http://sfx.library.jhu.edu:8000/jhu_sfx [I'm sending this posting to Nathan in the hope that he will post a comment with the correct address.]
  Give the link a name you'll recognize (like 'What does this button do?')
  


• Try it out here
  This is an open access journal whose references have been re-written as LatentOpenURLs. Here's what you do.
  
  
  1. Find an article in this journal
     
  2. Go to the reference page of that article
     
  3. Click on any article cited in the references
  
  All references in this journal have been Latent OpenURL-enabled. So you should see a link below the citation. The link will have the name you gave it -- Like 'What does this button do?'
  

enjoy

Making links

MakingLinks is very interesting blog with lots of stuff about SFX, linking, and using Refworks. For example there's a piece with links to info on how to make SFX link directly to dissertations.

(I'm told JH has licensed RefWorks for the institution and is just waiting to announce until they have it working with JHED).

Virtualization

It's one of the rare moments these days when Jonathan is sound asleep and I'm still awake...

Anyway, I was reading this interesting online article about Xen and the idea of virtualization. I think it's a pretty interesting & good idea.

Putting the Hyper back in HTML

Check out Liquid Information. They are committed to makomg online texts more interactive. Right now they have a way to make a menu pop-up when you pass the cursor over a word. You can highlight, search for the word or phrase elsewhere in the doc or look up the meaning of a word.

This is exactly what I've always wanted for reading history books. There are countless Dukes of Cornwall. When you're reading you can lose track of which one the author is referring to. You could also use it to bring up maps or census data or genealogies, hear the word spoken.

Finding GooglePrint books

In Search Engine Watch Gary Price explains explains how to finnegle Google to search only for GooglePrint books

1. Manipulate the results after a search
   • Run a search from any Google web search form using the word "books" before your search term. For example, books california
   • A OneBox near the top of the results page will offer up to three book choices. Pick any one of the three results, and click on it, such as this example.
   • At the bottom of the page, you'll see a search box allowing you to search "all books."
   Or
   
2. Use this as your search URL http://print.google.com/print?q= and then add your search terms
   
   
   
   

Search the catalog with a Firefox extension

Those folks at Waubonsee Community College's Todd Library are doing some very cool work in their catalog.

• They have a Firefox extension that does a Z39.50 search of their catalog.
• Catalog entries have a Map button that takes you to a map of the floor where the item should be.
• And, oh yeah, some of the entries include cover images.

But wait, there's more. They have several RSS feeds available via the RSS icon in the lower right hand corner.

At first I figured that it was a wealthy city but the census says the median income for 2000 is $83,332. Just interesting people doing nifty work. Go figure.

See the Shifted Librarian for more stuff like this

Prestige economy V money economy

In another salvo of the digital culture wars, six EU countries have developed a plan to create a Euroepan digital library a la Google digitization project. Their goal is to make 4.5M works available electronically lest important European literature be lost to future generations (and yes, I see the irony in digitzation for preservation.)

Of course this will cost many Euros.

"Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker warned the Comedie Francaise meeting that such a massive project would only be possible if sufficient funding was made available."

Before going too far they might want to talk to Hopkins' David Bell about how much of that European literature is going to be part of Google's digitization project. They could probably save significant costs by only digitizing titles not already in the Google project. Of course, then, Google & the Anglo-American libraries would hold the only digital copies and I guess that wouldn't be acceptable either.

++NOTE+++++++++++
In WHAT THE INTERNET IS DOING TO SCHOLARSHIP: The Bookless Future Bell makes the point that the Google project has tons of non Anglo-American content. I've seen it in .pdf and it's very thoughtful. Unfortunately I can't find a real link to an online version because it's from The New Republic Online and we don't seem to subscribe. sigh

Not Scrapple but...

I just want to say that it's truly sad that the the BBC site lists the top American stories as:

Blast strikes UK consulate in US

US prosecutors rest Jackson case

Mexico drops mayor charges

US soldier forced to change plea

I don't know if it reflects more poorly on us or them.

Wireless as a city service? -- can you say TVA?

Another article on city-wide wireless access. Some cities don't want to wait for the for-profit providers to get around to doing this. In some cases they see lack of ubiquitous wireless as a block on economic progress. Businesses might not stay in your city if you can't provide access.

"We look at this as another utility just like water, sewer, parks and recreation, that our communities should have," said St. Cloud, Florida, Mayor Glen Sangiovanni, who hopes to provide free wireless service to the entire city by the fall.

Needless to say the commercial providers are not happy. Some states have passed laws banning cities from doing this.

Apparently the feds are making this easier by providing funds for cities to upgrade emergency communication systems (homeland security) and the jump to wireless for the people is not that expensive from there.

Once again we find that intentions don't always match up with intended consequences. Think National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956 and the critical role that the Interstate Highway plays in the national economy now. (oh yeah, and think of the role that standards have played in making possible. plus que ca change)

**I can't seem to get a link in the title so ... See wikipedia on TVA

A New World of Wireless at Dartmouth

Copy and pasted from the Chronicle's wired newsletter:

A New World of Wireless: By this fall, Dartmouth College may have the most advanced wireless network of any institution in the country. The college is completing a four-year project that combines its Internet, telephone, and cable systems in one wireless network -- a move that campus officials say will cut maintenance and hardware costs. (The New York Times)Read more about the switch by Dartmouth and other colleges to Internet-based telephones in an article from The Chronicle, by Dan Carnevale.

Personal Info Mgmt -- after bookmarks

Google is great for the huge collection of web pages on the Internetweb but it's not for people to manage their own info.

Net Snippets isn't for scholars but it's another interesting tool for going beyond bookmarks to collect resources on the web. Seems like there is more and more of this sort of thing out there.

News feeds in Gmail

Gmail is beginning to provide it's users with a news feed at the top of the page.

Here's a screenshot of what it looks like.

Time Traveller Convention

http://web.mit.edu/adorai/timetraveler/

Software Sorts Scholarly Searches

From the Chronicle blog:

http://wiredcampus.chronicle.com/2005/05/software_sorts_.html

Thanks for all the fish

OK, it's not really scrapple-worthy but I really like this book, couldn't do my collection development without Babelfish and worry a bit about how its verbal humor will translate to the screen.

Municiple Broad Band Initiative Map

CNET's map of Government-sponsored projects to provide fiber-optic or wireless networks and efforts to legislate the issue in state capital. Check out Montana & South Dakota. North Dakota at least has Fargo.

Google news patents credibility ranking system

A great idea? Slippery slope? More difficult than it might seem?

Google will give a credibility index to news reports based on

• number of stories from all news sources
• average story length in that article's source
  
• number with bylines
• number of the bureaux cited (sic)
• long they have been in business
• number of staff
• volume of internet traffic to its website
• number of countries accessing the site

OK, so now the question is: Which source gets a higher score--NPR, Fox, NBC, ABC, C-SPAN, Al Jazeera, BBC, San Jose Mercury, Slashdot?

And they could also rank "sales and services could in the future be listed on the basis of price and the reputation of the company involved."

Shibboleth article

In an article in Ariadne Simon McLeish describes the experience of Shibboleth installation in a Higher Education environment, and suggests ways to make this experience more user-friendly.

1 + 1 > 2--or Gather locally, share globally

Two developing web-based systems have a potential to produce an incredible synergy.

1. Social bookmarking for academics:
   • CiteULike: Richard Cameron designed an built it in November 2004 and has run privately since then. camster@citeulike.org
     
   • Connotea: from Nature Publishing
     
   • biologging: Alf Eaton's community website for biomedical researchers. This one has other features but works best with HubMed (it's a really cool alternative interface to NLM's PubMed
     
   This kind of system offers an amazing arena for scholars to share and develop language for describing and locating work in their own areas of study. [I'll spare you the long winded description of theoretical models of contextualization as a social process in the construction of meaning. Trust me, this is amazing.]
   
   A major limitation of these services is that they do not easily capture bibliographic information about the references collected (author, title, sources, date, etc.). All of this information is invaluable for the more sophisticated search needs of academics. I might want, for example, to view only those articles written before 1999. Also, getting a bunch of links to articles on a web page is only half the battle. Eventually I'll want to use the citations in a paper. I'll need that bibliographic information.
   
   Also, if I attempt to share citation links online I run smack into the old 'appropriate copy' problem. Maybe I point to a version of the article that's on the publisher's web site but your only access is via Academic Search Premier.
   
   
2. Latent OpenURLs
   OpenURLs can, in theory solve both problems. They can capture that bibliographic data in a rule-governed format that makes harvesting bibliographic information a relatively straightforward process. And they include an element that refers to a link resolver.
   
   Unfortunately, as they are most often generated now, OpenURLs bind the bibliographic information with identification of a specific link resolving systems that cannot, by definition, be relevant or useful to all readers. That is, to use OpenURLs I have to find a way to make them point to the right link resolver for different readers.
   
   Latent OpenURLs come to the rescue. They provide a means for embedding metadata via OpenURL specs in regular HTML code without specifying the particular link resolving system to be called upon. Instead a reader's browser can, for example, use a bookmarklet or browser extension with a very simple java script to call the appropriate link resolver from a Latent OpenURL. (This is misleadingly simple. See Daniel Chudnov et al's article on this in issue 43 issue of Ariadne (April 2005) for a full discussion.)

So the social bookmarking manages intellectual access to the resources while Latent OpenURLs provide seamless/transparent linkage to the appropriate version of the resource cited.

Simputer --first computer designed and manufactured in India

Another BBC story, this time about the Amida Simputer, a handheld computing device that was launched today. It was designed in India and manufacturing of it was supported by the Indian government. I remember reading about this a number of years ago and then nothing.

The basic version of the device ncludes:

• monochrome screen
• 206 MHz processor
• 64 MB memory
• microphone
• speaker
• battery that lasts for 6 hours or more
  

Costs around $250 and is intended to bring the Internet to India's rural population. It runs on Linux and can handle handwriting in Hindi and Kannada. How cool is that.

Read about their view of universal access.

Ultra-thin clients--light and cheap

BBC has a story today about an ultra-thin client product developed by a not-for-profit company, Ndiyo.

"The sub-£100 box, called Nivo, runs on open-source software and is known as a "thin client". Several can be linked up to a central "brain", or server.

Thin clients are not new, but advances have made them more user-friendly."
(£100 is about $190 today)

The product is called NIVO (Network In Video Out). It's a small device (12 X 8 X 2 cm or 4.75 X 3.15 X .75 inches) and that encases just a little more than ports for ethernet, monitor, keyboard & mouse. The next upgrade is planned to add sound and local USB ports. The more distant goal is to make NIVO a chip that goes in a monitor.

Ndiyo's vision for a networking architecture that it becoms "more affordable and sustainable, especially for the developing world." Have a look at their vision/presentation of the product.

Rise of blogs in academia?

"PH.Dotcom
What if professors could lecture 24-7? Blog culture invades academia."

From the Village Voice.

Forget wireless

It's not WAN, it's not LAN, it's HAN!

RedTacton is a new Human Area Networking technology that uses the surface of the human body as a safe, high speed network transmission path.

I can't tell if this is real or a send up.

Coincidence?

We're likely to roll out Windows XP for staff workstations in the next week or two.
Today I found two postings that might be related:

• New Windows operating system should be available on Monday
• Dilbert

RSS feeds for Connotea --a social bookmarking project

Connotea provides RSS feeds for individual accounts. If you want to see an example, I have put a number of citations in my Connotea account and the feed is http://www.connotea.org/rss/user/smwoodson.

RFID in hospitals--it's not just for packages anymore

The Klinikum Saarbrücken in Germany is launching a trial that will tag 1,000 people with plastic wristbands with embedded RFIDs.

Google Print and the Brits

From Susan: http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/05/issue/feature_library.asp

"The Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford in England is the only place you are likely to find an Ethernet port that looks like a book. Built into the ancient bookcases dominating the oldest wing of the 402-year-old library, the brown plastic ports share shelf space with handwritten catalogues of the university’s medieval manuscripts and other materials."

Man, that's better than our plain black tags. I wonder who did their graphics.

And, by the way, yes, they do still have some of their books chained to the shelf. There's cognitive dissonance for you--Chained books and ethernet ports on the same shelf.

Telnet

Do you remember the good ol' days of control C, control O, control X and Control P?

http://www.diamondbackonline.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/04/19/4264981e6163a

I used this in grad school. Univ of Michigan has since phased it out and moved to a web-based e-mail program that has something to do with a squirell. This is funny if you know the library professor (who went to school at Hopkins) and feeds a squirell named Bucky and leaves her office window so he can come in and eat when she's out.

Knuckle-heads at Intel stage scavenger hunt

The Chronicle reports that they made an offer on eBay of $10K for a copy of the issue of the issue of Electronics, where Moore published his famous 'law'. Some libraries have already lost their copies, some have had issues cut out of bound sets, while others are locking theirs up.

Intel's defense? "Mr. High, the Intel spokesman, says the company didn't know about other options for finding the journal..." Who do you think they asked? Another example of people thinking that if they know a lot about one thing they know a lot about everything. Arghhh.

Sue V reports that she got our copy from Gilman last Friday and it's now in the Cage.

Two interesting RFID stories

RFID: getting under your skin: http://money.cnn.com/2004/08/05/commentary/ontechnology/rfid/

RFID vulnerable to hacking: http://www.rfidgazette.org/security/

More with Google maps

Now you can get sattelite images. Check out this one

Jeekers, what's wrong with 'validation service'?

RLG has announced a service for checking the quality of your EAD encoding. They are calling it an "EAD Report Card".

They plan to make it open source so you can download to your desktop for faster analysis.

Connotea

Hey, give a look at Connotea. It's marketed as social bookmarking but seems a nice way to keep references (to materials that are available electronically) at hand any time you need them. You can see who else has linked to an article and, you can look at their tags and even exchange comments.

Here's the announcement in March's D-Lib In-Briefs

Social bookmarking articles

The April edition of D-Lib has two articles about social bookmarking and a brief editorial on "Personalized Information Organization". Looks very interesting.

In a msg to gcs-pcs, Tony Hammond, who one of the authors working on social bookmarking, writes:

These papers describe the current state of play with respect to the new crop of web-based bookmark managers - tools such as del.icio.us and Flickr are well-known exemplars of the genre. These papers describe how such tools can be specialized as web-based reference managers.... Bookmarked references can be shared with other users and can be publicly commented upon. In fact, whole discussion threads can be built up around individual bookmarked references. (The papers are set up as living examples with their own reference lists available online both for comment and further additions.) Import/export opportunities within Connotea include RSS and RIS - support for other formats is under development.

I love the idea that del.icio.us and Flickr are "well-known exemplars."

Latent OpenURLs -- standards are about to be proposed

Have a look at Eric Hellman (Openly Informatics) draft of a proposal developing standards for Latent OpenURLs at http://www.openly.com/openurlref/latent.html. The idea is to create a standard for embedding OpenURL metadata into plain HTML.

To make a Latent OpenURL in an HTML document, put an OpenURL into the "href" attribute of an HTML anchor ("a") tag with class (or maybe rel) attribute set to "Z3988" [the NISO OpenURL standard is Z39.88-2004 -- dump the punctuation and the year and you have Z3988]

This proposal grew out of a discussion on the gcs-pcs list about developing a bookmarklet for a simple appropriate-resolver prototype. Having a convention for embedding OpenURLs in plain HTML makes it easier to develop schemes (bookmarklets, plug ins, whatever) for activating the URL to call a link resover server. Should be of interest to publishers of various sorts.

It looks as if the folks on gcs-pcs are about ready to go public (goal is 1 May) so, if you want to get two cents in, or if you'd just like to get a clearer understanding of what this is all about. I recommend Eric's draft.

The 7% solution

"Just 7 percent of adults said they read blogs at least a few times per week, according to the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll."

Now, don't you feel special?

Call me crazy but...

...it strikes me as an odd and ominous coincident that these two stories appeared on the same day:

1. French may have to buy compulsory biometric ID cards
   Plan for compulsary ID card could go into effect in 2007
   


2. LexisNexis data on 310,000 people feared stolen
   Databases had been breached 59 times using stolen passwords, firm say

I just feel there's a message in there that merits attention.

Jabber - Talkie

well, Jabber - Write-ie didn't work.
Jabber is:

• A streaming XML technology mainly used for instant messaging
  
• the Linux of instant messaging
  
• an open, secure, ad-free alternative to consumer IM services like AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo
  

all this from the homepage of The Jabber SoftwareFoundation site

David, what do you think about this kind of software?

SemioTagger and Skyline--EContent Decision-maker Review By Robert J. Boeri in EContent Jan/Feb 2005.

This is a review of the product
"Entrieva SemioTagger and Skyline

Purpose: A categorization and indexing engine and viewer that organizes unstructured text to allow it to be viewed and leveraged as business intelligence.

Starting Price: $75,000 per CPU plus 20% annual maintenance for which you receive SemioTagger, the Entrieva Software Development Toolkit, one Taxonomy Workbench seat, and 27 subject-area taxonomies.
$50,000 more buys Skyline, SemioMap, and SemioDiscovery. "

Usability VS CMS

Applying Usability Principles to Your CMS
By Tony Byrne - March 2005 EContent vol 26, #3.

The article is about CMS usability but there are lots of interestin tidbits. For example

• Stev Krug of Dont' make me think. fame says that User Centered Design "is not an occupation but an approach...so I encourage people to go ahead and practice it without a license"
  
• as projects get larger (more people) the interface needs to get simpler "Put another way, the bigger the project, the less you should spend on a software solution."
  
• one way to judge the usability of a product you are looking to buy is to go to the training sessions for the various products.
  
• My favorite quote from the article: "In conference rooms around the word, authors are standing up and declaring, 'Our CMS tool sucks.'"
  

More google

Now they take natural language questions. And, of course, do a relatively good job on:

• How many angels can dance on the head of a pin (the real question was point of a needle)
• What is the capital of Liberia?
  
• What is the best Electronic Resource Management System -- after the useless sponsored links they pointed straight to the DLF standards page on ERMs
  

But they failed completely with:

• Is my cat's medical care deductible --I got random stuff about cat care

My new favorite site is The Straight Dope where they answer great questions like: : Is it possible to be dyslexic in Chinese?

Serial Price Increases--Semi-Scrapple

Swets' report on serials price increases is out at http://informationservices.swets.com/web/show/id=52169.

The document version is for 2005. The spreadsheet version is summarizes the two reports previous to this one.

Pew & the Internet

If you've never looked at the Pew Internet & the American Life web site, have a look. They have lots of interesting reports and tables of trends.

http://www.pewinternet.org/index.asp

Amazon invests in books on demand

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Online retailer Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq:AMZN - news) said on Monday that it bought privately held BookSurge LLC, which maintains a catalog of books that can be printed on demand.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050404/wr_nm/retail_amazondotcom_dc

E-paper

I've been looking for this so long. I continue to hope but it's hard to believe that I'll ever see this technology. EContent has an article about epaper, though, about how it would fit in the for-profit publishing world. text only--free OR pdf -- licensed version

Google Is Not the End of History

...according to Le Monde.

From the Chronicle:

"President Jacques Chirac of France has asked the head of the country's national library and the minister of culture and communication to plan a French-led project that would make millions of European literary works accessible on the Internet.

"The move appears to be a response to a warning from Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president of the National Library of France, in an essay in the newspaper Le Monde in January. He said plans by Google and five leading academic institutions and libraries in the United States and Britain to digitize and make available online the content of millions of volumes posed a "risk of a crushing domination by America in defining the idea that future generations will have of the world" (The Chronicle, March 4).

"Mr. Jeanneney and Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, the culture minister, met in March with Mr. Chirac, who told them to begin laying the groundwork for a European endeavor similar to the Google project."

Story at: http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v51/i31/31a02901.htm

Latent OpenURLs--embedding OpenURLs in HTML

OK, I want to put a link to a journal article in my blog. But what link do I use? If I get the article from IngentaConnect, someone else reading my blog might get it through an I&A database like Academic Search Premier. How do I put in the citation and let the reader pick which version.

If the reader has access to an openURL resolver then this Latent OpenURL idea comes to the rescue. To oversimplify, the link in html is an anchor that includes the openURL for the article but the OpenURL is preceeded by text that tells the viewing application to get specific information about the resolver that the reader has access to.

Eric Hellman of Openly Informatics has a page that sumarizes where the work stands now. There is a discussion of its development in the archives of the GCS-PCS list.*

*GCS-PCS is a list that was pulled together during a common interest session at the 2004 fall DLF in Baltimore. The acronym stands for "Gather, Create, Share" and Personal Collection Systems"

230 gigabits of data per square inch

That's Hitachi's claim they will eventually get to once this shift to 'perpendicular' recording. Apparently you can get the magnetic grains closer together if you pack them perpendicularly rather than longitudinally. Since I assume you still have to put the grains in some sort of predictable order (one after another) does that mean that the poles of the grains point away from the center of the line of grains?


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4411649.stm

Throw another penguin on the barbee

The government of New South Wales has developed a panel to support the use of open source software and services to all of it's departments and agencies. They will provide training and support for Linux. The point is to encourage standards and interoperability in government systems. Interestingly enough, the panel will include reps from companies like Microsoft and Novell as well as Red Hat.

Class Action suit from Tasini case is being settled

The Tasini case was won by authors in 2000 but the framework for the distribution of $$ from the class action suit is just now being drawn up.


The awards run from $5 for a single article to $1,500 each for the first 15 eligible works written for any single publisher. Payment to the author depends on a number of different factors like when the article was coppyrighted, how much the author was paid and when the article was published.

The case only covers works where the author was paid. It doesn't cover works like scholarly articles where the author doesn't receive direct compensation for the writing.

"no freelance author can sue either the database firms or the 36 publishers named in the suit for the material covered. Failure to take advantage of the claim process in the 120-day time period will vitiate the rights of any writers to further legal action against those parties. However, as Murray pointed out, publishers not named in the suit would still be vulnerable."

So, will we now find full content in fulltext databases? Maybe. Our one hope is that authors will "allow publishers and database firms to incorporate missing material into their databases. Since failure to grant future electronic rights permission knocks 35 percent off the fees paid to claimants, the authors should have sufficient motivation."



http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb050404-2.shtml

IPOD as alarm clock

Hilton is advertising its own special alarm clocks. Its hotel rooms now have clocks with a jack for an ipod (other portable music devices) and they've developed a plug-in that makes your ipod an alarm clock. Bingo-- you carry your own wake-up info with you.

Couple of interesting responses to Google

A powerpoint presentation by Roy Tennant on what's wrong with Google Scholar. His points are good to keep in mind as we use it but people will use it.

An article by Marcus Banks that says Google Scholar--good; Google Print--bad.

Scholar: Unlike Tennant, Banks isn't afraid of crawling and indexing as one approach to searching. The service is immature but he sees where it could be helpful. He points to the Georgia State Library's Google site as an example of how it can be a useful educational tool.

Print: Essentially, he fears for the commercialization of scholarship and with it the possiblity of profit being more important than the quest for truth.

Cool new display feature in catalog

Liz just showed me some new links in the catalog. Go to http://hip-test.mse.jhu.edu do a keyword search for something that will return more than one hit. Then check out the hit list that turns up. Right from this multiple title display you can link to author and subject; and the location and status links take you to an explanation of what those links are.

Too cool, huh?

Proof

I really was in El Salvador in February. That's why I missed Scrapple that month.

http://flickr.com/photos/52707298@N00/7932868/

Yahoo blogosphere...or an alternative to google blogging...

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/03/17/yahoo.blogs.reut/index.html

"Yahoo Inc. said Wednesday it will soon start invitation-only testing of its new Web log and social networking service Yahoo 360, which aims to better connect users to people they already know."

a9.com search enhancement--related to folksonomy?

http://a9.com -- a search service offerred by Amazon and based on Google technology has added a new service "openSearch" columns to it's search interface. In addition to the regular tabs for additional searches that a9.com offers (web, books, movies, reference...) you can now add custom tabs for any "openSearch" service.

What is OpenSearch?

"OpenSearch is a collection of technologies, all built on top of popular open standards, to allow content providers to publish their search results in a format suitable for syndication....OpenSearch is not a search engine—it is a way for search engines to publish their search results in a standard and accessible format."
from http://opensearch.a9.com/

Add your own custom column to A9.com and share it, you can make it an optional tab in the a9.com search interface.

n.b., you have to be signed into a9.com to add more than one tab to your results screen.

Remember Jake?

I hear Jake is no longer being updated. Instead, there is now http://lib-cufts.lib.sfu.ca/CUFTS/sbt.cgi

According to their website:

CUFTS is an open source (GPL) OpenURL link resolver designed for use by library consortia. It supports multiple sites from one server, online management tools, usage statistics, and includes a knowledgebase of ~165 resources with ~200,000 title records. Sites can individually activate resources they have access to, as well as subserts of titles for packages to which they only have partial subscriptions.

Google Article

another google thing

Banks, Marcus A. The excitement of Google Scholar, the worry of GooglePrint. Biomedical Digital Libraries, 2(2). Published March 22, 2005.http://www.bio-diglib.com/content/pdf/1742-5581-2-2.pdf

Muse & Google

The text of MUSE journals is now indexed by Google and will soon be available in Google Scholar. To retrieve Muse articles from Google you'll need:

• a Hoopkins IP
  
• a search string that includes site:muse.jhu.edu

n.b., Google will not cache MUSE content and will protect images from inclusion in any of the image searching products Google is developing.

(I know, I'm sick of Google stuff, too. But this is our own press.)

kind of clunky interface to 'visual' display of hits

"OCLC has implemented a data visualization pilot project in conjunction with Antarctica Systems Inc. (http://antarctica.net) to evaluate library users’ experiences with searching and display of search results using a visual interface to the Electronic Books database on OCLC FirstSearch.

.... For the purpose of this pilot, users will be searching in a static database of about 211,000 electronic book titles. The pilot will run through April 5, 2005." from a promo e-mail from OCLC

Personally, I'm underwelmed.

Visual mapping of search results (you can run but you cannot hide)

Nstein Partners with Visual Analytics
Nstein Technologies, Inc., a provider of linguistic-based business intelligence(BI) solutions, and Visual Analytics, Inc., a provider of pattern discovery and information sharing solutions, announced that they have entered into a strategic partnership to provide homeland security and intelligence agencies with a fully integrated platform for collecting, analyzing, translating, sharing, and visually representing structured and unstructured multilingual data. Under the terms of the agreement both parties will engage in co-marketing and sales initiatives.
-->

Apparently Google is not popular in France

Agence Frances is suing Google for using it's photos, headlines and lead paragraphs on the Google site. They are asking $17.5M and, by the way, they have an approved news feed via Yahoo.

Google was sanctioned by a court in France for trademark counterfeiting, unfair competition and misleading advertising. The case concerned the way Google sell 'sponsored link' based on search words. For example, The Wharton Running Shoes store buys the search term Niki. Then you do a search of Google for Niki and find that Wharton Running Shoes is oe of the top hits in the sponsored link section. Niki is not amused.

and now for something completely different

http://www.montypythonsspamalot.com/

Need we say more? This is better than sliced bread, no scrapple, no spam... :)

OK, this might not work

But Google says they'll make a 'site flavored' version of their results list if you use this service. I've told them my site was about Maryland and Africa.


Google
Site-Flavored Google Search

Create a Site-Flavored Google Search box by copying and pasting the following HTML code into your own web page:

Adding this code to your web site will create a search box that looks like this:
Google

WiFi Lib Blog

This announcement has been posted to several lists. Please feel free toforward it where appropriateAs a step into the continuing growth of Wi-Fi in libraries, I amstarting a blog called Wireless Libraries. It is at:http://wirelesslibraries.blogspot.com/

If anyone is interested in becoming a contributor directly to the blog,please let me know and I will add you as a "member." That way you wouldbe able to add content to it as well as correct any content you add.I decided on a blog because it gives me a little bit of editorialcontrol for quality and content. I looked at wikis over the weekend butam still a little wary of using them because they are so wide open. Iwill also set up a second blog, if there is interest, to pipe contentfrom the LibWireless discussion group into it.

The list of libraries with wireless will not be part of the blogdirectly. This list will now be part of Marshall Breeding'slib-web-cats database. This is an ideal location for this information.The database is searchable by many different fields including type oflibrary. Marshall has added two fields to the database, one to indicatea wireless network and one free form field for adding your networkinformation and policies.

Each library in my original list will have to update or input your information. The database is at:http://www.librarytechnology.org/libwebcats/

Wilfred (Bill) DrewAssociate Librarian, Systems and ReferenceMorrisville State College LibraryE-mail: mailto:drewwe@morrisville.edu
AOL Instant Messenger:BillDrew4
Wireless Librarian: http://people.morrisville.edu/~drewwe/wireless/
Library: http://library.morrisville.edu/
SUNYConnect: http://www.sunyconnect.suny.edu/My Blog: http://babyboomerlibrarian.blogspot.com/
"To teach is to learn twice." - Joseph Joubert

Things you might not know about Google

Alan Williamson's notes on a presentation at BayCHI/PARC by Marissa Mayer, Google Product Manager. My favorite it the reason that the Google interface is so spare.

http://alan.blog-city.com/read/1003011.htm

On his web site Williamson describes hmself as "Java Mentor, author, BlueDragon architect, CFML guru and generally a good egg."

Don't Get Goggle-Eyed Over Google's Plan to Digitize

another one from the Chronicle of Higher Ed
http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v51/i27/27b02001.htm
OK, here I'm going to just copy & paste from a msg on LITA-L about the article.

"Basically, this Op Ed piece lists 'five reasons not to tear up your library card quite yet':

1. Copyright. Obviously Google has some issues to work out regarding their intent to scan copyrighted works at Stanford and Michigan.
   
2. Past Failures. Not past Google failures, but rather past failures in large scale digitization projects by other organizations.
   
3. Preserving Books. What impact will industrial strength/speed digitizing have on the physical books? The author suggests that Google may have "underestimated, perhaps substantially, the percentage of books that will be damaged or that cannot undergo rapid digitization."
   
4. Google's Future. Basically concerned about what happens if Googlegets out of the book digitization business, if libraries rely too heavily on one source for digitization.
5. Ecological Concerns. The author is concerned about increased demand for printing, and use of paper.

The author then lists a few other concerns:

• Increased potential for plagiarism;


• Heavy reliance on English-language materials;


• Will there be advertising;


• The books would promote 'picking and choosing, not really reading'".

from:
Bernie Sloan
Senior Library Information Systems Consultant, ILCSO
University of Illinois Office for Planning and Budgeting

Scholars Note 'Decay' of Citations to Online References

from Chronicle of Higher Ed

http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2005/03/2005031402n.htm

Study finds that 1/3 of the 1,126 web citations examined went to dead or no longer correct links. Yeah, but notice the journals examined: Human Communication Research, the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, the Journal of Communication, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, and New Media & Society. We're not talking JAMA .

Anyway, isn't there some work on print citations that says almost a half of them have mistakes?

Wonder what the role of the library is in this? Scholars who link from the URL furnished by their libraries may be using unstable links. What if the link goes through Ingenta or through a database like EBSCO. When they change their servers that could cause problems.

Cool new products from smelly clothes to fiber-optic fabric

Clever clothes react with smell:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/03/11/spark.smell/index.html

I want a sofa made out of this stuff or

the world's thinnest, flattest light bulb

And this light transmitting concrete on display at the National Building Museum in DC - click on the Future of Concrete).

Not that this has anything to do with technology, but I also want a fu-chest, although it's much too expensive imho.

Meetings of interest

ASIS&T's SIG for Classification Research is holding it's 16th conference on classification research.

It will be held at the ASIS&T annual conference in Charlotte N.C.

Winey Websites

Websites that help you select wine:

http://www.infotoday.com/linkup/lud030105-roberti.shtml

Gifts such as dolls should be wrapped in pink paper

This is not my idea, but Amazon.com's. And they've gotten a patent for it.

http://news.com.com/Amazon+patent+thinks+pink/2100-1038_3-5606053.html?tag=cnetfd.buzz

Torvalds switches to Apple

favorite quote:

"...part of it is that I got the machine for free...."

http://news.com.com/Torvalds+switches+to+Apple/2100-1003_3-5606030.html?tag=cnetfd.buzz

DASER

So who is not sick of hearing about institutional repositories at this point? I think the term is getting a little too much overkill, but here's a local conference that looks interesting:

DASER: Digital Archives for Science & Engineering Resources
http://www.daser.org
April 29-May 1 2005
College Park MD

According to the website, the conference will cover:

Impact of OA on the future of STM libraries;
Institutional repository models: what works and what doesn't;
Publisher-library collaboration strategies, now and in the near future;
Institutional repository object issues--theses, datasets, learning objects, etc.;
User needs and patterns related to digital libraries.

They are marketing it to various populations including systems people and
digital library professionals. It would be funny if they called them digital librarians.

Data Standards presentations

The speaker's presentation notes and handouts from the ALA Midwinter 2005
institute:

Codified Innovations: Data Standards and Their Useful Applications


http://www.ala.org/ala/alcts/alctsconted/alctsceevents/alctsmw/codifiedinnov.htm

Microsoft Promotes Virtual Meeting Software

Called Microsoft Communicator. According to the story it will be available for free download later in 2005, but pricing will be announced later.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=562&ncid=738&e=10&u=/ap/20050309/ap_on_hi_te/microsoft_collaboration

Blogger gains access to the White House

I heard about this story on the 5'0 clock news this morning:

http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/03/07/w.h.blogger.ap/index.html

JSTOR in Google only as pilot

FRom Newslink-- a news service of InfoToday.com

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Letter to Editor

I just read Paula Hane's article, "Google's Projects Continue to Generate Shock Waves" in the [March 1] InfoToday NewsLink E-newsletter (http://www.infotoday.com/newslink/newslink0503.htm), and thought it would be appropriate to clarify the statements attributed to John Lewis Needham at the NFAIS meeting (as reported by Marydee Ojala) regarding Google's activities with JSTOR.

The comments attributed to Mr. Needham overstated Google's involvement with JSTOR when he announced that "Google Scholar was adding JSTOR journals". In fact, JSTOR has only initiated a pilot project with Google to investigate the possibilities of enhancing the resource location alternatives for the journal content archived by JSTOR.

JSTOR does not presently have an agreement in place with Google to include any content from the JSTOR archive in Google Scholar. The pilot project, as it stands now, only includes the indexing of a small number of titles within the main Google engine. We are in the process of evaluating this pilot project with Google - as well as possible projects with other similar resource location search engines - to understand better the benefits to our participating researchers, libraries, and publishers.

Ms. Hane also reported that Ms. Ojala wrote that the journals archived by JSTOR and included in Google Scholar are all in the discipline of economics. The pilot project with Google currently includes 20 journals found in JSTOR, ranging in a variety of disciplines. All of the content from these journals has not yet been indexed by Google, so it could be that Ms. Ojala was only
able to locate articles from journals in the discipline of economics.

Sincerely,
Bruce Heterick
Director, Library Relations
JSTOR

another Google hoo-haa

Article on new feature in Google toolbar that turns things like ISBNs into links to Amazon.com. Many other book providers are, needless to say, miffed.

'cause you can't do authority control for the whole world

KwMap -- keyword map to the Whole Internet --
From their F.A.Q.

# What is KwMap ?
KwMap.com is a complex keyword refining tool, aiming to help you discover new keywords. It is a fact that search engines can only help you in finding something if you know the right keywords.

KwMap.com runs on a multi-gigabyte database of keyword inter-relations. You can search all common concepts and you will be presented with related keywords (eg. 'car' -> 'wind shiled', 'formula 1', 'bmw') and keyword variations (eg. 'car' -> 'car parts', 'car insurance', 'rent a car'). We also run pertinent links associated to most of the keywords.
...
# How do I use the keyword chart?
The keyword chart contains two axes, one of them is for keywords which are different but related to your search keyword, and the other is for keywords which contain your search keyword. We try to place the most relevant keywords in the middle. You can navigate by simply clicking on the keywords. When you reach a dead-end or you want to change the theme, use on the "New Kw" button.

'wind shiled'??? I guess it helps you pick up sites even if the authors can't spell...if that's what you want.

Google spurns RSS

Came across this interesting article when looking for some information about API's.

http://news.com.com/Google+spurns+RSS+for+rising+blog+format/2100-1032_3-5157662.html

Getting fired

Blog-linked firings. My favorite story is the guy fired from Microsoft for taking picture of Apples on the loading dock.

The Dangerous World of Rare Books

Did you hear about this? Some guys stole some rare books from a library in Kentucky and used a stun gun on the University Librarian. According to the library director, who posted the link to this story on a list serv, the librarian is doing okay.

http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/news/local/11047843.htm

Unfortunately, this sort of thing has happened elsewhere:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/565100.stm

There's a black market for this material and some even sell library books on ebay (I know, my husband has gotten some).

The perception of disorder

In March of 1982, conservative theorists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling published an article in the Atlantic Monthly introducing a crime fighting theory known as "broken windows." The theory states:

"if the first broken window in a building is not repaired, then people who like breaking windows will assume that no one cares about the building and more windows will be broken. Soon the building will have no windows...."

Now the theory is being reconsidered because new research shows that people's perceptions of disorder don't always match the actual disorder in their neighborhoods. There is also an older (2001) article from the Chronicle.

If our perceptions for disorder are off, what about our perceptions for order? Does this perception thing have any implication for libraries?

The Ipod Shuffle

A Long Island public library is among the first in the nation to loan audio books Apple iPod Shuffles containing audio books. Story at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4521427

More on the shuffle from Apple...must...resist....buying.......

CrossRef and Google

CrossRef and sever publisher's reps met in January. They report that

"Google agreed with the principle that if there are multiple versions of an article shown in the Google Scholar search results, the first link will be to the publisher's authoritative copy. Google would like to use the DOI as the primary means to link to an article so CrossRef and Google will be working on this as well as a template for common terms and conditions for use of publishers full text content." (my emphasis added)

Printing Google Print Books....

...is not allowed. From a listserv:

"I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Project Gutenberg, where the contents of books that are out-of-copyright are available to be printed out or pasted into another document. Apparently this will not be allowed when Google has their database of books in place, even for books that no longer come under copyright restrictions. I read in the NYTimes a few years ago about a women who printed out an entire Jane Austen novel. It took her the better part of a day, but at least her effort was cost-free, except for the paper she used. Does Google have any idea that there is already a magnificent book digitization project on the net?"

Two more interesting articles on Google Print

Once again, the French are not happy with us. "Jean-Noel Jeanneney, who heads France's national library and is a noted historian, says Google's choice of works is likely to favor Anglo-Saxon ideas and the English language."

and

Barbara Fister's article in Library Issues 2005 is a more nuanced article than I've seen elsewhere. My favorite line from the article: "Technological change tends to be met with utopian optimism or dystopian gloom, and Google’s partnership with libraries is no exception." To true.