librarian.net

There was so much good stuff in the Carnival yesterday, that I didn’t append some of my favorite links from the week, but here they are.

- Two links about Google Books. One is Scott Boren’s long piece on LISNews about full txt serching in books. What you can search and how you can search it. Great well-researched piece. The second is Julia Tryon’s contribution to FreeGovInfo concerning the amount of government information available via Google Books. Google provides no statistics. This will be part of an ongoing project she’ll be working on there, stay tuned.

When looking at the search results in Google for publisher field has GPO, I found 141,600 items, only 82,487 of which were available in the full view. And although it is nice to think that we have the full text for 82,487 documents, not all of them can be used. I randomly picked a title to see how it looked and chose the Statistical Abstract for 1954. The pages were clear enough to read easily but on every even numbered page part of the right hand column was chopped off.

- Also from FreeGovInfo comes this analysis of Google Video’s closing and what happened to all those DRMed video files that people supposedly “purchased” Please read Part I: DRM Killed the Files and also Part II: Why the Google Video story should scare you.

- Karen Schneider has been writing some great stuff lately. It’s been fun to see her getting into what I see as the more technical side of librarianing because her explanations of techie stuff are clear and free of nonsense while still being readable and engaging. Her article in Library Journal Lots of Librarians Can Keep Stuff Safe about LOCKSS and Portico really helped me understand the fairly complicated world of e-journal archiving.

- Bryan Herzog’s always-excellent blog has pulled some Reader’s Advisory suggestions off of ME-LIBS the Maine Librarie dicussion list and added his own commentary. Brian also made a custom book review search using Google’s custom search function. Very very nice. I’d love to see someone toss together a page of Google Custom Searches that were useful to librarians. Has anyone done this? I’ve already made a Custom Ego Search but that’s not the same thing.

Despite my Very Large Skepticism of Google in general, the tool itself is very easy to set up and is potentially extremely useful (especially for librarians). Basically, it lets you limit searching to a select group of websites - in this case, book review websites

FreeGovInfo has this post by Chris Zamarelli about how the perception of libraries as being good places to get access to e-goverment resources is a mixed blessing for libraries who lack staffing and other resources to actually act as public information officers. The huge bummer is that this would be a great role for libaries to fill, IF library staff had better training and suitable funding to actually carry out these positions effectively.

My pal Chris Zamarelli from Libraryola is guest blogger over at FreeGovInfo this month! Sorry I’ve been a bit scarce, I was off talking to the Internet Archive folks about some stuff, but I’m back now.

I wrapped up my second month blogging over at FreeGovInfo.info. It’s very challenging to blog outside of your normal area of interest, thanks for letting me help out. They’ve got a fun little project going on that combines their site and Flickr. It’s called Best. Titles. Ever! Here is the page with the titles. And here is the Flickr pool with images of the actual documents.