Speaking of ALA, they now have Google running their site search. This is an amazing improvement to the functionality of the site for a number of reasons: bookmarkable search results, rich search syntax, understandable familiar results. Let’s hope this is a real step in the right direction of increased site usability overall.
Author: jessamyn
radref tooklkit, fair use with cut-and-paste restricted pdfs
Some non-ALA stuff. Sethf has reposted a worth-reading post that’s a bit of a DIY “how to” on how to exercise your fair use rights with PDFs that have cut and paste functionality removed. Why might you need this? He also has a post addressing that.
where’s the swag at ALA?
Please see TangognaT’s schwag wrap-up, this is the sort of thing I love reading blogs for.
rememberance of Noel Peattie
I am very sad to tell you that librarian, poet, and Revolting Librarians [and Redux] contributer Noel Peattie passed away yesterday. He was an amazing man and a wonderful contributor to the field of librarianship. My colleague Chris Dodge has written a remembrance of him which I have posted here.
learn this word: folksonomy
What do you call a classification system where everyone gets to be a creator? Metadata by community? Grassroots free tagging? A folksonomy, of course. Systems like this are being used at places like Flickr and Del.icio.us and unalog. I’ve seen this term hitting the blogosphere but not really getting a foothold on the library blogs yet so here are some links for further reading. Can you say “user oriented”? I bet you can.
– peterme from Adaptive Path [who coined the term weblog] waxes folksonomically
– slashdot, naturally
– a neat little bullet-pointed list
perhaps the most important strength of a folksonomy is that it directly reflects the vocabulary of users. In an information retrieval system, there are at least two, and possibly many more vocabularies present (Buckland, 1999). These could include that of the user of the system, the designer of the system, the author of the material, the creators of the classification scheme; translating between these vocabularies is often a difficult and defining issue in information systems. As discussed earlier, a folksonomy represents a fundamental shift in that it is derived not from professionals or content creators, but from the users of information and documents. In this way, it directly reflects their choices in diction, terminology, and precision.