librarian.net

I don’t care if Tommy Thompson is going to chip himself, I’m still not sold on RFID technology for libraries as it’s being marketed and implemented currently. Let’s get real here. There’s a difference between voluntarily tagging yourself and having tagging being a prerequisite for your school or library. Would TT’s tag have his social security number on it? What about his library reading record? This article looks to be nothing more than a cheap stunt hyping VeriChip’s system of linking information on your chip to a database that could contain your health information. Like many nifty technology tools, this one only becomes useful when it becomes ubiquitous which seems to me to be a long ways off. Getting this sort of coverage would [or should] mean open standards to lower prices, encourage innovation, reduce vendor lock-in and encourage growth generally.

And, speaking of RFID, Laura Smart’s URL to her excellent Library RFID site has changed. You can find all her content here: http://libraryrfid.net/wordpress

Until a few days ago, this was the web page for the Sirsi online newsletter. Now it redirects you here. I sure hope this merger makes librarians happy. I sure worry that it won’t.

I have read variants of this on four blogs so far today:

“ebrary is offering one year of free access to 55 library science titles to ALA members.  The collection will be integrated with the American Libraries digital archive. More info is available at http://site.ebrary.com/lib/ala“

I’m an ALA member, and I may be thick as a brick, but nowhere on that page do I see anything looking like more information. Can anyone give me more actual information on this? Do I have to wait for National Library Week to start? If anyone has more information on finding these 55 periodicals I have free access to, I’d be very grateful.

update: apparently there are contextual menus available via right-click or control-click [see my picture here], as PLABlog alludes to. So you go to American Libraries online, highlight a word in the text of the magazine, from there you can search ebrary’s other content but, searching a word like librarian will get you to books with the word “librarian” in it, someplace. Alternately, you can search Yahoo maps, Biography.com, Excite.com [remember them?] and others. Clicking “explain” takes you to Britannica.com, “define” takes you to m-w.com, “locate” gives you a choice of Mapquest, Yahoo Maps or National Geographic.

It’s all very bizarre, sort of like what I imagine a postmodern search engine would be like. There is no way to just do a keyword search of ebrary content, the box that looks like a keyword search is only for American Libraries. All searches open new browser windows. All content is shown to you in a window that is maximum 3/4 the width of your browser, and if you don’t close the table of contents window, it’s roughly 1/2 the window width. You cannot bookmark content in your browser, only through their in-house “bookshelf” feature. I’m just shutting it down now. The toolbar software that ebrary requires you to download before you can even use this interface has left white stripes across my screen even once it’s closed. I hope there’s something a little more welcoming there when National Library Week actively kicks off, but for now, that’s about as much “more information” as I can share with you.

Strange little bit of news that came to me via the “copy and paste a press release into my mailto form” Allibris will be offering books for sale via OCLC’s WorldCat so librarians can buy a book instead of ILLing it. OCLC will bill you, making it even stupidly simpler. No postage, no mailing & return envelopes, no messy labelling. Is this the future of interlibrary loan? Is it really cheaper to buy the book than ILL it?

Speaking of library art, check out this description of a new art show by the guy who owns the LAPL’s old catalog cards. [thanks chris]

This whole “review policy” thing from a few days ago came about because I had gotten yet another press release in my inbox. I wrote back with a short but polite reply and asked to not be the recipient of any more press releases but sure, go ahead and send me a copy of the magazine. Got a polite and friendly reply and then a few days later a few copies of Bookmarks Magazine showed up in my mailbox. I was almost embarassed to like it so much because I hate being marketed to and, worse yet, I hate being accurately marketed to. In any case, the magazine is a review magazine more in the vein of Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust — which I am also reading this week — than Booklist or Library Journal’s reviews.

Their tastes run more to the independent, their layout tends more towards the creative, and their scads and scads of reviews are interspersed with interesting articles that give you in-depth coverage of an author or two; the Brontes and George Orwell were features in two of mine. One of the issues I read had an absolutely ingenious mystery section which included a graphical “historical mystery series timeline” as well as a US map showing the locations of many well-known fictional detectives with, of course, some capsule reviews of the books they appear in. Many of Bookmarks Magazines’ reviews also come with pullquotes from other major review sources so you can balance their reviewers’ perspectives with other well known “experts.” Without blathering on, I have to say I was really pleasantly suprised at how much I enjoyed this magazine. I don’t like most magazines aimed towards readers — they’re too ad-heavy and seem to exist for pushing product, not for fostering reading — and this one was different. You’ve read my review policy, no one paid me to say this, go check it out if you’re looking for book lust-ish recommendations, delivered bi-monthly.

OCLC has really been doing some outreach. First off, remember that they have a blog. Second of all, they have managed to work out a co-branded Yahoo toolbar with a worldcat search embedded in it. I’d send you to the OCLC link but it’s an annoying requesting-all-your-personal-info page, so I’ll just link to Gary Price’s comments and links about it. Lastly, and my favorite, they’ve got some top titles lists. Top ten, top 1000, top 1000 with all the cover art [giant page].

Maybe someone could give me some data, what level of markeet penetration does OCLC have? When they say “top 1000 titles owned by libraries” what is the difference between saying that and “top 1000 titles owned by OCLC libraries”? According to their site, they have 52,000 libraries worldwide [9134 outside the US], and according to the ALA, there are at least twice that many libraries in the US alone. The nearest “OCLC library” to me that has the #2 book, the Bible, is 40 miles from here. From there, I also found Project Gutenberg’s Top 100 lists which tells a different story, somewhat.

Political satire in a no-royalty play. Laura’s Bush is a lesbian sex farce featuring an absurdly prudish librarian and, of course, the First Lady. [thanks tom]

Our library got our settlement CDs today. This is, of course, particularly poignant because we do not have a music collection, we have a book on tape/CD collection. Now we have a music collection and it is bad, very bad indeed. Andrei Codrescu has an essay on the wrongness of this settlement for public libraries. Music industry, shame on you for dumping your unwanted products on the public libraries of the country in an effort to clear your warehouses and supposedly make good on what you did wrong. Remember when they were calling this CD dumping a computer glitch? What ever happened to that defense? [thanks robert]

In addition to your REF shirt [I'm wearing one today] the well-dressed librarian might also wear a Librarian pin. I’ll buy mine when the price drops to something a bit more reasonable, or when Fredflare starts accepting barter. [thanks pauline]