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Sweet Juniper! – Photos of abandoned school depository
“Pallet after pallet of mid-1980s Houghton-Mifflin textbooks, still unwrapped in their original packaging, seem more telling of our failures than any vacant edifice.”
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“The open theme continues today as we are announcing that we are opening up Yahoo! Search itself.”
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illumin8 blog » Blog Archive » Welcome to illumin8
“It’s all started in an Elsevier Library Connect meeting in October 2006….”
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“Illumin8 is a workflow solution that helps R&D decision makers answer complex R&D questions faster, more accurately… Semantic indexing…â€
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Netbase guy blog.
Category: search/browse
links for 2007-07-07
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Facebook Sees Flood of New Traffic from Teenagers and Adults
The coMscore press release on Facebook’s massive growth in use among non-college age users.
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Faceted Folksonomy | davidsturtz.com
via johnfudrow — Post on Faceted Folksonomy. This is one of my favorite topics as of late. Expect to hear a lot about this in the near future. Basically it is a concept for collecting richer user contributed metadata.
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InfoSpaces » Blog Archive » The Evolution of Social Tagging
More on faceted tagging.
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From the ASIST Bulletin, this article appears to describe the need for faceted tagging and how FaceTag is attacking the problem.
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FaceTag: Integrating bottom-up and top-down classification in a social tagging system
“FaceTag is a working prototype of a semantic collaborative tagging tool conceived for bookmarking information architecture resources. It aims to show how the flat keywords space of user-generated tags can be effectively mixed with a richer faceted classi
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via John Furdrow — Seems more general than the same author’s works on faceted tagging, but seems like it would be a helpful into to his line of thinking.
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citation-formats – Microformats
“This page will display several different types of citation format types.” In depth comparison of Dublin Core, MODS, bibTeX and Z39.80
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tiara.org » Online Identity Bibliography
“A collection of academic papers and books about identity online and online identity.”
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tiara.org » status in social media
“I finally got a glimmer of a dissertation idea today: status in social media.” – Includes a nice discussion of status in Web 2.0 geek culture.
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The Real Paul Jones » Blog Archive » OCLC NextSpace virtual roundtable – Q1
Paul is blogging his answers to the questions being given to panel participants. The topic of the virtual roundtable is online communities. Other panel members include Fred Stutzman, Lori Bell, and Ed Castronova.
Brief review of WorldCat Beta
The new WorldCat.org is a significant step forward. I am especially impressed with the efficient permanent urls (isbn/isbnnumber and oclc/oclcnumber) and the faceted browsing offered on the left of the results screen. Additionally, I like the breadcrumb trail that accompanies the faceted browsing. I am also impressed with the search speed and the simplicity of the interface. They have also describe a number of ways to integrate WorldCat into one’s browsing habits and websites. I look forward to seeing results appearing in search engine results. Overall, it seems like a significant step forward, but I need to look at it more carefully later.
NCSU rolled out a great new catalog today
The press release is here. This is possibly the nicest library catalog I have seen they use a database/search company instead of a typical opac vendor and appear to have tweaked it extensively. AMong other things, it clusters results based off subject headings, has advanced relavency rankings, and allows browsing of the full collection. It also facilitates browsing in other innovative ways.
Yahoo! announces book digitization program
Today Yahoo! announced their partnership with some academic libraries (Univ. of California and Univ. of Toronto) to digitize a ton of out of copyright materials. They also plan to digitize copyrighted materials. If I understand the details properly, there appear to be two main ways this differs from the Google Print project.
1. They plan to make all digitized materials, both in and out of copyright, freely available on the web to be indexed by any search engine that pleases. On the other hand, Google currently plans to keep books they digitize in only the Google index. The reasons for this difference are at least partially because of:
2. Yahoo! will only digitize copyrighted works when writers and/or publishers have given explicit permission to do so with the understanding that the work will be made freely available in its entirety. On the other hand, Google plans to digitize the entire collections of Stanford and Michigan allowing copyright holders the option to opt out of the program. In an attempt to stay within fair use, Google needs to keep the copies under strict lock and key and only display metadata and snippets based on a users search.
Both of these methods have their pros and cons. The new Yahoo! project is in collaboration with Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive who is a great proponent of free books. Furthermore the project, called the “Open Content Alliance”, stresses the collaborative effort between all the partners. That they are allowing all of the books to be indexed by whomever is in fact a major move towards providing open content.
However, if Google Print can win the lawsuits to allow its project, this will be a major win for fair use. I read a bunch of articles on both. Hopefully I have most of the details right. I have been spending most of my time working on formatting this thing properly, but figured I ought to get a post in.