Wow! File this under amazingly cool tools for digitization. Some computer science folks from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst have come up with a took that can search handwritten manuscripts without requiring human intervention (rekeying). Here is an article about how it works. You can even try it out. This is a promising step …
I think our ALA president-elect, Michael Gorman, has the right idea on what the ALA should be focusing on. Education. According to the Library Journal, in a meeting entitled “The Future of Library Information Education”, Gorman expressed serious concerns about the state of library education and accreditation. Although I’ve only gone through one MLIS program, …
Yesterday, at my job interview, I was asked to talk about the 21st century library and what I would bring to it. I wish I had read this article by Robert S. Martin of IMLS (in College and Research Libraries News) before I went to the interview. While I did talk about libraries changing their …
Tame the Web this week has a great little guide on Teaching RSS to Reference Librarians. He’s got great links to other resources that will educate and inspire librarians to get excited about RSS. The Kansas City Public Library System and the Minneapolis Public Library are good examples of public libraries that have embraced RSS, …
There have been a number of recently published or written scholarly articles on blogging. Communications of the ACM has devoted most of their December 2004 anniversary issue to articles about The Blogosphere. I read the articles for free (one of the benefits of still being a University student) and didn’t really find anything in them …
Amateur journalists take note: according to Wired, the makers of Wikipedia have now created Wikinews, which allows anyone to write and edit news articles (subject to a similar review process to that of the Wikipedia, of course).
I’m probably grossly oversimplifying this, but I think there are two types of librarians: those who embrace technology and those who are antagonistic towards it or ignore it. I have seen this in my work at a public library and, surprisingly to me, at library school. I have been amazed that many people in my …
I couldn’t agree more with what Aaron Schmidt wrote about in his Ten Things to Stay Tech Current, but I think he should add a number eleven to his list: learn everything you can about open source and use OSS in your library. I really don’t understand why more libraries haven’t explored the world of …
Everyone working at or interested in libraries should read Top Ten Things to Stay Tech Current by Aaron Schmidt at Walking Paper.
A couple of months ago, I was impressed by how well TiVo was courting consumers by lowering their price and marketing to busy people rather than to couch potatoes. But my opinion has changed greatly now that TiVo is going to allow pop-up ads while users are fast-forwarding through commercials. This makes TiVo look like …
I recently read an interesting article for my Information Retrieval course about Power Laws and Weblogs, which I found very interesting in light of my recent forrays into blogging. The author states that blogs follow the same power laws that affect most social and economic systems. “A new social system starts, and seems delightfully free …
The Washington Post, in a series of focus groups, discovered that young people are far less likely to subscribe to newspapers than people 35 and over. Frankly, that wasn’t a great big surprise to me or most other people living on planet Earth. What was slightly more surprising is that many of them said they …
If you want to read as much as you can about Google Scholar all in one place, there is now a blog devoted entirely to the subject. It’s interesting to see the mix of opinions; that it’s the death knell for libraries, that it is the greatest invention since sliced bread, that it’s the anti-christ, …
I just wanted to encourage everyone to watch series of lectures on C-SPAN organized by the Library of Congress entitled The Digital Future. There are some great people who are going to speak (Lawrence Lessig, David Weinberger, MIT’s Neil Gershenfeld, etc.). If you miss them on TV, you can access the video feed from C-SPAN’s …
One of the many wonderful things about RSS feeds is that they are blissfully devoid of advertising. That may not be the case much longer. According to Wired News, “a new pilot program from FeedBurner embeds ads in the feeds of a number of the company’s content-publishing partners.” This is probably the begining of the …
Our servers were down for almost seven hours today. This is really unprecedented. At first I thought I’d somehow caused it, but fortunately (or not) it was not my fault. Apparently the DOT cut some fiber optic lines right near where the servers were housed, making the fact that ServInt has redundant pathways to the …
The MPAA has filed their first bunch of lawsuits against people who offer movies for download. Apparently they were inspired by the rousing success of the RIAA’s campaign to sue music sharers into oblivion (hmmm… how’s that going?). Slightly more scary is the Intellectual Property Protection Act which contains a slew of measures including criminal …
Cutting class — almost a right of passage in high school — is no longer an option for Houston area students. According to the NY Times, children in Houston area schools are being equipped with RFID tags that monitor their movements. While this particular project was designed for benign purposes (to prevent kidnappings), it isn’t …
Welcome to my new and improved blog. I’d really wanted to keep the old one, but alas, I had to upgrade and am far too lazy to move my old posts over. I promise to replace them right away with new and exciting links and commentary. I was really disturbed by this story out of …