‘puters

The Trouble With Online – is it us?

Roy Tennant’s article for Library Journal about the pitfalls of trying to use an OPAC to find articles online is now itself online. I love it when people tak about disturbing failures of our profession.

We exert much more control over our library catalogs than we do with article indexes, where we are at the mercy of vendors. Since our catalogs are at least partly in our control (automated system vendors largely respond to market demand, and we control how we catalog our items), we need to find ways to enable users to limit searches to full text online. Users rightly expect this ability. Their not being able to do it easily, or at all, is a disturbing failure of our profession.

what can you use a wiki for?

Posted on 21Sep04 by jessamyn

Wikis were one of the more foreign things I discussed at my talk. It’s easy to point to Wikipedia and say “Look, a collaboratively built encyclopedia!” but it’s more difficult to explain how a librarian could use it in their own libraries. Today Teleread has a post about using a wiki for a book discussion group where groups can collectively annotate a book club web site. I think this is what the National Science Digital Library was hoping for with its Annotation and Review Services wiki but it seems to have suffered from neglect. Here’s a neat little wiki about blogs.

search engines get paid to direct users to for profit sites?

Posted on 20Sep04 by jessamyn

Do you think it’s bad if search engines start receiving revenue for traffic they direct towards other for-profit sites? I’m not entirely sure I understand this article about the Google/Reed Elsevier talks. I also wonder what this means for Scirus which, by its own account, was giving Google a run for its money.

Many scientists post their research on university websites, which can be accessed free of charge. Google directs its users to Reed’s sites, but Reed does not now receive a share of the revenue generated by the traffic. Google has similar revenue-sharing arrangements with other companies, but a deal with Reed would be one of the biggest of its kind. [shelf]

You do remember libraries, don’t you?

Posted on 18Sep04 by jessamyn

What if your search engine really worked like a librarian does?

If only the search engine could stop after a few tries and say, “hey, I’m guessing that you’re looking for something like…” You know, just like any reasonably bright librarian might. (You do remember libraries, don’t you?) Yeah, it’d probably freak some people out, but what if it actually was helpful? [thanks hanan]

Google Google everywhere

Posted on 16Sep04 by jessamyn

But back to my number two boyfriend: Google. As you know, all librarians are in love with Google and we are all anxiously awaiting the days when it will put us out of a job…. OK I am kidding. However, we all love to talk about Google. Here are two non-librarian perspectives on Google. One which tells us how people search Google and other search engines. Is it any surprise that Google says that “Searchers become expert searchers very quickly” using Google? No, it isn’t. The second article is by a sysadmin pal of mine who went to a talk about Google’s place in research and librarianship. He was a bit suprised at all the gushing admiration he saw. He wrote this post: Google is Good? Talking about how while Google may not be evil, it both is and is not, good.

In the market of information, we tend to believe that the results Google provides are “most relevant”. In fact, the concept of relevance is redefined…. It is as if every time you searched for Apartheid, you got back a USA Today article on the end of Apartheid. This would be useful if you wanted a generalist knowledge, but it would be less useful if you had to study a specialist sub-area of the topic. To sum, as we begin to trust Google as a central knowledge authority, we do become more “dumb.” By accepting generalist documents and valuing ordered results, we’re buying into the system. There is inherent danger here; I feel that for many reasons, this danger is lost on most.