OpenURLs, they're not just for the commercial big guys anymore.

Right now you probably just see the citation to the book by CarolineBledsoe in the space below this text.

---

Caroline H. Bledsoe

Women and marriage in Kpelle society.
This will go to whatever link resolver you are using

---

But if you download the COinS extension for Firefox and configure it for Hopkins you'll see the Find IT button below this citation. Click on the button and you'll get a FIND IT menu that has a link that searches the JH Libraries catalog for the title.
How cool is that?!
OK, if you missed the point, this means that anyone can put a COinS enabled URL in any web page (blog, wiki, etc) and people who have the COinS extension configured properly can get their own link resolving button on that page.

Here's what you need to know:
Go to this link for info about getting the COinS extension for your Firefox browser: http://www.oclc.org/productworks/coins.htm
Use these settings you'll need to configure your extension to work with the JH linkresolver

• Link server base URL is http://sfx.library.jhu.edu:8000/jhu_sfx
• OpenURL version 0.1
• Image location is http://sfx.library.jhu.edu:8000/jhu_sfx/sfx.gif

If you want to generate a COinS URL for your web page, here's a COinS generater page: http://generator.ocoins.info/?sitePage=info/journal.html&

OCLC has now added COinS capability to Google Scholar and to their "Find in a library" service in regular Google. According to OCLC

COinS has already been implemented in various online resources including Wikipedia's Book Sources Page, Citebase, HubMed, and the British Library's ZETOC service."

One man's digital divide is another man's digital canyon

Reuters reports that the digital divide has shrunk in the last few years. But as you read the article you see discussion of India and China but not a word about Africa. The next to the last sentence says Central and Eastern European countries lag behind because

Mobile phone penetration is ubiquitous, but fixed line Internet connections are not widely available, while the business and legal environment is weak.

MS Academic Search

It even includes a list of journals covered!

SLIM is clever

Have a look at SLIM: Slider Interface for MEDLINE/PubMed searches. It uses slider bars instead of drop down boxes. Somehow it feels easier.

Most people read web pages in an F pattern

At least that's what Jakob Nielson says:

Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.

I have some questions about the pages they chose to use for the experiment but I could have missed something. I just skimmed the report. Since the text went all the way across the page I just focused on the headers and the images. The F-Shaped superfast skim wasn't possible.

MS challenges Google Scholar

Have a look at MS Academic Search . Right now it covers Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Physics. They are using OAI to harvest compliant archives like ArXiv.org. And it recognizes you if you're coming from a Hopkins IP. Pretty slick.

Another (possible) reason not to like Google Desktop

Posted on the ERIL listserv

Over the past month, we have received an increased number of notices concerning unusual spider activity. In most instances, we have found the Google Desktop Search with MSIE crawler installed on the machines associated with the blocked IP address. Are others experiencing this problem? If so, have you been able to resolve the conflict? I would appreciate any advice or suggestions.

Mostly I just don't like the idea of an organization that big knowing that much about me. But now it seems they might be an irritant to the community at large.

Interesting CNI Presentation

At the CNI conference this week, there was a presentation about a web tool that was built at Allegheny College called Gnosh. It is a meta-search tool that incorporates components of social software into the search itself. Check it out.

not really scrapple but...

BBC reports women are voting in Kuwait for the first time ever and that there are two women candidates for one of the positions.

Serves to remind us that we aren't that far out from women getting the vote in the US. My grandmother on my father's side got the vote the year my father -- her third child -- was born. My mother's mother had two children before she could vote. Can you imagine that? When I was 11 months old my family moved to Galveston, Texas and my mother was not allowed to serve on juries there. I remember discussions about poll taxes when I was growing up and how they kept poor people from voting. (And, by the way, I couldn't have applied to Hopkins when I graduated from high school--women were not allowed. I couldn't even have eaten in the faculty club--again, no women allowed.)

Today it may feel like the air we breathe but the truth is the right to universal suffrage is relatively young. 1920 isn't that far back and people were dying in the 1960s to secure voting rights. OK, I'll get off my soapbox now.

Congratulations to the Kuwaitis.

Making Singapore secure...er

Singapore is instituting biometric passports
http://news.com.com/2100-1029_3-6056746.html?part=rss&tag=6056746&subj=news. Does it surprise me that Singapore is on the leading edge of this technology? No, I have a friend from graduate school who taught in Singapore. He said that he flew in one time and his hair was longish. They whisked him out of line and chopped his hair off before he could enter the country. Of course this was in the 1970s when long hair meant something.

Sever costs??

Does a server with a dual pentium 4 or xeon processors around 2 GHz, with 1 GB RAM for memory, 8 GB for system (hard drvie) and 30 GB for data with a backup tape drive or network back up really go for $10,000?

Or can you get a good server for less than that? The above are the configuration we are looking for. I'm getting some price quotes, but wanted to know if any of you thinks this is in line or out of line with what a server with the above specs should cost...

OK, maybe we don't need e-paper

BBC reports that in the last five years the Japanese have taken to reading books on their phones in a big way. I noticed that the biggest commercial publisher of this kind of work only has 20,000 subscribers and 400 books but....

The interesting thing to me isn't that they are reading off their phones. I've read lots of stuff on my black and white Palm and these phones have color screens. No, it's the effect of this kind of media on the way people write and the reading habits of the people who read it. There's a publishing house that has launched a program to train people to write for the phone. Can't you see it on the back cover of a comic book? 'Make cash in your spare time by learning to write for the mobile phone market.' And at least one science fiction author says this kind of access "is reversing the younger generation's apathy towards reading." Of course they are reading pretty short pieces.

Now before everyone starts jumping up and down about how the world is coming to an end if people stop reading the Brothers Karamatoz because it's too long to read on a phone, check out The Singer of Tales. Or, if that's too long and academic for your reading tastes just breeze through the wiki article on it's author Albert Lord.

The point is that some of the earliest works we think of as literature (e.g., Beowulf, Gilgamesh) are transcriptions of parts of a person's performance of a much longer epic that would be told in different ways by lots of different people. That is, in the act of committing the works to writing we ended up shortening the pieces and fixing texts that had been dynamic. The oral performers of these epics (the singers of tales) varied their performances based in part on audience reaction. We're too hung up on the individual author and frozen text. There are lots of ways to skin a cat.

This could be something that has a transformational effect on society but who's to say that transformation will be bad? Shorter, fixed texts work pretty well for things like treaties and contracts. And while we all lament the passing of the illuminated manuscripts, there is much to be said for the transforming effects of the printed word and the rise of literacy.

And, interestingly enough, I think this is one of my longest entries ;--)

r u sik 2day?

BBC reports that 42% of the 18-29 year old Brits surveyed said they would miss a trip to the doctor because they had to wait.*

Maybe the National Health Care should consider IM-ing their younger patients.

ANSWR: No, sir. The nose doesn't normally spew blood. How much blood is there?

*Interestingly enough only a third said they would skip a dental visit because of a wait; sadly, 16% wouldn't give blood because it takes too long

I'm shocked, Rick, shocked!

BBC reports that Windows has announced a delayed the roll out of Vista. They also say that MS is building 6 (yup, six) versions of Vista.

"Three versions of the software, called Vista, will be for home users, two will be for businesses and one will be for emerging markets."

Wonder if the one for emerging markets will run on one of those $100 hand-crank computers?

another Google Beta [purchase]

Google recently bought Writely a web based collaborative document editor. You migh think, 'Yawn, another wiki knock-off,' but this thing looks interesting. They list the following capabilities:

• Upload Word documents, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML or text (or create documents from scratch).
• Use our simple WYSIWYG editor to format your documents, spell-check them, etc.
• Invite others to share your documents (by e-mail address).
• Edit documents online with whomever you choose.
• View your documents' revision history and roll back to any version.
• Publish documents online to the world, or to just who you choose.
• Download documents to your desktop as Word, OpenOffice, RTF, PDF*, HTML or zip.
• Post your documents to your blog.

Now they also say you can simultaneously edit a document with your colleagues and that sounds cool. If you and your fellow editor collide you get a pop up warning--and I guess you arm wrestle over who's right. Sounds interesting; I wonder what counts as colliding? Do you have to simultaneously edit the same word? What if you are simultaneously editing the same sentence? couldn't that cause problems?

Docutek

Did you know Sirsi bought Docutek? I learned this when visiting Docutek at ALA, since we're trying to get e-reserves going at my library.

Three reasons I know I'm way too old for today's humor

#1. I actually thought John Stewart was funny hosting the oscars (but then I don't have cable so maybe he just wasn't up to his usual)

#2 . I still think the Fox series of Greg the Bunny was funny even though my 18 year old nephew explained to me that it was about as funny as a whoopy cushion.

#3 . I thought the idea of Google hosting the content of everyone's hard drive was a joke. Turns out it wasn't. So now I just think it's scary. Don't they teach Farenheit 451 and 1984 in schools anymore?

It's more complicated than just wanting Google

In the last six months or so I've seen several articles mentioning the fact that Yahoo is actually beating Google for user loyalty, preference or what not. Seems to go against the common notion that Google is the be all and end all of Internet access.

ClickZ, a search engine newsletter, has a recent article on the market for videos over the internet. In it they cite a report by Points North Group saying that

"Fifty-four percent of the group expressed interest in the Yahoo! Go service. Interest in Google Video trails Yahoo!'s service with 46 percent of the market."

Yahoo Go is their all-in-one suite of services for pc, mobile and video. So why is Yahoo ahead here? They say that

Yahoo!'s offerings have more market share in this situation because the portal has set itself up as more than a search engine.

So I'm wondering what this has to say about offering library services. Clearly portals are good (and thank goodness the library has a good start in that area--thank you, Elliot et al.)

But we're still stuck with the problem of presenting a complex search environment in a simple fashion. Federated searching is sort of helpful but it's not a silver bullet.

Benefits of getting new staff...

learning aobut cool undergrad library portal

We've recently hired an acquisitions librarian away from St. Cloud State University. She's told us about a very nice undergraduate portal for research they had at the last library she worked in.

http://www.lib.umn.edu/undergrad/

I love the clean look and compact design and they have a good ear for names.

Find Full Text is their SFX journal/article locator service in a nice interface

Research QuickStart goes to something like our subject guides (again, better name)

Top of the screen is a search box (uses X server?) that chooses some general purpose databases limiting to

• books & articles
• books only
• articles only
• newspapers

They have library pages for individual courses that seem to share a common format that allows for autogeneration of lists.

I'm really happy that these guys use SFX. I want to pick their brains at the upcoming SMUG (or whatever they call it now) mtg.
They also have a nice way of handling metasearching -- I love the link entitled 'what am I searching?'

really cool

A wireless experiment in Bath

CNN reports a wireless experiment in Bath...the city, not the tub. Seems like an effort to blend tourism and technology. For example, they will test have a server that stores photographs of building in Bath. People could take a picture and if a match occurs with a picture on the server, information about the building and local points of interest will be returned to a wireless phone or other device. Another application will consist of users uploading information and pictures to a Web site that then charts their route.