BIBLIOTHEKE

In the latest Cites & Insights, Joy Weese Moll put together a nice overview of a presentation on Google’s library-related endeavors given at the ACRL conference.

The latest Ars OS X review has been posted and covers a lot of details of 10.4.

Boing Boing links to a short article discussing how DRMed audiobooks shut out affordable housing tenants for whom GNU/Linux machines have been set up to use.

Another story of copyright running amok. BB links to an article discussing a new Ghanian copyright bill that aims to collect royalties on commercial uses of folklore. Creepy.

Apparently we got one of these phone calls yesterday.

Bogus publishing companies and bill-collecting operations have college librarians across the country reading up on a new subject: financial scams.

Last July, the Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against Pinacle Publishing and MDSC Publishing—two lucrative scamming operations—for using illegal telemarketing maneuvers against a number of institutions, including several college libraries.

The FTC asserted that the companies pretended to have preexisting business relationships with librarians, referred to nonexistent purchase directories and pretended to have lawyers that would collect on fake accounts if the libraries refused to pay them.

From Some college libraries fall prey to scammers by Jasten McGowan
Duke’s Chronicle Online 3.10.5

Also: College Libraries Are New Targets of Telemarketing Scams (sub required or internet post) By Scott Carlson
Chronicle of Hgher Ed 2.25.5

First, the links:

Knowing When to Log Off by Jeffrey Young
Chronicle of Hgher Ed 4.22.5

Donald Knuth versus email

Again, there’s all this jibber-jabber about kids today and how much info is getting pumped into their heads. Maybe this is true, but internet surfing is not all that different than channel surfing and, as I’m sure a lot of folks love to point out, in both cases they aren’t digesting quality. Many people like to say that the quantity of info being fed to them has increased, but I can’t say I agree. Certainly there is a greater number of info sources putting out info, but a bunch of little pieces add up to the same quantity as the big chunks, and information recieved outside of media certainly qualifies as info. In fact, Knuth is an example of someone remembering that computers can be used simply as tools of expression instead of being led around by internet trends. Maybe his model is the solution to the problem…

All too often I read someone hyping blogs and, particularly in the online librarian world, saying that it’s a choice between blogging and digital death. One of the great things about the past 10 years is that the world has shrunk dramatically and information is now so completely accessible. Particularly in the case of someone in an academic library with electronic databases up the wazoo, virtually everything is a couple clicks, or an ILL request at most, away.

But in the blogging world, it goes beyond that. Blogging is largely viewed as the act or writing about what going on now, as in right now. You’ve missed the train if you wait a day or two to comment on piece of news. I think this is where this whole “blog or die” attitude comes from. After all, the biggest proponents are bloggers.

Taking a broader view, however, and we see that this issue extends beyond the blogs. If you aren’t aware of the lastest developments (meaning 5 minutes ago) you instantly become an outsider to information society. For librarians, this can be a more pointed issue, since a large part of the profession is to be on top of advancement in information management and dissemination.

What we are seeing is a continuation of the boom-era problem of internet/information anxiety. With librarians, however, it can seem worse for the reasons described above. Because of this, I think it’s important for librarians to realize that, contrary to popular belief, blogging isn’t God’s gift to libraries and not everyone should worry about it quite so much.

Anyway, more on the subject later, but if you want to feed your info anxiety a little bit, here are some links:
Om Malik
Slashdot comments
N.A.D.D.

More coming in part 2…

House OKs Family Copyright Bill by Katie Dean
Wired 4.19.5

More details on the criminal penalties from news.com.com.com:

File-swappers who distribute a single copy of a prerelease movie on the Internet can be imprisoned for up to three years, under a bill that’s slated to become the most dramatic expansion of online piracy penalties in years.

Prison terms on tap for ‘prerelease’ pirates By Declan McCullagh
CNET 4.19.5

And Cory Doctorow’s take:

The House just passed the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, which is a classic DC compromise bill: on the one hand, it panders to the Hollywood filmocrats by promising mandatory beheading for people caught videotaping movies in theatres, and on the other, it throws the tiniest, most noncontroversial of bones to the copyfighters by legalizing tools that automatically fast-forward, audio-mask, and otherwise munge DVDs during playback, a technique largely employed by Christian companies that sell paranoid parents players that guarantee nipple-and-cussword-free playback of movies from the corner Blockbuster.

from BB

• Battelle on Google Keyhole Integration Update
• Memorymaps
• myGmaps enables you to create, save and host custom data files and display them with Google Maps.
• Google Maps Hacking and Bookmarklets
• Google Maps Standalone Mode
• housingmaps.com powered by craigslist and google maps

Over at IBM’s developerWorks Peter Seebach writes about Naturally occurring standards. (4.12.5)

Sanger has written a detailed history of Wikipedia in an effort to clarify how it became what it is today, and it’s a must-read for a number of reasons:

The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia part I
The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia part II

One very interesting higher-level point:

Wikipedia became what it is today because, having been seeded with great people with a fairly clear idea of what they wanted to achieve, we proceeded to make a series of free decisions that determined the policy of the project and culture of its supporting community. Wikipedia’s system is neither the only way to run a wiki, nor the only way to run an open content encyclopedia. Its particular conjunction of policies is in no way natural, "organic," or necessary. It is instead artificial, a result of a series of free choices, and we could have chosen differently in many cases; and choosing differently on some issues might have led to a project better than the one that exists today.

A quick pointer to two interesteing articles on the subject:

Piercing the peer–to–peer myths: An examination of the Canadian experience by Michael Geist
First Monday 10:4

Nielsen Rating System At Odds With RIAA’s Claim Of “Lost Sales” by Moses Avalon
MusicDish 4.24.4

And while I’m at it, here’s one of the most well-known articles on the RIAA:

RIAA’s Statistics Don’t Add Up to Piracy by George Ziemann
AZOZ.com 12.11.2

Open-Access Journals Flourish by Randy Dotinga
Wired 4.11.5

Directory of Open Access Journals

Yet another article on the disconnect between libraries and today’s youth (bugmenot probably required). Being in my late 20’s myself, it’s really difficult for me to figure out why librarians have such a problem understanding the information needs of young folks. This is a demographic that has the most mallible tastes. This same age group that librarians think are so hard to please make up the most receptive and virgin group of folks in the online world.

Having an ipod is not ‘techie.’ Having a blog (or any variation thereof) isn’t either. Far from it. The belief that things like these are ‘techie’ needs to be dispelled with a quickness. Most of the things these kids are into are not complicated and do not require technical knowledge. Librarians who feel these toys are intimidating should really try to get over the superficial appearance and recognize that the whole point of these electronics is that they are actually easier to deal with and understand than the tools that preceeded them. Having an ipod means you no longer have to worry about changing the CD. It’s a simple convenience. In fact, the ipod itself is so popular largely because it is dead simple to use. Services like Blogger are just another step in making online publishing universal and accessible to even the most technologically illiterate among us.

Part of the gulf I see in my day-to-day life in a library is a disconnect between librarians and younger patrons specifically because librarians simply aren’t interested in new technology. There shouldn’t be anything wrong with that. I, for one, am not interested in learning German. I’m also not interested enough in book binding to go learn how to do it myself. We all have our roles and librarians shouldn’t push themselves so hard to dive into all aspects of tech if it doesn’t interest them. It just makes those folks look clumsy. But taking a few minutes to set up a blog on blogger in an effort to understand the process is so simple and painless that avoiding it is silly.

I’ve noted before that, from what I can tell, the biggest reason that young folks don’t realize the significance of libraries is because libraries and librarians don’t have a significantly visible online presence. In my online travels, there seem to be more librarians talking to other librarians about stuff that companies are doing than there are librarians talking to non-librarians and making cool new information tools for the public to use. Library web sites are hard to use and non-standard. In online discussions, I have never seen a librarian assuming that role by providing factual information. Finally, I think librarians are overextending themselves. More on that in future posts.

Steven Cohen posts critically about authors tagging their own work.

I’ve noticed that quite a few bloggers have been tagging their own blog posts on del.icio.us. My belly barometer goes off when I see this. It just doesn’t seem right to me. I find it counter-intuitive to the collective knowledge base. It also seems a bit egotistical. Thoughts?

So now authors tagging their own posts in some fad internet site is considered unethical? As long as it’s not spam, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it and it is far from ‘unethical.’ Who is Steven (or anyone) to say who gets to post links to what? Advocating restrictions on anything beyond obvious spam is an indication of being unclear on the concept.

With regard to spam, as Cory Doctorow has pointed out, if you have a digital ecosystem, you have to deal with parasites. I get spam in my email just like everyone else, but now that we have spam filters it’s not a big deal. The snail mail spam I get at work from the university itself is far more of a chore to deal with than email spam. And in search, Google has ways of dealing with inidividuals who exploit the search engine to an inordinate degree. These are the appropriate ways of dealing with it. Social software clearly should just recongnize that there need to be mechanisms for managing spam in a way that still gives users control.

But in the case of content creators who aren’t obviously spamming, there is absolutely nothing at all unethical about adding to the collective knowledge base in any way they want. Part of the point of a collaborative effort is that you get contributions in a variety of forms and they all combine to create an organic representation of the larger body of information. Who cares if it’s ‘egotistical?’ If there was an ego restriction on creation of weblogs, you’d probably lose the bulk of them.

In the end, however, it’s not ‘egotistical’ to add to a collaborative information project, particularly one that is used for “your personal collection of links,” as noted in the first full line of text on the site. I don’t use del.icio.us very much (and have never bothered to post a link to anything I’ve written myself), but I, for one, will continue to post whatever I want regardless of whether it gets approval from the armchair ethics committee.

The BBC has launched a pilot project to work out the details of releasing the BBC archives DRM-free. It’s pretty nice to see the tagline “Find it. Rip it. Mix it. Share it.”
- link to site

NPR ran a story the other day on the use of comic books in the classroom. Educators are starting to look to them for help with everything from reading to science, but the old debate continues. While comic books certainly can’t fill every role, there are some jobs they do exceeding well. For example, Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde (see example pages here) the war in Bosnia closer to the reader than probably any other work. The drawings allow Sacco to show the reader the gruesome images of war without them being completely repulsive, as would be the case with photographs (which, of course, simply don’t exists for many of the events being described). Thus, comics journalism is one area where the medium is perfect, and there are many more.

Criticism of the graphic novels and dramatic comics is, as is so often the case, born straight out of ignorance of the form’s strengths and weaknesses. Works like Jimmy Corrigan and, of course, Maus show that comic works are an extremely important cultural development that can’t be ignored. Regarding the debate discussed in the NPR story, librarians have the responsibility to understand how comics work and what purposes they serve.

Note, too, that most of the noteworthy artist/authors are being published by Fantagraphics, so that’s the first place to look for great works in the genre.

Google has introduced a new Q&A service that puts facts related to searches in OneBox instertions. In an example noted in the Macworld article, a search for Portugal population returns the answer mined from the CIA’s World Factbook. More details on the service and how it fits into the world of search can be found on the Search Engine Watch blog.

If you use Adblock with Firefox, here is a good filter set.

And it works just like the rest of the service. Zooming in, it appears to be 1m resolution and I see a couple dots that look like people. While this ability has been there with other services, integration with Maps makes it very pleasant to use. They’ve also incorporated world-wide imagery, but it’s not detailed.

UPDATE: I tried looking up the University of Illinois library in Urbana, but they don’t have any high res imagery. Also, the images of my city are at least two years old and, therefore, don’t include a lot of new construction.