librarian.net

I’ve always thought that one of the troubles with librarianship was that there are always more great ideas and projects than anyone has time for or can get funding for. As a result we outsource projects to the people who have time and money and thus lose control over the end product. I have no idea if Library Thing’s open source Open Shelves Classification Project is going to wind up looking like a library product or a vendor product, but I’m curious to find out. As Tim Spalding says “You won’t be paid anything, but, hey, there’s probably a paper or two in it, right?” I haven’t seen much chatter, blog or otherwise, about this just yet but I’ll be keeping my eyes open. Whether or not this project it ultimately successful, I think it’s an interesting grass rootsy way of looking at ideas of authority and rejecting the top down let-us-have-you-contribute-and-then-sell-it-back-to-you models we’ve been working under.

Tim has a post on the Thingology blog about OCLCs new announcement that they are creating something they call WorldCat Local, further blurring the boundaries between book data and end users services using that data.

There are a lot of good things about this. And—lest my revised logo be misunderstood—there are no bad people here. On the contrary, OCLC is full of wonderful people—people who’ve dedicated their lives to some of the highest ideals we can aspire. But the institution is dependent on a model that, with all the possibilities for sharing available today, must work against these ideals.

Keeping their data hidden, restricted and off the “live” web has hurt libraries more than we can ever know. Fifteen years ago, libraries were where you found out about books. One would have expected that to continue on the web–that searching for a book would turn up libraries alongside bookstores, authors and publishers.

It hasn’t worked out that way. Libraries are all-but-invisible on the web. Search for the “Da Vinci Code” and you won’t get the Library of Congress–the greatest collection of books and book data ever assembled–not even if you click through a hundred pages. You do get WorldCat, but only if you go sixteen pages in!

Meanwhile WorldCat still tells me that I have to drive 21 miles — to a library I don’t even have borrowing privileges at (Dartmouth) — to get a copy of the Da Vinci Code when I know that I can get a copy less than half a mile down the street, and another copy eight miles away, and another copy if I go another two miles, and then another copy eight miles beyond that. I can get maybe eleven copies of the Da Vinco Code before I hit a WorldCat library.

There may be a future world where teeny libraries like the ones in my area and other rural areas become part of this great giant catalog that is supposedly so beneficial to library users everywhere, but for now they can’t afford it. And every press release that says that this sort of thing helps everyone is like another tiny paper cut added to the big chasm that is the digital divide out here. How is this problem getting solved? Who is trying to solve it?

Just a “how to do it” note at the recent departure of Chris from LibraryThing. Chris posts to his blog, a little unhappy. Tim posts to the LT blog, quite professional. Space is available at LibraryThing for leaving messages about it all. Chris, you put in a lot of hard work and your dedication and skills will be missed. Tim, way to be a classy guy about it. This is a great example of how you don’t need to send out dorky “we are really looking forward to these new opportunities” press releases when something bad happens. I welcome this aspect of transparency that comes along with our new 2.0-ish world.

Hi. I’m in the Los Feliz branch of Los Angeles Public library where the air conditioning is brisk and the wifi is fast and free. Abby has an amusing wrap-up of her impressions of the WLA conference as well as some thoughts about Library Thing. It’s fun to hang out with other moderator/administrators of library-ish social-ish sites (LibraryThing for her and MetaFilter for me). A lot of the issues we deal with concerning identity, authority and content filtering as well as the sheer volume of the bits and bytes we move around mean that even though our sites are very different, some of the cat-herding aspects of being an overseer of a social software network are very similar.

Speaking of MetaFilter, here’s a fun link from there today: Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie.

I got my LibraryThing Author designation (like another librarian I know) and along the way, became an interesting exercise in authority control.

Library Thing takes on the tags vs. subject headings debate in their new thing-ology blog, a complement to their other blog.

Please, someone awesome take this job.

Jason Griffey makes a good point, the “tag cloud” I referred to when talking about daveyp’s OPAC subject cloud was a bit of a misnomer. Now that I’m using LibraryThing, at least a little bit, I have been looking at my author cloud which makes me think one thing “Man I read on the plane a lot!”

I’ve been swapping email with Tim over at LibraryThing because I’ve been talking to some small libraries (less than 10,000 volumes) about OPAC ideas. LibraryThing doesn’t have an enterprise version yet, but it’s got some features I’d love to see in my own OPAC, like a feed for “recently added” books, options for turning book cover display on or off (why is this so hard?) and all the cloudy goodness. The small-library OPACs I’ve seen are often either kludgey stripped-down versions of larger ILSes, or they’ve got terrible web implementation which seems added on as an afterthought. If anyone has seen a stand-alone OPAC that’s attractive, cheap and easy for non-techies to implement, please let me know. We don’t need patron or money management features, just the book parts, and maybe a “checked in/out” flag.

While you’ve got your OPAC hat on, read the ILS Customer Bill of Rights and the four fundamental must-haves.

1. Open, read-only, direct access to the database
2. A full-blown, W3C standards-based API to all read-write functions
3. The option to run the ILS on hardware of our choosing, on servers that we administer
4. High security standards

Is that too much to ask? Don’t miss the comments, I’m going to make “glommed-together, katamariesque nightmare ILS codebase ” part of my lexicon. What’s katamari, you ask?