From the Tribune:
Proposed changes in the Patriot Act would set up safeguards for the nation’s library patrons and let librarians seek legal help if federal investigators demand patrons’ records, the head of Chicago’s library system and U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) said Sunday.
Google has released a Google Maps API.
Google has officially launched the Google Earth beta. I’ve been playing with it for a little while and it’s an extremely cool application. 3D terrain, on-map roads, restaurants and hotels. It’s like Google Maps on steroids. Best of all, there’s a free version that basically does everything a normal user would want.
Read on for the press release…
From CNN
In MGM v. Grokster, the high court unanimously overturned a ruling that had barred Hollywood and the music industry from suing Internet services used by consumers to swap songs and movies for free.
“One who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright … is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties using the device, regardless of the device’s lawful uses,” Justice David Souter wrote in the ruling.
But Monday’s ruling by the nation’s highest court does not end the battle. The Supreme Court order sends the case back for trial to the same lower court that had originally ruled in favor of Grokster Ltd. and StreamCast Networks Inc., the file-sharing services named in the case.
Here’s the actual ruling (pdf)
update:
copyfight with links and comments
slashdot discussion
Boing Boing links to blogs and resources
Update2:
Ernest Miller with notes from the eff press conference
Update3:
grokster press conference audio (mp3) via Boing Boing
Update4:
Commentary from Ken “Caesar” Fisher at Ars including:
From my reading of the decision, there has been little actual clarity given to the question of what constitutes promotion and encouragement, outside from some ideal statements about the encourage being obvious. Of course, is Apple’s “Rip. Mix. Burn.” encouragement? Remember: the RIAA certainly thought so.
From WSJ
The Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection, consisting of 1,082 books. List price: $13,317.74. Discount price: $7,989.99. Never has a 40% discount seemed quite so weighty.
Speaking of weight, we’re talking about 700 pounds of books, according to Amazon, which offers some other stats in its editorial review: The books contain nearly half a million pages, and would form an 828-foot-high tower if stacked up. For those of us who live in New York City apartments, it must be said that this is terrifying as well as enticing.
You can sort the books by author (Edwin A. Abbott to Emile Zola) or by title (”Adam Bede” to “Zazie in the Metro”), which is fun in its own right, as are the inevitable arguments that attach themselves remora-like to any great-books list: Eighteen Graham Greene books, yet all you get is “The Portable Faulkner”? “The Beautiful and Damned” but not “The Great Gatsby”? Five Jack Londons? Has anyone really ever read nine Sir Walter Scott novels? Only the first part of “Remembrance of Things Past”? (On the other hand, you’re spared “Ulysses.”)
Another interesting Amazon collection is the $5000 The Criterion Collection Gift Set 2004 of 241 films.
As you can probably tell I’ve been busy and vacationing, so thanks to Mark Leggott for pointing out a great couple of articles in the last Tech Review by Lessig and Epstein debating who owns ideas.
gCensus is a new Google Maps derivative by the author of DRM Blog that displays Census data from 2000. from BB
There’s also a slashdot discussion on Google’s 3D maps.
This is a huge deal. See this from CNET:
After Jobs’ presentation, Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller addressed the issue of running Windows on Macs, saying there are no plans to sell or support Windows on an Intel-based Mac. “That doesn’t preclude someone from running it on a Mac. They probably will,” he said. “We won’t do anything to preclude that.”
However, Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers’ hardware. “We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac,” he said.
Bill Drew points to the WikiProject Librarians page at Wikipedia. Intro:
We librarians flatter ourselves that we know a thing or two about organizing information. It’s time we stepped up and contributed to Wikipedia: not just to its content but to its structures and technologies. This project page is intended to provide a rallying point for these activities. –Helperzoom 06:20, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
Google has updated the support for link resolvers and WorldCat in Google Scholar. From the new about page:
Support for Institutional Access
For libraries that make their resources available via a link resolver, we are now offering the option to include a link for their patrons to these resources as a part of the Google Scholar search results.
How does it work?
On-campus users at participating schools will see additional links in Google Scholar search results which facilitate access to their library’s resources. These links lead to the library’s servers which, in turn, direct them to the full-text of the article.Support for Library Search
For libraries that have their holdings listed in OCLC’s Open WorldCat, we have a link for each Google Scholar book result that leads to the Open World database where users can find the book in a local library.
How does it work?
All users of Google Scholar will see a ‘Library Search’ link for book results. Clicking on this link will direct them to the WorldCat system which will allow them to find a list of nearby libraries that have the desired book.
The page also states that Google is working with link resolver vendors to try to integrate it into the systems. There are also instructions for schools with home grown link resolvers.
The Encyclopedia of Chicago is now online. The Encyclopedia is a joint project between the Chicago Historical Society, Newberry Library and Northwestern University and has a hugely popular dead tree counterpart.
From Eric Hellman of Openly:
I think that libraries should consider returning to their historic roots that have nothing to do with “search”.Forget search- a billion dollars says that Google and Amazon will do search way better than any real library on the planet, and libraries can now leverage these searching capabilities in very real ways.
What libraries CAN do with their “rich stores” of data is to facilitate browsing- which is what libraries have always done well. Please take a look at today’s very best digital library software package - iTunes. It’s modestly priced. It manages collections using xml and leverages large stores of remote metadata. There’s a small search box that you might not even notice because the collection is so accessible via browsing. That’s worth emulating.
sounds fantasitc. There’s been a lot of discussion since then about how to really implement such a system. The mSpace project from the University of Southampton might give us some idea of how such a system might work.
Chicagocrime.org lists reported crimes by type and displays the location of the crime on an inserted Google Maps display. Pretty nice integration. From BB
By mid-July, the university says, almost all of the library’s 90,000 volumes will be dispersed to other university collections to clear space for a 24-hour electronic information commons, a fast-spreading phenomenon that is transforming research and study on campuses around the country.
This article came to my attention in a posting from a professor worried about the deemphasization of books.
What concerns me more were a couple of points mentioned in the article. First:
Carole Wedge, president of Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson & Abbott, an architecture firm in Boston that has redesigned dozens of college libraries for the computer age, said most were built “as boxes to house print collections.” The challenge, Ms. Wedge said, is to adapt them to what she called “the Barnes & Noble culture, making reading and learning a blurred experience.”
Rarely do today’s students hunt for a book in the stacks, she said. Now they go online and may end up with a book, but also a DVD or other medium. But, she said, “it’s unlikely there will be libraries without books for a long time.”
Librarians are big supporters of this trend.
I’m a huge fan of the changes happening in libraries. However, it’s one thing to support the changing role of libraries, but it’s another to become encourage poor research skills. Regarding the “they go online and may end up with…” part, that’s what students learning to become advanced consumers of information should be taught to do properly. If part of the goal is to get patrons back from lazy Google/Yahoo searches, isn’t it the point to encourage proper and sustained research. Sure, librarians are there to help, but statements like this combined with the movement to cater to these students’ ADD makes me wonder how much of a serious priority that really is.
Second:
“This is a new generation, born with a chip,” said Frances Maloy, president of the Association of College and Research Libraries and leader of access services at Emory. “A student sends an e-mail at 2 a.m. and wonders by 8 a.m. why the professor hasn’t responded.”
Wouldn’t that just be a case of an impatient and not-so-bright student?
Summary:
Users now have precise expectations for the behavior of search. Designs that invoke this mental model but work differently are confusing.Search is such a prominent part of the Web user experience that users have developed a firm mental model for how it’s supposed to work. Users expect search to have three components:
…
- A box where they can type words
- A button labeled “search” that they click to run the search
- A list of top results that’s linear, prioritized, and appears on a new page — the search engine results page (SERP)
Some rules I like: when going to do search, do it according to convention (including ranking). When doing more, don’t try to use a search interface.
On Web4Lib list yesterday Bernie Sloan posted a March Library Journal article by WebFeat president Todd Miller on why libraries should be simple like Google. Tom Miller is eloquently saying what many other have also said: the library web tools aren’t working. Users don’t like them and don’t want to use them. It’s as simple as that.
In addition to making basic search easier, however, we also should be looking at the library web prsence as a whole. One crucial point that doesn’t seem to get enough overt attention is that web interfaces for libraries are, like Google, web applications. Just like in the world of desktop applications, there is no one solution to rule them all. Different users have different needs. For instance, Apple doesn’t just offer iMovie as the solution for all video editing and the reason is obvious: iMovie is for consumers who just want to do a simple job quickly. If the user needs to do anything beyond basic video work, iMovie just won’t cut it and the user will have to turn to Final Cut Pro.
Why would research be any different? It’s not. Google only provides a small percentage of what’s available through an academic library, even only counting electronic resources. There’s simply far more functionality. Just like you can’t slap the iMovie interface on FCP and still have all the power of FCP, you can’t slap a stripped down interface on an academic library and still have the power. What Apple does is work on refining FCP’s complex interface and making it easy to use while still increasingly powerful, and libraries should do the same.
Sure, I use Google all day every day, but I also need the power of the library during my research as a student. I’m a ‘pro’ information user because, like most academic researchers, I need more than Google can offer. The problem with library interfaces today isn’t that they are bad because they aren’t like Google, it’s that they are bad, period. It’s a world of extremes, with the stripped down, basic Google application and the awkward, intimidating and illogical library interfaces.
Obviously, federated search is the Next Big ThingTM for libraries. Federated searching is beginning to solve some of the weakest points in library research, but it’s just one part of the larger problem. Todd Miller agrees that the advanced controls should continue to be there, but there’s an assumption that they already exist in a way that works for advanced users. They don’t, so we are still stuck in the pre-FCP world. Federated search is one step in the right direction, but it’s only one part of a whole package that needs to be fixed.
In follow-up posts a couple people have mentioned how Tom Miller’s article is in line with this great quote from Roy Tennant: “Only librarians like to search, everyone else likes to find.” Very, very true, but that doesn’t mean that library user interfaces can’t consist of anything more than a single search field à la Google.
If librarians consciously recognized that library web interfaces as a whole are web applications that need to have UIs which behave as expected, patrons wouldn’t be turned off by them. Google isn’t going to go anywhere. Therefore, the natural role of the library is as an advanced information retrieval system, and the interfaces should reflect that role.
The web presence of a large academic library (the only kind of library I know about) has become a web application to the users, but the user interfaces have not caught up. That’s probably the most fundamental difference between Google and libraries today: Google recognizes that it is an application and immediately provides you with the UI while libraries are still stuck in the mindset of web ‘pages.’
As reported everywhere, a federal appeals court has ruled that the FCC stepped beyond its authority with the broadcast flag:
In a blow to the entertainment industry, a federal appeals court on Friday found that federal regulators overstepped their authority by requiring consumer-electronics manufacturers to help restrict digital home recording.
My Architect (IMDb) is the 2003 documentary on architect Louis Kahn created by his son, Nathaniel Kahn. A few of the buildings were spectacular, but the Exeter Library at the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire stood out as particularly interesting. I’ll be up in the area next month and might visit it, so I’ll save most of my comments on the until after the trip. For now, check out the film if you are looking for a good documentary and poke around these links for more info on the Exeter Library itself.
Exeter Library from U Oregon
Old news in internet years (last week):
In a stand against a deal struck by five of the world’s top libraries and Google to digitize millions of books, 19 European libraries have agreed to back a similar European project to safeguard literature.
European Libraries Fight Google-ization
Deutsche-Well 4.27.5
New Scientist reports that Google has filed for patents related to adding authority as a factor in Google News rankings.