Archive for the "Linkblog" Category
Cologne City Archive Disaster | MetaFilter
A short post to MetaFilter about the collapse of the Cologne City Archive in what appears to be a construction accident results in a long thread that has a lot of interesting and well-informed opinions on archival practice (and some really snippy stuff that seems to end on an OK note).
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The Brewin’ Librarian » What I’m finding as an Information Professional
My fellow Coloradan, Matt Hamilton, takes a look around and comes to the conclusion that "the library field is weird. No, really. I mean it…. I’m afraid we just might be making a mockery of ourselves. And we don’t have another 15 years to fix it. In 15 years the information landscape will have changed just as drastically as the web has changed us and if we don’t get serious we might just fall off the map completely." Matt is finishing his MLS, and he's written up a very interesting perspective on what's wrong with the field, what's right with it, and how he thinks we cold start to improve things.
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Max Planck Institute page on open access to visual media | Radical Reference
Laura Crossett pointed out this link on Radical Reference to the Max Planck Institute's "Recommendations Concerning the Free Use of Visual Media for Scholarly Purposes." Interesting in light of the discussion around the Huntington's policies on the Darwin photo.
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I love FriendFeed and I love pathologically helpful librarians. This is just one of a few examples from just today where someone asks a question to the gang on FriendFeed and gets a tidal wave of useful resonses.
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ASCII by Jason Scott: Temporarily Deleted
A brief email exchange with an aspiring plagiarist.
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Literature in typical PowerPoint templates. Crazy and funny. The interface is downright scary on the Macintosh. From the New Zealand Book Council. [link via Waxy]
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random($foo): Web 2.0 Expo Presentation Rundown
Links to video and slides from the Web2.0 Expo. For some reason, all the videos are redirecting me to Matt Mullenweg, but you can access the others in the blip.tv sidebar.
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Digital Things I’ve Been Wrong About (Kevin Kelly)
Along the lines of the "how we done it wrong," it's always useful to look back and see where your predictions or impulses were wrong. And, as Kelley says, "This inherent uncertainty about success is what makes life so interesting."
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Twitter / Matt Haughey: My local library has a flickr account…
Jessamyn, would you please have a word with Matt? Can we ground him or something?
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Issue number one of the Code4Lib Journal is out.
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Slashdot | ‘w00t’ Named 2007 Word of the Year
Merriam-Webster names "w00t" the word of the the year. Slashdot says "£4m3."
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The Morning News – The Laptop Club
Great construction paper laptops made by kids. Photo gallery and interview. (via Waxy.org)
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Students Find That Wikipedians Are Tougher Graders Than Their Professor – Chronicle.com
We found this with our student projects, too. But it's not that Wikipedia "grades" harder, its that the criteria for an "A" paper are not the same as the criteria for a robust Wikipedia entry.
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graphpaper.com – The Social Web’s Coffeehouses, Nightclubs, Country Clubs, and Taverns
Online social networks as "clubs" and all that implies. I think the number of club meetings I have attended in real life could be counted on one hand, but over the past five years, hardly a day passes without checking in on one online club or another.
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Telstar Logistics: The Fine Art of Printing by Steamroller
"Gutenberg did not have access to a two-ton steamroller, but it turns out that this mundane piece of road construction hardware is ideally suited to the task of creating large-scale prints. Who knew?"
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On O'Reily Radar, a very interesting conversation about Google Books between Paul Duguid and Patrick Leary (of SHARP), prompted by Duguid's recent First Monday article. (via Dan Cohen)
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The O'Reilly Radar blog takes a look at the downward trend in circulation and reference questions at ARL libraries. Interesting comments from all angles, including a hectoring librarian. (via corplibrarian/LSW)
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Anil Dash: toread is tobehuman
Dash: "But the reason ‘toread’ is profound is because it’s the biggest tag in an invisible tag cloud that surrounds us all…. Aside from those quiet desires that lurk inside us, though, there is something simple and beautiful about the desire to come b
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Inside Higher Ed :: A Provost and Librarian Walk Into a Meeting…
"it’s becoming less important for librarians to brag in meetings with provosts about the number of books and periodicals they have in their collection, and more important to emphasize how they are helping students with information literacy"
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Chronicles of Bean: PAR-TIC-I-PA-TION, or 37 pieces of Library Flair!
Very good post on ALA, with an even better photo–my favorite that I have seen from this ALA. Where did she get all those ribbons?
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Lawrence Lessig–Required Reading: the next 10 years
Lessig moving away from his focus on copyright, intending now to focus on government corruption.
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The Siren Song of the Internet: Part II – Britannica Blog
The best part of this whole stupid Gorman thing yet: in a blog post on shoddy research, he misquotes Jimmy Wales based on a printed source. And has to apologize. The irony! The laughs! The sheer idiocy of this whole exercise!
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Jonathan Lethem, Richard Posner, and others reveal their favorite fonts. – - Slate Magazine
Slate asks authors about the fonts they write in. I’m down with the Courier people (unfussy, easy to read on the screen, typos seem to stand out more). I use Bitstream Vera Sans Mono in my text editor for the same reasons. (thx Jessy)
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Enemies of Books! | MetaFilter
A link to "Librarians as Enemies of Books" by Randolph G. Adams, Library Quarterly 7 (1937): 317-331, plus the usual commentary and banter from MetaFilter.
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Turn any feed into an LOLcats feed. So wonderfully pointless and silly.
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A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright? – New York Times
Insanely stupid op-ed by Mark Helprin.
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Dear Internet, Re: SmithsonianImages.SI.Edu
A group is taking direct action-producing a Flickr set, book, tarball, and derivative works- to draw attention to the Smithsonian’s "draconian notices" claiming rights to apparently public domain works.
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ASCII by Jason Scott: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
"We have entered the hopefully-short era of the Microtheft, the smallest possible unit of larceny, the atomic level of sin. We’ve boiled down the act of being immoral to one string of numbers being in your possession, one collection of digits representing
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A fun idea: someone is twittering first lines of books twice a day. If you want to reveal what book it is, you click the link which goes to an Amazon page which has an affiliate ID for whoever is behind this. See also twitterlit.com.
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Free Range Librarian » Blog Archive » Rigor mortis
KGS on Steven Bell’s recent bit about academic librarian blogs. She does a nice job of dissecting why this essay was so dissatisfying. My most cogent critique so far had been "bullshit"; Schneider takes a more reasoned approach.
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blogwithoutalibrary.net » good conference ideas from the IA Summit: a photo essay
I’m not normally big on "icebreakers" but some of these ideas–from the recent Information Architecture Summit in Vegas–sound great for a conference. Nice photos, too.
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Librarian Avengers » The New York Review of Books
Entire post: "The New York Review of Books contains reviews written at great length by people who wish they had written the book in question and are slightly bitter about it." I love Librarian Avengers.
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Via Veerle’s blog, this link to letterpress porn.Well-shot short video about Firefly Press, in Somerville, MA. The voice-over is a little annoying, but worth it for the beautiful shots of type, typography, and the presses in motion.
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Behind the Typeface: Cooper Black
I missed this the first time around (in 2002) but Tim Spalding linked to it today celebrating his "new logo" in Cooper Black. If you are any kind of typeface geek you must watch this.
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Contrary to what you may have read, the official blog of the current ACRL conference is world-readable. (Note this is the event-specific "ACRL Blog," not the long-running "ACRLog"
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Overheard in the Office | Lest the Keepers of the Books Wreak a Terrible Vengeance
Funny overheard dialog. It is one thing to be drunk and searching pr0n at the library, and quite another to dis the librarians. (link via Jessy)
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O’Reilly Radar > How Google Books is Changing Academic History
O’Reilly points to a blog post by a Berkeley grad student on what Google Book Search means to her research. I was just thinking of GBS as the "poor library’s ECCO" when I helped someone find an 18thC publication there this week.
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O’Reilly Radar > How Google Books is Changing Academic History
O’Reilly points to a blog post by a Berkeley grad student on what Google Book Search means to her research. I was just thinking of GBS as the "poor library’s ECCO" when I helped someone find an 18thC publication there this week.
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O’Reilly Radar > How Google Books is Changing Academic History
O’Reilly points to a blog post by a Berkeley grad student on what Google Book Search means to her research. I was just thinking of GBS as the "poor library’s ECCO" when I helped someone find an 18thC publication there this week.
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Lorcan Dempsey’s weblog: Finding Time
Dempsey embeds a funny/depressing video from Ellysa Cahoy about finding Time Magazine on the Penn State website. I counted 18 clicks. I often tell students "believe it or not, the link resolver is supposed to make things easier."
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2007 Code4Lib Conference Schedule | code4lib
Videos posted for presentations and lightning talks.
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The Mantra of Entrenched Industries
"The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past."
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"Default templates are terrific for people who can’t or don’t want to design their own — but they’re terrible starting points for anyone attempting to establish their own unique brand. If you start with nothing, you’re forced to think about ever
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Metadata for All: Descriptive Standards and Metadata Sharing across Libraries, Archives and Museums
"Applying in particular data content standards by material type, and not by community affiliation, could lead to greater data interoperability within the cultural heritage community."
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"Over the last ten years, a company called ‘Octavo’ embarked on digitally photographing some of the world ’s great books from some of the greatest libraries…This site contains all of the books (about 400) that have been digitized to date."
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Creating Passionate Users: The Asymptotic Twitter Curve
"Twitter is the new Crackberry."
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Sean and Jenny on Flickr – Photo Sharing!
This woman’s Metadata/Metallica T-shirt is one fo the most gloriously geeky things I have seen lately. Rock on! \m/
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marclafountain.com: The Unbearable Lightness of Twittering
"Not only can you know in real-time when a friend is eating pizza, you can know if it has anchovies. Behold the power of technology."
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ASCII by Jason Scott: You Are Fuel
The whole dynamic of this is probably worth going into; here people were just posting stuff according to the class’s requirements, writing their dashed-off thoughts on a speech, and suddenly the asshole who gave the presentation is there in class. I wish
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Chip Kidd uses great photos by Thomas Allen on James Ellroy covers. Commenters don’t like Kidd’s type design. Kidd shows up in the comments and gets defensive.
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The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: Big Mac Attack at Wilkes U.
I’m proud to have kicked off this comment thread trainwreck reacting to the idiotic Mac baiting at the end of this CHE blog post. lolz
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Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education – Inside Higher Ed :: iCranky
"So one of the reasons I’m cranky today is because most faculty development workshops I’ve attended assume no knowledge and experience on the part of those being lectured to about the latest advances in technology, learning style, and interconnectivit
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Reading the comment thread, I am suddenly thankful that the NYTimes has never linked to me.
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"PennLabs presents new software developed by the Penn Library – and, in some cases, still under development." PennTags, subject maps, browser tools, etc.
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Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Database
"An online index to historical and critical items about science fiction, fantasy and horror." Free online citation database from Texas A&M. Via boingboing.
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Jobs: "So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none."
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The Chronicle: 2/9/2007: Time for Reading
On the need for slow reading. Advice I feel I need to take to heart, for myself and for my children. I do admire Franco Moretti, though; I think his project is something altogether different and that he claims not to read for the predictable shock value.
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Librarian Avengers » Deliver my books bitch.
How to get books delivered at Cornell: "2. The patron adds each book to her ‘bookbag’ 3. A MIRACLE OCCURS HERE 4. The patron mysteriously knows that she can have her books delivered." I love Librarian Avengers.
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The Scattered Librarian: The Dark Side of Library 2.0, Part 1: “It’s the Patron, Stupid!”
“Don’t worry about what babbling bibliopundits might have to say about the tools you choose, the speed of your implementation, or choice of software. You are not here to impress them–you’re here to serve your patrons.”
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The Scattered Librarian: The Dark Side of Library 2.0, Part 1: "It’s the Patron, Stupid!"
"Don’t worry about what babbling bibliopundits might have to say about the tools you choose, the speed of your implementation, or choice of software. You are not here to impress them–you’re here to serve your patrons."
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Thoughts For Better Conference Discussions
How to share what you are doing at your library without boring everyone else?
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Machine tags – Flickr: Flickr API
I can’t say I fully understand this, but it looks like a way for shoehorning more structured metadata into Flickr tags. Good timing for me, as I’m about to start an experiment using Flickr to host some image collections.
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blyberg.net » AADL.org Goes Social
"So what is the SOPAC? It’s basically a set of social networking tools integrated into the AADL catalog. It gives users the ability to rate, review, comment-on, and tag items."
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"Moreover, you’ll also be subject to some fairly onerous terms of usage on Footnote.com, especially considering that this is our collective history and that all of these documents are out of copyright."
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Information Wants To Be Free » Blog Archive » Keeping it real
Meredith has a great trainwreck of a comments thread going here, complete with fisking and Nazis.
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Live from Macworld 2007: Steve Jobs keynote – Engadget
My favorite part of the coverage is the audience reaction: “Loud cheers, people are starting to lose it a little.”
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“Did libraries (public and university) stop requiring people to be quiet in the last few years, or is it just me?”
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librarian.net » Slow Library, a 2.0 idea
Jessamyn has several links around the “Slow Library Movement,” apparently a call to take a more deliberate approach to Library 2.0.
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Academic Library Futures – December 15, 2006 – Library Journal
“For example, how about a desktop or web application that would enable faculty and students to not only find information more easily but also capture, organize, and manage it and output it in various forms? Wouldn’t academic libraries rush to site license
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Pegasus Librarian: eReserves: Blessing or Curse?
“So the upshot is that printing is a definite problem, but the answer isn’t as simple as, ‘Well, with the advent of eReserves printing went through the roof….’”
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explodedlibrary.info: librarian reactions to the taser incident in UCLA’s Powell Library
I, too, was surprised that more bloggers didn’t write about this. Police hitting patrons multiple times with a taser isn’t very “library 2.0.”
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