Our experiment with the Commons on Flickr continues and barring a few hours delay we have managed to keep to our promise of 50 new images a week. We’re up to 400 images now with the most recent 50 going live this morning. 158 of these have been geotagged. [fresh + new(er) » Blog Archive » Commons on Flickr - one month later]

A couple of things struck me about his note. First, the volume of activity:

... our images have been viewed 39,685 times to yesterday. That’s more than an entire year on the old Tyrrell website (which, incidentally, has more images and is better indexed by Google) [fresh + new(er) » Blog Archive » Commons on Flickr - one month later]

And second, he talks about the volume and quality of tagging activity:

Tonnes of tags have been added and they have been of a quality that we’ve not experienced in our other tagging projects. I am firmly of the belief that the quality is a result of the Flickr environment (lets call it ‘culture’) and its userbase. [fresh + new(er) » Blog Archive » Commons on Flickr - one month later]

It will be interesting to see the promised three-month report. It seems to me that this shows the long-tail dynamic I have discussed elsewhere. A large part of the long tail effect is about better matching supply and demand by aggregating each in a network environment. Flickr aggregates supply: it provides a critical mass of pictures and community structure for sharing at the network level. It also aggregates demand by attracting large numbers of users, and creates value for them through its sharing structures. An individual institution has difficulty mobilizing this audience.

Related:

Dempsey, Lorcan. Libraries and the Long Tail: Some Thoughts about Libraries in a Network Age. D-Lib Magazine, April 2006, Volume 12 Number 4.

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These resources may be different in scope (reference, discovery, full-text or other content, ...), in type of content, in terms and conditions, in specialization, and so on.

Abstracting up to that single - or small number of - search boxes that are presented as a goal is not straightforward. And indeed it is still common to see various searches/entry points offered: the catalog, metasearch, a list of databases, a search of the library website, ....

In this context I was interested to see Suzanne Chapman's "search box round-up".

She does a nice job of commenting on several approaches, and has a companion Flickr set of search box pics.

Incidentally, over time I reckon that 'single search' alternatives to 'metasearch' for general article access will emerge. By this I mean that services will consolidate article level metadata to facilitate access. This is not to say that there will not be target markets where niche databases continue to exist, rather that alternative solutions for general article searching seem inevitable. And of course, we are also seeing integrated search solutions for local resources emerge, Primo for example. In this way, the multiple resource challenge may get simpler, but will continue to exist in some form.

Related entries;

• The simple search box and the rich texture of suggestion

• Comparing single search environments
• What is the catalog
• Federated search that doesn't very well
• Metasearch: a boundary case
• From metasearch to distributed information environments
• Metasearch, Google and the rest
• Three stages of search
• Systemwide discovery and delivery
• The one-stop-shop that isn't
• Landscape versus brandscape

• Library websites again
• The library website

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Web advertising is the primary driving force behind many Web activities, including Internet search as well as publishing of online content by third-party providers. A new discipline - Computational Advertising - has recently emerged, which studies the process of advertising on the Internet from a variety of angles. A successful advertising campaign should be relevant to the immediate user's information need as well as more generally to user's background and personalized interest profile, be economically worthwhile to the advertiser and the intermediaries (e.g., the search engine), as well as be aesthetically pleasant and not detrimental to user experience. [ACL-08: HLT - Tutorials]

This is from the notice about a tutorial session at ACL-08: HLT which is taking place in Columbus in June. The conference combines the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) with the Human Language Technology Conference (HLT) of the North American Chapter of the ACL.

Given the nature of the conference, the tutorial has a particular focus:

In this tutorial, we focus on one important aspect of online advertising, namely, contextual relevance. It is essential to emphasize that in most cases the context of user actions is defined by a body of text, hence the ad matching problem lends itself to many NLP methods. At first approximation, the process of obtaining relevant ads can be reduced to conventional information retrieval, where one constructs a query that describes the user's context, and then executes this query against a large inverted index of ads. We show how to augment the standard information retrieval approach using query expansion and text classification techniques. We demonstrate how to employ a relevance feedback assumption and use Web search results retrieved by the query. This step allows one to use the Web as a repository of relevant query-specific knowledge. We also go beyond the conventional bag of words indexing, and construct additional features using a large external taxonomy and a lexicon of named entities obtained by analyzing the entire Web as a corpus. Computational advertising poses numerous challenges and open research problems in text summarization, natural language generation, named entity extraction, computer-human interaction, and others. The last part of the tutorial will be devoted to recent research results as well as open problems, such as automatically classifying cases when no ads should be shown, handling geographic names, context modeling for vertical portals, and using natural language generation to automatically create advertising campaigns. [ACL-08: HLT - Tutorials]

Via Michael White.

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I have not yet read it, although I look forward to it. The author, Nigel Ford, describes educational informatics as the integration of three major R&D emphases: information and communication technology, education and library/information science. He defines it as follows:

The development, use, and evaluation of digital systems that use pedagogical knowledge to engage in or facilitate resource discovery in order to support learning.

Flicking through the pages, I was interested to see the following on the bottom of each page:

Copyright © 2008, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.

This was interesting as an example of how practice and thinking in the electronic environment is influencing practice and thinking in the print environment.

Jeanette Winterson's remarks on book swapping sites I quoted the other day was another example, where she seems to be suggesting greater limits on the use of books than now exist.

Of course, those churches and charity shops that made money from second-hand book sales stand to lose out, as do the publishing industry and authors. "In the music industry, this kind of thing would be called 'file sharing', and technically illegal," the author Jeanette Winterson wrote of book-swapping sites recently. [Charlotte Northedge on book-swapping websites | Environment | The Guardian]



[Lorcan Dempsey's weblog]

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Reconfiguring the Library Systems Environment

portal: Libraries and the Academy, Vol. 8, No. 2, April 2008.

http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/archive/2008/dempsey-portal.pdf (.pdf: 195K/18 pp.)

[Lorcan Dempsey: Selected publications [OCLC]]

This is a short piece adapted from an earlier blog entry.

Lavoie, Brian, and Günter Waibel. An Art Resource in New York: The Collective Collection of the NYARC Art Museum Libraries. (.pdf: 136K/18 pp.)

[Books and reports [OCLC - Publications]]

The New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) includes the Frick Art Reference Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Thomas J. Watson Library, and the libraries of the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. This report describes the results of a study of the aggregate collection of these institutions.

Godby, Carol Jean, Devon Smith, and Eric R. Childress. 2008. "Toward Element-level Interoperability in Bibliographic Metadata." The Code4Lib Journal, 2 (2008-03-24). Available online at: http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/54.

[Publications [OCLC - OCLC Research]]

I mentioned this before, but in a message about another topic.

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Psychologists, journalists and celebrity chief executives crowd the top of a ranking of influential business thinkers compiled for The Wall Street Journal. The results, based on Google hits, media mentions and academic citations, ranked author and consultant Gary Hamel No. 1. [New Breed of Business Gurus Rises - WSJ.com]

The list itself can be found at the end of another WSJ article. It repeats an exercise carried out in 2003.

As interesting as the articles themselves is Davenport's commentary on them in his Harvard Business Publishing blog. I thought two things were especially interesting.

The first is the growing importance of reputation management in our Internet age. Davenport writes about why Jim Collins is not higher on the list (and judging by airport book stands one would expect him to be!).

Why isn’t he higher if his ideas are so good? Unfortunately, the list is not a ranking of the quality of the ideas. A high-ranking management guru has to be a good promoter as well as a good researcher and sound thinker. Collins—like Michael Porter, who was at the top of the 2003 list but fell a bit (to #14) in the new list—doesn’t do a lot of conference speeches, doesn’t have much of a web presence, and doesn’t write much in the popular press. If you want your ideas to be really influential, you’ve got to be out hawking them all the time. [The New Gurus - Harvard Business Online's Tom Davenport]

The second is the emphasis on ease of reception in an environment which is increasingly resource-rich but attention-scarce:

Interestingly, none of these latter three people are traditional management experts. Friedman and Gladwell are primarily journalists, and Gardner is an educational psychologist. Why have these interlopers prospered to such a degree? I chalk it up to two factors: the increased desire to master people issues in business—we’ve finally realized they’re always the most difficult to address—and the ever-decreasing attention span of businesspeople. Many of them want few academic details and an entertaining story, which these journalists know how to provide. I don’t always agree with the quality of Gladwell’s evidence, but I am certainly impressed by his writing ability. Some of Friedman’s ideas seem quite obvious to me, but he knows how to put together a sentence. That didn’t matter much in the old days of management gurudom, but it seems much more important now. [The New Gurus - Harvard Business Online's Tom Davenport]

Related entry:

• Why business thinking is not the answer

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This morning in our local Border's I noticed that they had little notices stuck above the screens of their enquiry system. They said that these were not touch screen systems and that people should use the tracker ball and button.

It is interesting how things come to be expected ....

Related entry:

• Kindle again

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Arrow

An Australian colleague alerted me to the redesign of the Arrow Discovery Service. Arrow aggregates access to Australian research repositories.

Welcome to the ARROW Discovery Service - where you can search 143,582 Australian research outputs, including theses; preprints; postprints; journal articles; book chapters; music recordings and pictures.



The ARROW Discovery Service searches simultaneously across the contents of Australian university research repositories. The list of currently participating universities, and the number of outputs currently in each repository, is listed at the left. [Arrow]

Search box is complemented by tag cloud access. Results filtering by facets, including institutional facets. Alerts can be set (although it does not have RSS feeds, as I notice Roddy MacLeod pointed out somewhere).

Catalog Widget

The Information Resource Centre (IRC) at Jacobs University, Bremen, has produced a catalog widget, jOPAC, as part of its broader initiative to produce a range of 'Web 2 tools'.

The IRC has started developing Web 2.0 tools. Because we want to be able to deliver digital (library and multimedia) services at the point of need, where our patrons are. And because we want to enhance our services by mashing them up with other available services out there on the web. [Web 2.0 Tools - Teamwork at Jacobs University]

The are using the Universal Widget API from Netvibes:

Using the UAW API allows easy implementation within various platforms, such as iGoogle, Macintosh, Vista, Yahoo Dashboard, and various others. This way, any developed tool can easily integrate within any supported platform - some of which you might already use! [Web 2.0 Tools - Teamwork at Jacobs University]

See a jOPAC demo here.

I was interested to see the University Confluence-based wiki infrastructure that the pages above are part of. Also interesting is the dedicated focus on such tools that IRC is making.

Linking from Wageningen

As linking between systems becomes more important, so does our interest in identifiers, and in mappings between identifiers. Here is an example from Wouter Gerritsma:

Previously I announced that we made use of the Google Books API to link to the full text whenever possible. We only experienced two problems with this service. First, the quite frequent Google spam warnings, which have been partially resolved but still keep coming back. Second, we did not have the required OCLC or LCCN numbers for the pre-ISBN books in our catalog. [Linking from Catalog of Wageningen UR Library to Google Books at WoW! Wouter on the Web]

He goes on to describe a service from our OCLC Dutch colleagues that returns an OCLC number when fed a Pica Production Number, which they have in their catalog. And the results:

A few examples are:

• Staring, W.C.H. (1860) De bodem van Nederland : de zamenstelling en het ontstaan der gronden in Nederland ten behoeve van het Algemeen beschreven
• Vilmorin-Andrieux, (1856) Description des plantes potageres
• Loudon, J.C. (1831) An encyclopaedia of Agriculture.

Even when the full text is not available on Google Books, the service can be usefull. In the following example of Hogg, R. (1884) The fruit manual, the electronic version of the 1860 edition is available on Google Books rather than the 1884 edition we have in our collection. [Linking from Catalog of Wageningen UR Library to Google Books at WoW! Wouter on the Web]

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For eco-aware readers, the environmental benefits of swapping rather than buying are clear. In 2003, Greenpeace launched its book campaign, producing evidence that the UK publishing industry was inadvertently fuelling the destruction of ancient forests in Finland and Canada. It found that one Canadian spruce produces just 24 books, which means that if you get through one book every two weeks your reading habits destroy almost one large tree every year. (In the same year, Greenpeace persuaded Raincoat Books to produce the Canadian edition of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on recycled paper, saving an estimated 39,000 trees.) But despite the campaign, only 40% of the UK book industry has introduced paper with a high level of recycled content, largely choosing to use paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council instead.



Beyond using the country's dwindling network of libraries, until recently the opportunities for exchanging paperbacks have been limited to friends, community schemes and book groups. But in the past two years, a spate of online book-swapping sites have emerged. Inspired by the goodwill schemes operated by hostels around the world, whereby travellers can leave behind books they have read and pick up something new, these sites generate little profit for their founders. The books are swapped directly between users, who pay the postage; the sites simply facilitate the meeting and identifying of potential exchanges. [Charlotte Northedge on book-swapping websites | Environment | The Guardian]

I was surprised to read the following:

Of course, those churches and charity shops that made money from second-hand book sales stand to lose out, as do the publishing industry and authors. "In the music industry, this kind of thing would be called 'file sharing', and technically illegal," the author Jeanette Winterson wrote of book-swapping sites recently. [Charlotte Northedge on book-swapping websites | Environment | The Guardian]

One of the more interesting things to me about the mass digitization initiatives is that they have highlighted that libraries do not 'own' many of the books in their collections, if by 'own' we mean the ability to repurpose at will. Of course, they do own the cost of processing and making them available, and of storing them over time, but for the larger part of their collection, there are limits on what they can do with the content.

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Making Tracks takes young readers on a fictional journey through some fascinating Australian stories, inspired by objects from the National Museum of Australia's collection. The series is written and illustrated by leading Australian children's authors and artists. [National Museum of Australia - Making Tracks]

While looking at the NMA site ("Nice bright colors, K....") I was interested to discover reCollections, their journal. From the current issue, an article by Paul Arthur:

This paper surveys the digital history field — a broad field that is increasingly relevant to museum practice as museums experiment with digital modes of presentation and communication, including virtual exhibitions and other online extensions of the physical visitor experience. [reCollections - Papers]

In recent presentations, I have been suggesting that libraries will need to adopt more archival skills as they manage digital collections and think about provenance, evidential integrity, and context, and that they will also need to adopt more museum perspectives as they think about how their digital collections work as educational resources, and consider exhibitions and interpretive environments. I have used a capture of the home page of the Library at Oregon State University in this context, which showcases several digital collections. These currently include a resource about Linus Pauling and the peace movement which puts digitized materials in a broader context:

The three sections of Linus Pauling and the International Peace Movement combine to provide an unusually rich source of information on Linus and Ava Helen Pauling's remarkable body of peace work. Navigate between the sections by using the links on the site's home page or by using the links at the top of any page within the site. [Introduction - Linus Pauling and the International Peace Movement - Special Collections - Oregon State University]

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1. My colleague Karen Smith-Yoshimura alerted us today to a page of library blogs assembled by British Library staff. I was interested to see the classification employed. There was I thinking that this blog had become much more general in recent times, and I see it classified under 'web and library technology'. There are some interesting videos under the photos/videos tab.
2. There is always something useful on the BBC Internet Blog page.
3. I worked in Dublin City Public Libraries many years ago and so was pleased when Eddie Byrne got in touch a while ago. Here is the page he has put together showing library resources.

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The Economist has a very nice special section with articles on a range of topics (see the display panel on the right of this opening section for a list of articles). There is almost no focus on the technology per se, rather it looks at how our working and social lives, our buildings and our jobs, and our attitudes and expectations are being reconfigured. The emphasis is not on 'mobility' but on permanent connectivity in an environment where computational and communication capacity is increasingly pervasive. What is our world like when the network is not something that is 'out there' but when potentially all that we do is network aware.

There are several sections; here is a note from the piece on space:

The fact that people are no longer tied to specific places for functions such as studying or learning, says Mr Mitchell, means that there is “a huge drop in demand for traditional, private, enclosed spaces” such as offices or classrooms, and simultaneously “a huge rise in demand for semi-public spaces that can be informally appropriated to ad-hoc workspaces”. This shift, he thinks, amounts to the biggest change in architecture in this century. In the 20th century architecture was about specialised structures—offices for working, cafeterias for eating, and so forth. This was necessary because workers needed to be near things such as landline phones, fax machines and filing cabinets, and because the economics of building materials favoured repetitive and simple structures, such as grid patterns for cubicles. [The new oases | Economist.com]

I particularly liked this section; it filled out the context for my suggestion a while ago that Starbucks has become 'on-demand space'.

And I was interested to see this little snippet the other day:

Who is the largest camera maker in the world? Nokia. Who is the largest manufacturer of music devices in the world? Nokia. Who is buying the company that provides the map data behind Mapquest? Nokia. [Our Cells, Ourselves - washingtonpost.com]

Related entries:

• QOTD: predominant transportation method, texting and reading
• Ambient fulfilment and on-demand space

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Library blogs are a mixed lot. I am always on the look-out for interesting combinations of reflection and experience. Bob Molyneux has been an intriguing contributor since he began working with Equinox, appearing in two blogs, open-ils and the Equinox blog. John Wilkin and Alma Swan are always suggestive, but seem to have faltered.

Well, John has gone and done an entry - which blows this one up ;-) He talks about the discrimination of opennesses ('open' is a word which is meaningless imho without qualification) and it has sparked some interesting interaction.

Alma has not done a blog entry. She has however produced yet another report: Key concerns within the scholarly communication process: report to the JISC Scholarly Communication Group, March 2008 [Word document]. I will return to this report, in particular to the section on accessibility (in the sense of being able to find, get, use and share stuff). Reading through the recommendations, I notice a profusion of suggestions for further studies: there are not enough good consultants in the UK to do this much work ;-)

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Vinyl, CD, or MP3? Vinyl. In a hundred years time, vinyl will be the only medium that has survived. CDs will fade, like old pictures that have gone a bit orange, and MP3s, well you can just accidentally wipe 'em any time.

I know. Another quote from a music magazine for the middle-aged. I bought this issue for the story about Portishead. We lived in Bristol for many years and enjoyed the occasional trip to the sea at Portishead, the town whose name they took (also the home of a lido). This was during a remarkable period for Bristol music, with Massive Attack, Tricky, Portishead, and others contributing to the Bristol Sound:

The Bristol sound was the name given to a number of bands from Bristol, England, in the 1990s. These bands spawned the musical genre trip-hop, though many of the bands shunned this name when other British and international bands imitated the style and preferred not to distinguish it from hip-hop. [Bristol underground scene - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

Mind you, for us living in Bristol, the early to mid-nineties was the era of the cassette, which is not even mentioned by Bragg.

Related entries:

• The musical record
• The times, they are a'changin
• Serendipity in stacks, racks and online systems

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A remake of Blake's Seven is being discussed.

LONDON -- Hoping to cash in on the success of classic sci-fi revamps such as the BBC's "Doctor Who" and "Battlestar Galactica," Sky One is planning to remake cult '80s space series "Blake's Seven." ...



... Memorable for its cardboard sets and leather-clad arch villainess Servalan, the show was the creation of sci-fi legend Terry Nation, himself responsible for Doctor Who's arch-nemesis the Daleks.[Sky One to revive 'Blake's Seven']

Here is Wikipedia on the original:

Although many of the tropes of space opera such as spaceships, robots, galactic empires and aliens are present, the series is primarily noted for its strong character interaction, ambiguous morality and its dark, pessimistic tone.^[3]

[Blake's 7 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

I preferred Blake's 7 to Doctor Who, perhaps because it came along when I was older, or maybe because it lasted for a much shorter time.

Avon was a pretty memorable character. And you could never forget that eye-patch!

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