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Love for sale

Thursday, July 10th, 2008

Seriously, I just don’t get it.
So, Google used to have a blog just for librarians called Librarian Central. I remember hearing about it from lots of folks way back when, but I didn’t read it because I figured if Google came out with something cool, I’d hear about it from someone’s blog. Apparently, the blog [...]

LibWorm: Searching, syndicating and aggregating the bibliblogosphere

Saturday, November 25th, 2006

A few months ago, David Rothman asked me if there was any tool for searching the biblioblogosphere. At the time, there really wasn’t much. I told him about LISFeeds, but explained that its search functionality was very limited. And that was the last I heard on the subject from him until a few days ago [...]

Whatever you do don’t use Google!

Thursday, November 9th, 2006

After we teach our students how to distinguish between authoritative and unauthoritative resources, we need to actually show them how to find such authoritative resources. While our databases are great, they sometimes aren’t the most user-friendly things to search (LexisNexis anyone?). And frankly, these students won’t have access to the databases once they graduate and [...]

LISZEN is the path to library blog search nirvana.

Sunday, November 5th, 2006

This is what we have needed in the biblioblogosphere for a long time. Have you ever been looking for a blog post you read a while back, but you don’t remember who wrote it or exactly when? All you remember is the topic and that isn’t going to get you too far. Well, things in [...]

Do they care what they’re looking at?

Sunday, November 5th, 2006

About a week before I left for my vacation, Paul Pival, Ken Varnum and David Rothman had an interesting distributed discussion about how students are perceiving the research literature and are evaluating the quality of documents given that, online, everything looks virtually the same (and even more so when you’re looking at an RSS [...]

IL 2006 Day 1: Federated Search: State of the Art

Wednesday, October 25th, 2006

Jeff Wisnewski and Frank Cervone
I haven’t really looked much at federated search tools since my post on using MetaLib well over a year ago. So I was very interested to hear Jeff and Frank talk about the recent developments in federated search technology and how many federated search companies are partnering with search companies outside [...]

Why Google (or Ask or Yahoo!) is good for reference work

Wednesday, March 29th, 2006

Google/Ask/Yahoo! is rarely the first place I will look for information when helping a student. If it’s a really current topic, I’ll try Academic Search Premiere and LexisNexis. If it’s something more scholarly and related to a specific subject, I will use subject databases, though I will usually try Academic Search Premiere as [...]

CIL06 Day 3: The Future of Catalogs

Saturday, March 25th, 2006

This session was PACKED! I came in with Dave King and we both had to sit on the floor. There aren’t too many folks I’d sit on the floor for, but Roy Tennant and Andrew Pace are definitely two of them.
Roy and Andrew both took the word OPAC out of [...]

When is a wiki not a wiki?

Sunday, October 16th, 2005

Or does using a specific type of software necessarily define the product?
I was as excited as everyone else when I heard that the WorldCat wiki was live in Open WorldCat and that people could start adding reviews, tables of contents, and other notes on books. It will add tremendous value to WorldCat! [...]

Lorcan Dempsey on library middlware

Sunday, May 15th, 2005

I’ve read a lot of posts and articles lamenting the fact that many students and patrons prefer using Google to the library’s print and electronic resources, but few look at why people prefer Google beyond the fact that “it’s easy to use”. Today, Lorcan Dempsey posted an excellent analysis of the characteristics of the [...]

The Failure of Middleware, Part 7: OAI and Google Scholar

Thursday, April 7th, 2005

The Open Archives Initiative develops interoperability standards with the goal of developing easy ways to access digital content and improve scholarly communication. They have developed a protocol for harvesting XML-formatted metadata from text repositories. If all e-content providers used open metadata standards, libraries could harvest metadata from a variety of places so that [...]

The Failure of Middleware, Part 6: Link Resolvers

Thursday, April 7th, 2005

Link Resolvers allow users to move from a citation to the actual article (so long as the library has access to it), regardless of which database the article happens to be in. Joy Moll, who has a nice post on the topic, writes “a “resolver” program does all the work for me. I find [...]

The Failure of Middleware, Part 5: The Unintegrated Library System & Federated Search

Thursday, April 7th, 2005

Sorry for the delay in posting the rest of this, but we were flying to Florida yesterday to visit family. Nice to be in consistently warm weather for a few days.
When library catalogs were first developed, all of the electronic needs of a library system were fulfilled by the ILS. At [...]

Federated searching and why users aren’t finding/using your electronic materials

Wednesday, March 16th, 2005

Looking at my alma mater’s library website, I noticed that they are implementing a new federated search tool that searches eight resources (a mix of A&I databases and full-text). It’s powered by Metalib from Ex Libris, a company I think is pretty great. I was really excited at first, until I decided to [...]

Google Maps: Oh the possibilities!!!

Monday, February 28th, 2005

When I wrote my first post on how excited I was about Google Maps, I had no earthly idea what the broad capabilities of the application were. I don’t think Jon Udell even did at first, but he quickly discovered some really amazing stuff and illuminates these possibilities for us with fantastic screencasts (using [...]

Google Movies!

Thursday, February 24th, 2005

Yes, another new Google search tool (it seems like there’s been a new one every day over the past few months!). Google Blog reports that Google has come out with Google Movie “just in time for the Oscars.” It’s not a whole new search engine, but an operator that you can use to [...]

The cool yellow pages

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005

If you haven’t already, go check out A9.com, a yellow pages for the future. More a reference work than simply a “phone book”, A9 allows users to not only search the yellow pages but it lets you leave notes on the places they find, it shows you what else is in the neighborhood, and [...]

Giving the patron what s/he wants

Monday, January 31st, 2005

Steph at TechnoBiblio wrote about an interesting observation at a recent panel discussion she attended:
The final panelist came forth with a statement that seemed to take the audience by surprise, but it really shouldn’t have… “Users don’t care.” They don’t care that the subject specific databases will bring back more relevant hits. They don’t care [...]

RSS feeds in your catalog

Wednesday, January 19th, 2005

Exciting news from the world of ILS’s [as reported by Jenny at The Shifted Librarian]!
I’ve been crawling out of my skin with anticipation, waiting to be able to announce this, and now it’s finally official! Sirsi will be the first ILS vendor to offer native RSS feeds out of the catalog, and they’ve gone the [...]

Folksonomies: Listen to Jessamyn

Saturday, January 15th, 2005

Jessamyn said “learn this word: folksonomy” and I make it a point to always listen to Jessamyn. Actually, I’ve been hearing quite a lot about folksonomies lately, between my Theory of Information Retrieval class last semester and the recent discussion on Slashdot. Folksonomies are the taxonomic vocabularies generated from such [...]

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