Month: January 2007

a few things I have been reading

Posted on by jessamyn

Some of these have been mentioned to death other places, some I haven’t seen a lot of talk on. I’ve been fighting with Gates Computers this week and haven’t been reflecting much but I thought you might like to read them too.

but what are people really reading

Posted on by jessamyn

I’m fascinated by the Public Lending Right scheme wherein authors receive money from the government for the lending of their books in public libraries. Nothing like having a little money involved to get accurate statistics on who is reading what. One author reports on what people are actually reading at the library.

The truth is that public libraries have become a service for the very young – the place where you go to inspire the nippers with a love for literature. For better or worse (and I’d say worse), they are no longer where many adults go in search of information (what’s Google for, after all?).

If adults go at all, it seems that it’s hardback fiction that they are mainly after. Josephine Cox and Danielle Steel came in second and third place in PLR’s top twenty last year (with sales in Steel’s case totalling over 500 million, I’m not quite sure this is the kind of struggling writers that the Brophy’s had in mind). And so far as I can see, there were no authors of non-fiction for adults in the top hundred; though Terry Deary, who wrote the Rotten Romans etc for kids, non-fictin of a kind, does get there.

nownow.com/nownow answers by email… NOW

Posted on by jessamyn

I am intrigued by nownow.com, Amazon’s answers-like service that allows you to ask questions via your phone [or other web enabled device] and they’ll email you back three answers, fast. Looks like the answers come from people working for mturk.com and, if I’m not mistaken these answers generally take a minute or two and answerers get paid a few cents. The answers I’ve seen are your standard concise copy/paste web answers, they seem pretty good for factual type questions. Here are some examples

Is faceted indexing the future of social tagging?
What fast birds start with the letter A?
Where is the closest public bathroom to 3 Hanover Square NY NY 10004….um like NOW!

At some level it’s like being able to email someone to have them do a web search for you, I bet it becomes very popular and I’m curious to see how it fits in with Amazon’s other qanda product, Askville.

Contrast this to library email reference. In this example (which coincidentally came in to my inbox this week for an unrelated reason) where someone is trying to remember a book from their childhood (which, as we know, is a really typical reference query). The librarian, while excruciatingly thorough with the resources, does the standard librarian thing and teaches as he or she tries to answer the question. For an opening line to a response to a “what’s this book” question, this one is sort of…. daunting?

Fiction is usually cataloged by author and title, not by subject or plot line, which makes identifying books by their plot an often difficult endeavor. One of the best ways to find books for which you know only the plot is to ask other knowledgeable and well-read people for help. There are several resources you can consult to do this.

The answer is amazing if, like librarians, you look up books for people as your job. However, telling someone to subscribe to a listserv just to answer a “what’s this book” question seems a bit like overkill. Telling them to ask knowledgeable people seems to pave the way for the response “isn’t that what I just did?” In any case, names have been removed and this is not a “tut tut” post, just an interesting observation on the divergence of serious ref and ready ref.

weeding and noisy libraries, a community response

Posted on by jessamyn

Simon Chamberlain’s VALIS blog points to a bunch of responses to the Wall Street Journal piece about what they see as aggressive weeding. He gives two nods to MetaFilter, one for the discussion about the WSJ thread [which I participated in] and one for a related thread in Ask MetaFilter asking when libraries started being so … noisy. One of my favorite things about these discussions is the interactions between librarians and non-librarians in a non-library setting. The other thing I like is that thanks to MetaFilter’s use of the XFN protocol I can link to every library worker I notice in these threads as a “colleague” and then keep track of their posts and comments. Look at all those librarians talking to each other, and to their once and future patrons.