Andrea looks at Cantfindongoogle.com a list of failed searches. When people ask me, as they often do “how do librarians stay relevant in the age of Google” I tell them that Google is a very powerful tool that very few people know how to use well. I’ve been reading Tara’s Web Search Garage lately and even I’m learning more about how to massage information out of Google. Sometimes it’s as simple as explaining to the patron that if you’re looking for LTD Consortium, it’s going to be pretty important to use both words. Or maybe telling the patron who is trying to find the Boston Museum of Fine Arts that the key word to include in her search is “Boston.” This is second knowledge to me, and many of us, but it’s not to my patrons. Google is so fast and so useful that I’ve taken to remembering some web pages just by the search terms that I can use to find them, since I can never remember their URLs. I’m also pretty good at ballparking whether some information that I need either can or can NOT be found in Google before I waste a lot of time looking. That’s powerful stuff, and a useful skillset, so it’s good to remember that some people don’t have that mojo, either because they haven’t learned, don’t care, or give up too easily.
Author: jessamyn
accessibility in library web sites in KY, a sad state of affairs
Library Web Accessibility at Kentucky’s 4-Year Degree Granting Colleges and Universities a paper by a Kentucky web development librarian. Guess what, despite the fact that the ADA pretty much mandates accessible web sites, we’re not seeing them.
Based on low levels of compliance with the basic principles of Web accessibility and the potential of legal threats, institutions need to take accessibility issues more seriously. While the impetus to do so should fall under the rubric of professional ethics rather than avoiding a legal threat, either reason will suffice. Much like issues involving copyright, librarians embrace, on ethical terms, the protection of intellectual property while, at the same time, the threat of litigation hangs over our heads. Ethics may be important but they are also cheap. Litigation, on the other hand, is expensive. On issues such as standards, librarians understand how ignoring cataloging standards could have a negative impact on accessing collections. Can we afford to ignore Web standards when doing so impacts accessibility? [unalog]
not whine, WINE librarians
Wine librarians meeting, coming up soon.
xISBN blog to watch out for
I almost never link to new blogs with less than a few weeks of posts in them, but Glenn Fleishman [you may know him from such hits as isbn.nu] has a proven track record and is a delight to read. His new blog ISBlogN which tracks the “authority problem” with the ISBN system for most people’s real-world search needs. He’s got big plans, it will be fun to watch them unfold.
Authority doesn’t mean that the information is correct. Rather, it means that you have authoritatively settled on a single form of a category of information that might be represented in several ways. It’s a way to collapse lots of individual information that is fundamentally about the same think into a single set of information that is mapped to the same thing. This is closer to how people conceive of what they want from a book search than any of the tools I’ve seen….. I believe that with a little effort and some coordination, along with the tenets of Feist v. Rural, the Internet community could develop a WikiBook-a-pedia, or a compendium of updatable bibliographic information along with authority and chunky linkages that could be distributed freely.
hi – 05oct
Hi. I was invited to go to the ALA’s Office for Information Technology Policy’s Workshop on Libraries and the Information Commons today. It’s in Cerritos CA at the end of the month and I’m going to try to make it. If anyone else is going or has some pointers for Info-Commons type stuff to read in the meantime, please let me know about it. I’ll be starting with the Washington Office’s Issues Page first of all.