Doh, LibX & xISBN services--now I see

these are not working on 21 August 2024

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OK, I'm a little slow on this stuff so maybe other people have already picked this up but, it just hit me in the face how easy it must be to use OCLC's xISBN service. Research Buzz recently wrote a piece about using OCLC's xISBN service to harvest a list of all the Wikipedia pages citing a book. Here's how it works:

Replace the ##### in this template with the ISBN of the book you're interested in.

http://xisbn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/isbn/###########?method=getEditions&format=xml&library=wikipedia&fl=*


For example this url http://xisbn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/isbn/006073132X?method=getEditions&format=xml&library=wikipedia&fl=*
gets an xml version of a list of urls of all the pages in Wikipedia that mention the book Freakonomics. One line for each different ISBN. You can see it more easily in the html version (substitute format=html for format=xml)

http://xisbn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/isbn/006073132X?method=getEditions&format=html&library=wikipedia&fl=*
I have a LibX tool bar in my browser so whenever LibX sees a number on a page that it thinks is an ISBN, ISSN, etc. it turns that number into a link for searching the Hopkins library catalog. This is what the first line looks like for me:

006073132X Freakonomics BA 2005 eng 1st ed. William Morrow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixing_Broken_Windows http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixing_Broken_Windows http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheating http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_Sense http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freakonomics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kloran

2012 to be revenue tipping point for e-books, says Publishing Technology report - 24 Mar 2011

This site is not working on 21 August 2014

Latest news on the stm publishing industry from scope e knowledge center pvt ltd

"It showed that one in four UK academic publishers were already seeing 10 percent of their total book revenue coming from e-books in 2011, with double that predicting this would be the case in 2012."

That means that 3 out of 4 get less than 10% of their revenue from e-books.

The Horizon report for 2011

"The internationally recognized series of Horizon Reports is part of the New Media Consortium’s Horizon Project, a comprehensive research venture established in 2002 that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact over the coming five years on a variety of sectors around the globe. This volume, the 2011 Horizon Report, examines emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in teaching, learning, and creative inquiry. It is the eighth in the annual series of reports focused on emerging technology in the higher education environment." 

Beware of the cloud

The Golden Mean warns against cloud computing because it robs us of our ability to innovate in our own interest (plus a few other issues are discussed)

HOW TO: Use QR Codes for Event Marketing

HOW TO: Use QR Codes for Event Marketing

http://nnlm.gov/sea/newsletter/2011/02/recording-of-february-16-beyondthesea-presentation-pubmed-for-handhelds-is-now-available/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+nnlm%2Fseacurrents+%28SEA+Currents%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo

http://nnlm.gov/sea/newsletter/2011/02/recording-of-february-16-beyondthesea-presentation-pubmed-for-handhelds-is-now-available/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+nnlm%2Fseacurrents+%28SEA+Currents%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo

Thunderbolt: Everything You Need To Know

This site is not working 

21 August 2024

Thunderbolt: Everything You Need To Know

a try

Does this thing work? It should link to Mike's ID.

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.