Build the Open Shelves Classification

Build the Open Shelves Classification

Description: I hereby invite you to join the Open Shelves Classification (OSC), a free, “humble,” modern, open-source, crowd-sourced replacement for the Dewey Decimal System.

—from LibraryThing.

You can follow its progress or contribute to its effort here

Google and Librarians — the lovelorn relationship

Well, if you haven’t heard all of the chatter and buzz, Google Librarian Central hadn’t been updated in a year (before today, that is)…and Google wasn’t at ALA leaving some librarians to call out google for punking librarians or even using librarians, while other librarians proclaimed, we weren’t surprised!

While I fall more on the side of “google is a business, google is a corporation” , I do understand a little bit why some people feel, eh, jilted(?).

and really, You can make money without doing evil doesn’t necessarily mean that they will do good. Because some good things are not profitable, ya know?

Golly, it’s the equivalent of a bad soap opera romance — so, where’s the child spawned by the rival (microsoft? yahoo?)

VU Find - on authority control

Interesting article on authority control and VU Find includes a very good (and brief!) view of how authority control works, in general, plus detailed tweaking of VU Find to improve authority control.
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/57

OpenLibrary news

If you’ve not heard of the openlibrary.org initiative, the idea is “one web page
for every book ever published.”

A pretty noble undertaking….
Anyhow, news is that have now have a total of 13.4 million books,
with about 18 million more records to go.
Of course quantity and quality are not the same. ;-D
As for where these records are coming from, they have started
merging library records with other book data (vendor data?)

An API has been created for use by developers at
http://www.openlibrary.org/dev/docs/api
Other news includes some translation services,
and the fulltext searching of 230,000 books.

To visit the openlibrary project,
http://www.openlibrary.org

Web2.0 and your library blog (tools)

I finally started loading some of my presentations at slideshare. Hopefully, I will add audio at some point.
This presentation was for GLA 2007 and focused on web tools for blogs.
Sorry, the links work within slideshare, but the movie does not. ;-(

————–
Brief introduction to Web2.0, mashups, RSS, youtube, flickr del.icio.us, and how those tools can be incorporated into a library’s website or blog. Also includes brief overview of mashups, widgets, and RSS feeds.

| View | Upload your own

Need a virtual signup sheet?

If you need a virtual signup sheet, give writeboard a whirl.

Flickr & the Library of Congress

Library of Congress announced today that it has partnered with flickr, putting up 3,000 photos from two of their most popular collections.Only images for which no copyright restrictions are known to exist are included.

The LOC blog post about it is here:
http://www.loc.gov/blog/?p=233

The flickr page is here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/

Code4Lib

Code4Lib has a new journal:
http://journal.code4lib.org/

Also, the conference is coming up in February. It sounds very interesting, but I’m out of travel money. ;-(

social networking, library services & web usage - a survey

Interesting survey of 330 students at the University of Michigan; the social networking question was just one question out of the survey. The rest of the survey is kind of interesting, too!

———————–
QUESTION: If you could contact a librarian via Facebook or MySpace for help with your research, would you? If not, why?

Data/Analysis

A total of 23% of respondents stated that *yes* or *maybe* they would be interested in contacting a librarian via these two social networking sites.

Undergrads had a slightly higher than average percentage of 34%.

Nearly half of the total respondents stated they would not be interested, but for various reasons - the biggest reason being that they
feel the current methods (in-person, email, IM) are more than sufficient. 14% said no because they felt it was inappropriate or that Facebook/MySpace is a social tool, not a research tool.

http://onlinesocialnetworks.blogspot.com/2008/01/data-students-
facebook-library-outreach.html

Entire survey:
http://www.lib.umich.edu/usability/projects/ProjectReports/
WebSurvey_Fall2007.pdf

social networking, library services & web usage - a survey

Interesting survey of 330 students at the University of Michigan; the social networking question was just one question out of the survey. The rest of the survey is kind of interesting, too!

———————–
QUESTION: If you could contact a librarian via Facebook or MySpace for help with your research, would you? If not, why?

Data/Analysis

A total of 23% of respondents stated that *yes* or *maybe* they would be interested in contacting a librarian via these two social networking sites.

Undergrads had a slightly higher than average percentage of 34%.

Nearly half of the total respondents stated they would not be interested, but for various reasons - the biggest reason being that they
feel the current methods (in-person, email, IM) are more than sufficient. 14% said no because they felt it was inappropriate or that Facebook/MySpace is a social tool, not a research tool.

http://onlinesocialnetworks.blogspot.com/2008/01/data-students-
facebook-library-outreach.html

Entire survey:
http://www.lib.umich.edu/usability/projects/ProjectReports/
WebSurvey_Fall2007.pdf