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

Test posting

Hmmmm...can I post? Just a test.

Everything's free on the Internet, right?

When students find something on the Internet, they usually think it is free (forget the library might have paid thousands of dollars for something), but anyway, I did find come across the complete works of Mozart online now. Here's the blurb from the Internationale Stiftun Mozarteum website:

The complete works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart are now available for free on the Internet. The resonance of this new resource is overwhelming (more than 400.000 hits during the first 12 hours). This may lead to delays in accessing the web site. We are about to provide additional server capacities.

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
|

Second Life

I've decided to participate in editing a library for Cybrary City. I'm waiting to see if I get the go ahead to include the Stanford name on the project. If not, I'll probably create an Engineering Library Consoritum or perhaps we should create a digital scrapple library.... :)

Anyway, here is my avatar looking at a poster from an education poster session. Some other groupst that have buildings: OCLC, UNC Chapel Hill, Michigan Libraries Consoritum, IBM. Many more to come. It will be interesting to see what applications are developed.

Last night, I visited OCLC's interactive search engine. You talk to it on a special channel and you can pull up search results in another Internet window. There is also a central reference desk and various exhibits being developed by librarians. I looked at one about cats in mysteries. There is also a big medical library where you can search PubMed and do a lot of other things. I didn't stay there too long since I was a little overwhelmed by it.

One idea I had was to have virtual office hours in SL. It's almost impossible to get offices in departments. You can also include links on web pages to teleport users to your location. The hurdle would be assuming that a user had a computer adequate enough to run Second Life. I had to upgrade my home computer clunker to be able to run it...although I was able to get a really good deal on an HP 1610, which is very quick and can run SL.

Anybody want to meet me there sometime? Let me know. My building currently only has a glass table and perhaps a renegade planet. I managed to recapture most of a solar system script I ran, but couldn't catch Mercury (to darn quick).

Educators look at Second Life

For those of you following the development of 'Second Life' (an online community where people are represented with cartoon-like avatars) there is an interesting article in the Technology section of CNN. Some educators are starting to use it help create a sense of community for distance learners.

From a Stanford colleague who attended Internet Librarian:

According to those who attended Internet Librarian one of the vendors that sells services to libraries has paid for an "island" for such purposes for a year. There is a reference desk and others are building "libraries" there. From the snapshots I've seen they're pretty specialized (like speculative fiction). OCLC has also given some limited access of some kind as well...

...there's also a blog about this at http://infoisland.org... from The San Jose State Spartan Daily, Nov 6, 2006, article by Ryan Berg: “Ken Haycock, director of the San Jose State University school of library and information sciences, said the school has just recently purchased its own island on Second Life, which the school will use to build learning resources that people can access in the virtual world.”

Google Standards Search

Wow! I just created a Google search engine for Standards. You can plug these engines into your own webpages. I'm thinking about including one of these in my guides.

Google search

Google now cas a customizable search.

Here's some examples of it. Not any for libraries yet. Maybe that needs to be rectified. Wouldn't it be great to have a search engine for (engineering) standards and include just the data sets you wanted? Or patents? Or genomics data....and link that stuff to journals or whatever?

Two cool things

Quick, I'm late for work

1. Babelfish is almost a reality
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6083994.stm


2. Rochester has already done the find videos thing we want to do-- we'll just steal from them

http://www.library.rochester.edu/index.cfm?page=videos

IPOD pod casts & NPR

I'm considering getting an IPOD finally. One thing I would want to do is download some podcasts, like from NPR. I heard today that you have to subscribe to them through a service. Is this the case? If so, do you use something you would recommend?

Treo

I'm a Treo convert. My husband got 700 and I now have his old 600. Can't wait for the 680 to come out. Read a Treo review.

Now I can get my e-mails & surf the Internet during boring meetings. How did I ever function without this phone?

Spore...exploring the universe one hard drive at a time

I'm really pushing the Scrapple limits here, but if you missed it, there was an interesting article in this past Sunday NYTimes magazine about the game called Spore (designed by Will Wright). There have been lots of interesting posts about this online, so you can google it, or look at this page if you are wondering what the heck I'm talking about.

The idea behind the game is that you start out as a single-celled organism. Once you gathered enough DNA points, you can begin to evolve. Then you colonize the planet. Once you've accomplished that you are awarded a rocket to explore outer space.

The interesting thing I thought is that the creations are then uploaded on a file server and begin to populate the games of other players. So while there will be an interactive War of the Worlds just yet in terms of the players, the characters will be built and then go off to explore the universe out of the control of the original creator.

Interesting concept. I wonder how long it will take somebody to figure out how to create a Trojan alien?

Firefox 2.0

Is now available.

Adobe gets into ebook business

If you've ever wondered if e-books were endangered, you might want to read about Adobe's attempt to jump into e-book market. As I'm reading it, Adboe will come out with a software that publishers can use to create their e-books.

-Digital Editions will support Adobe Content Server DRM, which many lending libraries currently employ.

-Publishers who like the service but aren't necessarily PDF-centric can also build e-books in Open eBook format (an x-html standard)

-Publishers will be able to offer content for free or include ads

-The client is built on Flash and displays covers and contents of ebooks, magazines, and other types of publications

Another Pew Survey

I don't know how much of this stuff you can really predict, but I read an interesting article some responses to what the Internet might look like in 2020.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5370688.stm

One interesting quote (although I'm not sure this is new or just applies to the Internet):

"The less one is powerful, the more transparent his or her life. The powerful will remain much less transparent..."

Should I be worried?

...or just be sure to bring a good book?

I'm going to the CODI confrence in Salt Lake City in a little over a week so I'm following the Gordian Knot -- a blog for Syrsi/Dynix users. (CODI stands for Customers of Dynix) A new posting there today by "suzyq" says she can summarize her 5 weeks worth of training and migration to 8.0 with a Foxtrot cartoon.

Have they looked at Creative Commons licensing?

A number of publishing organizations are develooping a standard protocol for granting publishing rights -- an Automated Content Access Protocol.

"In one example of how ACAP would work, a newspaper publisher could grant search engines permission to index its site, but specify that only select ones display articles for a limited time after paying a royalty."

The aim is to control spiders but I wonder if this has implications for bloggers?

Stop. You're both right....

You can always get me to read an article that promises to be about an advance toward something that will let us read novels electronically. So a BBC headline "Roll-up screens 'moving closer'" sucked me in.

Turns out some guys in Cambridge have come up with a thin, flat metal that can snap from one shape to another--from a flat sheet to a rolled up sheet. The metal is cheap and easily produced so could work well for 'flexible electronics.'

They point out that it would also do nicely for buildin emergency shelters. Although I'd worry that a heavy wind might snap my tent into a rolled up piece of metal.

serving library resources via phones

BBC article about use of net from cell phones says there's going to be a new domain starting next month -- .mobi -- that will be for sites that you can get over your phone and there will be a strict set of accessibility standards."

Go to this site to see what your web pages looks like on a phone http://emulator.mtld.mobi/emulator.php?. Oooh, the library catalog doesn't look good at all. I wonder what one of the library's portal channels would look like?

more info at http://pc.mtld.mobi/mobilenet/index.html

Could be a good Scrapple topic for Wednesday.

Cui bono?

Check out the Reuters article on Hansdehar, a village in India, has created a web site that describes itself to the world. It is the first (and currently only) entry in the Smart Villages project.

The intension of the overall project is to create a grid of information about thousands of villages in India. Different people associated with the Hansdehar project seem to have different ideas about its benefits--advertise for local businesses, help students find colleges and employment, and my personal favorite: publish the nature of local problems so that the government can deny knowledge. Could also do a lot for the world in general to know a bit more about how a big chunk of the human race lives -- in rural areas with limited means.

For the non-Latin-speaking readers