BIBLIOTHEKE

I don’t really want to give any more fame to the comments from ALA prez-elect Gorman last week, but George Needham’s satirical post at It’s all good is a rather amusing response.

John Heilemann gives us tons of dirt on Google’s path to IPO. Tons of untold stories, like the engineer squating in CEO Schmidt’s office to Sergey and Larry playing hardball with VCs, breaking rules all along the way.

From Cory Doctorow:
It’s not a service I’d use, but I believe that it’s the kind of service that is vital to the Web’s health. The ability of end-users to avail themselves of tools that decomopose and reassemble web-pages to their tastes is an issue like inlining, framing, and linking: it’s a matter of letting users […]

John Ritterbush, a colleague of mine from Northwestern, has a fantastic new blog, Anatomy of a Psychictoad, with an interesting post on Beauty and the Biography. In it he asks, “can you admire art without the artist’s biography?” His post is a great point to start, and this began as a comment there, […]

Jesse James Garrett breaks down the tech that’s introducing desktop app functionality to web apps.

Slashdot article and discussion

Kembrew McLeod’s new book, Freedom of Expression®, is available as a downloadable PDF. From the publisher:
In Freedom of Expression®, Kembrew McLeod covers topics as diverse as hip-hop music and digital sampling, the patenting of seeds and human genes, folk and blues music, visual collage art, electronic voting, the Internet, and computer software. In doing […]

Google has implemented a new “movie:” operator that can be used for finding info on, obviously, movies. Type in movie: followed by a zip code or city name to get show times and theaters (Evanston, IL). This will be a pretty cool supplement to IMDb which I have been addicted to for a […]

librarian.net linked yesterday to a fantastic article by Nathan Bierma on the future of libraries: Future Bound: The greatly exaggerated demise of an American institution. He discusses how audio books and multimedia have had tremendous growth at a time when the ebook was supposed to be taking over (which it barely has started to). […]

Last week we had a very interesting discussion on the Web4Lib discussion list about how libraries relate to other online tools like, of course, Amazon and Google. I thought Alane Wilson’s post was dead on in a lot of ways, although we shouldn’t forget the absolutely vital role that non-tech librarians play. Going […]

These two articles are great resources on the wiki phenomenon:

Wikis Described in Plain English from Common Craft
Wikiphilia - The New Illness from Hacknot

And while we are on the subject of wikis, don’t forget to buy some Wikipedia products for the fundraiser.

Battelle links to Vimeo, a Flickr-like system for videos.

A couple cool videos on there are a clip of Marc Cantor talking about the lack of metadata for podcasting, etc, and a clip of Wooden Mirror by Daniel Rozin which was all the rage at the 2000 Siggraph (and one of my personal favorite works of […]

Over the past week or so folks have been up in arms about the Google Toolbar’s new AutoLink feature. I haven’t tried it (IE only), but the core of the major complaints is that it adds links to web pages without the consent of web authors, something very much like the Microsoft Smart Tags […]

A couple interesting articles on Google from Library Journal:

The first, Google Out of Print by Roy Tennant, takes a critical look at the copyright restrictions of the service, speculating that there will be an overrepresentation of text from the pre-1923 books.

The second, The Google Opportunity by Stephen Abram, lists some ways that libraries can keep […]

Everybody’s been talking about Righting Copyright: Fair Use and Digital Environmentalism from the current BOOKFORUM, so I’m linking to it for those who haven’t yet read it. It’s actually a very good overview of the current state of digital copyright and what some call the Digital Environmentalism movement, led by folks like Lessig, that […]

I don’t have much to say that can’t be taken care of with the following links:

mSpace info
Classical Music Browser (requires Mozilla-based browser)
Slashdot article and discussion
Register aritcle

more on the semantic web movement (interesting articles and applications with varying degrees of relevance):

Wikipedia entry
A Comparison of Hyperstructures: Zzstructures, mSpaces, and Polyarchies (PDF)
Taking a Stand on the Semantic Web
August […]

Google Scholar now has a preferences page to specify your institution (if it’s among the few included in the pilot) and get links to your resolver in the results. I don’t have time to play with it just yet, but according to a post by North Carolina State University’s Andrew Pace on the web4lib […]

Bowing to the primary complaint from ILL librarians and staff about the Ariel electronic document delivery software, Infotrieve has announced that they are working on a patch that will make Ariel 4 compatible with older versions of the software. As previously noted here on Bibliotheke, the incompatibility between older versions and the recently released […]

I found this absolutely fascinating and thought I’d pass it on:
Tammet is calculating 377 multiplied by 795. Actually, he isn’t “calculating”: there is nothing conscious about what he is doing. He arrives at the answer instantly. Since his epileptic fit, he has been able to see numbers as shapes, colours and textures. The number two, […]

From the press release:
Thanks to an eBay-shopping English professor, the University of Iowa has acquired more than 250,000 science fiction fanzines and almost overnight has increased its stature as a prominent science fiction research center.

The collection was assembled by Martin M. (Mike) Horvat of Stayton, Ore., a longtime science fiction fan and collector of fanzines, […]