What does it mean to be an Associate Director?

Today we had an evacuation drill. This is different from a mere fire drill. The evacuation drill involves clusters of men in suits standing on the sidewalk watching the event. Guards stop traffic so we can cross the street to our staging point and people run around with clipboards checking off names. These drills are practice to see what happens when we try to evacuate the building if there is a major catastrophe. We've known the date and time and all the rules for for over a month. We've known that if we don't go to the appointed site and get checked in no one will be able to go back to the office. Most people managed to be somewhere else for the event. I ended up being one of the few A.D.s present.

It all went pretty smoothly until we returned to the library and found the guard at the door saying she couldn't let us in because she hadn't gotten the All Clear yet. As we were melting on the front steps I heard the alarm going off in the building. This was not a situation that was going to self-heal any time soon. So I headed back to the staging area to look for the cluster of men in suits. My, they must be sweating. It's 90 degrees today. Why do they insist on wearing coats in this summer weather? Well, anyway I found the gaggle of admins and asked if anyone of them could help out. Of course they couldn't but they found a flunky with a cell phone and sent him around the building to let us in. We were let in and they will probably turn off the alarm before too, too long.

So that's what an A.D. does. Instead of waiting for someone on the evacuation team to figure it out, the A.D. is 'pro-active' and wrassles up some help.  Forget about managing budgets or getting licenses signed. The real work is doing the obvious when no one else will.

#thereallmeaning

Go To Hellman: What IS a Library, Anyway?

Go To Hellman: What IS a Library, Anyway?

Liz, for class to read?

Good lecture online from Berkeley

Sept 17, 2007 What People Think About When Searching - Dr. Daniel Russell: Google

He was a guest lecturer in the Berkeley course INFO 141 Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business. He talked about some of the challenges to figuring out what people want from their searches in Google. For example

• when a person is on the Google home page and types in google as a search term, what do they want?
• since people don't notice most of the things on a screen how do they guide the user to the right part of the screen? 
• chronological ordering the results of a Scholar search is difficult at best and impossible when the publishers don't include dates in their metadata
• people's skills are very uneven because they learn search skills from someone else (not the manual)
• building an advanced search page that doesn't scare people is very difficult
  

He also talks about how they do their user observation studies.

New forms of publishing

QR writing breaks the link between a sign and it's meaning; it breaks the contract that written language is based on: viz a stable, shared understanding of a collection of signs and their associated meanings.

Of course signs can be creatively adapted but that creativity is by necessity based on shared understanding. otherwise we're all the crazy people on the subway who talk to themselves.

Similarly codes can secretly shift the meaning of signs but the translation only works if the shift is predictable and stable. It can be extremely complicated but it can't work if it is totally random.

In QR publishing the meaning of the image, the relationship between the sign and it's meaning is decided elsewhere and can, therefore be changed without changing the sign (the actual QR image.) This potentially

• destablizes authorship -- the author is the one who controls the server where the translator lives rather than the person who designed the QR. In that sense the author can change over time.
  
• disrupts temporal nature of meaning -- what the image means can change over time in a completely unpredictable way,
  
• limits readership to those with the functioning tools -- if I don't have a device that works on the internet I cannot read the QR image and 
• subverts permanence -- I can't read the intended meaning of the image without current access to the translator server. One could argue that writing limits access to the meaning of signs to those who are literate.  But once learned, the ability to read is portable and, absent physical or mental deterioration, it is essentially permanent. Once I know how to read I can read anything in the language I know and I cannot be blocked from reading a text I can view.

to be continued (edited) but I'm ready for dinner.

Google and Print-on-Demand

"Google has agreed to provide On Demand Books, LLC (ODB; www.ondemandbooks.com), the maker of the Espresso Book Machine (EBM), with immediate access to more than 2 million public domain titles in the Google digital files....."

Sept 17, 2009

So here's my question: is it an exclusive contract or will Google license their files to other ODB companies.

title

here's how hard it is to enter a new post

Many hands make light work

Those great folks at Carnegie Mellon have re-worked CAPTCHA into reCAPTCHApage and, on any site that uses it, every time you retype the text correctly you are correcting an OCR problem in an Internet Archives file. If you want to just contribute to the effort you can go to this site. Why not go in and do a couple today?

Of course this is not really so new but seeing the numbers is pretty amazing. The story is from ScienceDaily (2008-08-19).

New flexible displays for "pocket ereader"

Readius is a new (not yet available in US) e-book reading device that will be extremely portable. It's not quite there but they are getting real close.

There's a NYT article for general description but you need to look at Readius web site to see it held in a person's hand and get a sense of how small it is. Of course there are demos on YouTube. Holds 22 lines of text and does 16 shade grey scale. The specs from their site are:

• Weight             5.6 g complete display module
• Size (diagonal)    5" active area
• Refresh            0.5 s
• Grey levels        16
• Resolution         QVGA, 320 x 240
• Email              POP3 and IMAP supported
• Audio              MP3 / AAC / WMA 
• Images             JPEG / PNG / GIF / BMP 
• Memory             RAM   128 MB 
• Internal Storage   256MB 
• Extendable Storage High Capacity Micro SD 
• Operating system           
• Open OS          
• Microsoft Win CE 
• Connects to PC or Apple Mac via USB cable

Readius can behave as USB mass storage device or connect with the PC client, works with Bluetooth 2.0 EDR for accessory connection (eg. headset, keyboard). And when fully charge it's good for up to 30 hours active reading or 7500 page refreshes. I can't find the citation but I think I read/heard it will connect to the internet the same way an iPhone does (don't quote me on that)

Sadly it's expected to be more expensive than the Kindle. At least to begin with.

Note: For comparison, on Project Gutenberg the ASCII version of War and Peace is 3.13 MB uncompressed.

The smartest man in the known world...

Apologies to those of you (if there are any) who read this for Scrapple-esque material. This is probably not something we'd talk about at a Scrapple lunch. (But the truth is I also use this blog as kind of bookmark list and I very much want to be able to get back to this.)

If you're interested in ideas like the Semantic Web and books like "Thinking on the Web : Berners-Lee, Gödel, and Turing" Eisenhower Stacks TK5105.888.A3755 2006 -- then you might enjoy listening to this. Searle is not just smart; he's witty and he has a deep understanding of an unbelievably wide range of topics."





Here he makes a proposal for how to move between neurobiology and free will. What I'd like to hear him talk about is the movement between free will and social interaction. If anyone could talk cogently about that, he'd be the one.

Some of the benefits of listening to him talk at Google are:

• He's talking in a non-specialist way but still at a high level
  
• You get really interesting questions

Dr. Horrible

Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog

Check it out now -- while it's still free.

Getting warmer....

A NewScientist blog announces a prototype (by whom???) that is meant to simulate the ergonomics of reading an actual book. They hinge together two more-or-less-kindle-sized screens.

"The two leaves can be opened and closed to simulate turning pages, or even separated to pass round or compare documents. When the two leaves are folded back, the device shows one display on each side. Simply turning it over reveals a new page."

Read their paper on it or just go look at the video.

I suspect that when you're done with the book and want to close it you turn the device upside down and shake. :~)

I'm still waiting for the e-paper version.

If you want to search Oxford Music Online...

Here's a box for searching

Search Oxford Music Online

I can't seem to figure out how to put code up here so if you want the code you can look in the source code for this page.

Add ASP's free music link to your page

Well, I tried to add it here but Blogger's right column is too narrow. And it can't go into the heading because the heading only takes 500 characters. So I'm just putting it here as a post. sigh.

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

Takin' Names and Checkin' Facts

CQ has joined forces with St. Petersburg Times to create Politifact.com, web site whose mission is "just gimme the truth." They check out claims made in political campaigns and give them ratings like True, Barely True, Mostly True and, my favorite, Pants on Fire.

Put a widget on your site to include an RSS feed from their Truth-O-Meter. That's what's generating the feed in the right-hand column on this page.

Or send them a campaign claim you want them to check out at truthometer@politifact.com

Of course it goes without saying that you have to read the text to find out the basis for their ratings. For example, they rated Joe Biden's comment that the president is "brain dead" as a Pants on Fire statement because:

There’s no evidence Biden performed the necessary medical tests to make such a diagnosis. We would have accepted the results of a cerebral blood flow study or proof that Biden had examined Bush to see if he had an oculocephalic reflex.

Indeed, even people who disagree with the president about Iraq and assorted other issues will acknowledge that the president has spontaneous respiration and is responding to stimuli.

Here are some similar sites:

• FactChecker from the Annenberg Foundation
  http://www.factcheck.org/about/
• Fact Checker from the Washington Post http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2007/09/about_the_fact_checker.html

Be very angry

Is it Scrapple? I don't know. It's the kind of thing you don't want to belive. You want to put it out of your head. But I heard this testimony on C-Span radio yesterday.

Two years and no action from the State Dept or DoJ. Who are the guys covering this up? Do they not have mothers? sisters? wives? Where is Condoleezza Rice? Where is this country's moral compass?







She has created the Jamie Leigh Foundation to help others in similar circumstances.

Right tool for the job

See the free alphabetizing service online at http://alphabetizer.flap.tv/index.php.

I know, I know. So, what. I can paste a list into Excel and sort fine. But this thing does more. It has tons of options.

You can dump in text separate by:

• new line
• comma
• tab
  

As it alphabetizes you can have it:

• Strip HTML
• Ignore Case
• Make all lowercase
• Capitalize first word
• Remove Duplicates (cool)
  
• Reverse List
• Randomize
  
• Ignore Indefinite Articles (haven't tried but it sounds nice)
  

You can have it:

• Add your own term to the beginning of each entry
• Add your own term to the end of each entry
• Remove the first word from each entry before alphabetizing
• Remove the first word from each entry after alphabetizing

It won't:

• make coffee
• wake you up in the morning.

An open source clustering engine

This morning I ran into Carrot2 , an "Open Source Search Results Clustering Engine."

It has an interesting approach to displaying results from multiple sources. Being built in Poland. Give it a try.

And it's open source. How great is that?!

"Beyond OPAC 2.0: Library Catalog as Versatile Discovery Platform"

There's an absolutely fabulous article in The Code4Lib Journal about what NCSU is doing these days with their catalog. Since JH is in the middle of thinking about what we're going to do when we don't have Horizon to kick around anymore this article caught my eye.

If you remember NCSU folks are the one who brought us the faceted 'Endeca-based" catalog a few years ago. Of course they are up to even more creative doings.

The whole article is very interesting but if phrases like 'Application Programming Interface' and 'data modeling' make your eyes glaze over then just skip the one section called "CatalogWS."

But definitely don't miss the section on "Current Applications." I'm excited by the idea of making a version of the catalog for the mobile--you're in the stacks and can't remember what the call # is. What do you do? pull up the catalog in your phone. Cool, huh?

BTW, The Code4Lib Journal is a brand new journal and our own Jonathan Rochkind is one of the founding editors.

Spacetime browser

The Spacetime browser attempts to provide a 3D search space for displaying results. Check out the flash video on their website: http://www.spacetime.com/

I downloaded it to my pc. I wasn't too impressed with the initial google image search, however, I did like how you could star multiple images and click on compare. This bought up the images side by side for comparison.

The nice thing about the google search in spacetime is that you can click the next button, to switch directly to the keywords from your search in the next web page.

Will be interesting to see how this develops. Too bad they don't have it for the Mac :)

Shelfari

Hi all, been a long time since I posted.  Thought some of you might be interested in Shelfari. If you haven't tried it, it's a social networking site where people share what books they are reading. 

It is extremely easy to set up. Somebody sent me an invite, though I'm sure you could sign up on the site directly. When I signed up via the link, it asked me if I wanted to import my gmail address book friends who already were on Shelfari. Annoyingly though, it then wanted to send invites to everybody in my contacts list....and I have a lot on that list that aren't in my address book (people from listservs mostly). There wasn't an uncheck all, so after unchecking about 15, I closed the window. When I logged back on today to plow through that list, I found I didn't have to, it took me directly to my home page, where it showed my one friend and group lol. 

Adding books to your shelf is very easy also. You just search on title, author, or ISBN etc and get a list of results you can select from and with just one click, add that title to your shelf. When you log onto your shelf, you see a selection of books from your bookshelf.

I've avoided most of the social networking attempts, like twitter, face book, etc., however, we're trying this site out to see if our local friends of the library group wants to make use of it somehow.