Tennant: Digital Libraries   

Earlier in the week I wrote again about "the flow" -- that is, sources of information and content that are mostly about getting your attention now rather than later. Twitter is perhaps the best example of this. In that post I discussed some professional angles on this phenomenon (for example, what happens when information that may have historical utility disappears). This post will focus on the more personal angle.

As a long-time Twitter user, but also someone who has both a life and a job, I've become aware lately of how much passes me by i...Read More

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A few years ago I wrote one of my Library Journal "Digital Libraries" columns on the phenomenon of "flow" ("Hustle and Flow", LJ, 3/15/2006). "Flickr, similar to other new interactive resources like blogs or link-sharing sites (like del.icio.us)," I wrote at the time, "is all about flow. The constant refreshment of new information, or flow, is about grabbing your attention. People use these tools mostly for current awareness rather than to find previously posted content." [emphasis added]

I went on to describe the difficulty of finding older material in a site like Flickr. Now Flickr looks like a paragon of retrieval when compared to Twitt...Read More

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I've been inspired to write this post based on a discussion on the Code4Lib list about embedding HTML in MARC records. Even worse, perhaps, it turns out that the actual use case was to embed an image of a line of text that would be used in a catalog display. I'm telling you, I can't make this stuff up.

I'll get to the reasons why this is wrong, but first I'd like to acknowledge the motivations behind this "fix". A fix like this often comes from a library's inability to control the end-user display like they wish to. The vendor may not provide enough flexibility to do this, and/or the library may not possess the technical knowledge required to accomplish it in a different way than embedding HTML in a MARC record. ...Read More

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I have so often written of the great things that the National Library of Australia does that it may sometimes seem that I'm in their employ. Well, I'm not, but neither does that prevent me from seeing what great things they do and calling attention to them. Also, not to slight their counterparts across the Tasman Sea, I've also made note of the great work that the National Library of New Zealand does as well. But this post is about a specific project called Australian Newspapers.

Released now in "beta" form, a wide public release is planned for ...Read More

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I usually try to write more seriously, but even I must descend to the depths of the Annoyed Librarian upon occasion. Well, maybe not that far, but you get my point.

Why, oh why, must so many web site designers transfix their pages to a specific width, rendering it incapable of being adjusted by readers to their own requirements? Silly me, somehow I had thought one of the things that Cascading Style Sheets would bring us would be the ability to make great designs that were also liquid. A liquid design can accommodate virtually any browser width and still look good.

But lately it seems that just about every site I run into uses a fixed-width design. This is partly due to underlying applications that provide a certain set of theme options...Read More

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Today "Deanna Marcum, Associate Librarian for Library Services at the Library of Congress, announced that the Chronicling America website (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/)—a free, national, searchable database of historic American newspaper pages published between 1880 and 1922—recently posted its millionth page." The press release goes on to provide additional background:

Launched by the NEH and the Library of Congress in March 2007, Chronicling America is a part of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP),

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Google is beginning to let word out about an intriguing project called Pregel. Named for the river spanned by the seven bridges of Königsberg (of Prussia, now Kaliningrad, Russia), it actually refers to a famous mathematical problem that laid the foundations of topology and graph theory in 1735. The Google blog explains it this way:

"A relatively simple analysis of a standard map (a graph!) can provide the shortest route between two cities. But progressively more sophisticated analysis could be applied to richer information such as speed limits, expected traffic jams, roadworks and ev

...Read More

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One of the numerous Google Labs projects is one called Google Squared. Google's "in a nutshell" explanation of it is:

"Google Squared is a search tool that helps you quickly build a collection of facts from the Web for any topic you specify.

• Facts about your topic are organized as a table of items and attributes (we call them "Squares" for fun).
• Customize these Squares to see just the items and attributes you're interested in.
• See the websites that served as sources for the information in your Square.
• Save and share Squares with others."

I recently tried it out to see if it offered anything new, and so far I can't see why I would use it. To be truly useful, it would need to take your search and build a...Read More

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A recent post on the Google blog highlights how easy it is to add books from your personal collection to Google's MyLibrary service. Although that post described how to use a barcode reader, it is also fairly easy to add books by searching Google Book Search. I know, since that is how I added mine (only a few, for testing purposes). But doing that also highlighted some problems.

For example, at least one of the books in question had multiple records. Do I add them all? Do I add one? Which one? Do I really want to root around to find the specific edition or printing? Here is where ...Read More

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I saw this come across...uh...Twitter today. It turns out the learned folk who produce the venerable Oxford English Dictionary -- "the definitive record of the English language," mind you -- monitors the language used on Twitter. OUCH.

"Oxford University Press lexicographers have been monitoring more than 1.5 million random tweets Since January 2009," they boldly state, "and have noticed any number of interesting facts about the impact of Twitter on language usage." Well, duh. Among the amazing findings:

“Watching”, “trying...Read More

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This blog, and the column I wrote for Library Journal for a decade, are all about doing things differently. But every now and then it's worthwhile to take stock about how difficult that actually is to do.

I remember when a popular cliché said that "no was ever fired by buying IBM". The premise was (and still is, although not with IBM in particular) that if you went with the market-dominant player when making buying decisions, no one could ever fault you. It was, in other words, career safe. Your project might completely fail, but no one would ask for your head on a plate.

So one reason it is so difficult to innovate is that it requires risk. Innovation is all about not making the safe decision, but the risky one. It is about setting off in a new direction that has been uncharted. It is sailing int...Read More

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I was thinking about this issue the other day, and with the announcement of Google Wave yesterday, it brings it even more sharply into focus. The issue is the title of my post: just how social do you want to be? I'm a fairly social animal myself, although I have to admit that is mostly online. In person I'm a virtual shrinking violet. Others whom I know are just the opposite. Many of us fall somewhere in between.

Until now, we've mostly been able to manage this to our own desires. If you didn't want to blog, no one was going to hold a gun to your head. If you preferred not to Facebook, your friends might miss you, but so be it. If you chose not to use instant messaging your peeps could still call you up on the phone. And if you didn't think the world would be improved by your no-more-...Read More

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