Tennant: Digital Libraries

July 3, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (4)

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
Industries: News & Features

June 30, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (3)

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
Industries: News & Features

June 29, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (4)

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
Industries: News & Features

June 23, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

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

June 18, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (8)

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