Library Stuff

Well, PLA doesn’t have a weblog (yet), but I wrote a piece for their site on public libraries and weblogs. It will have to be updated to reflect the changes in Blogger and MT, but the basics are still there.

There is an article in Library Journal about UThink, the fabulous weblog project from the University of Minnesota Libraries. Hey, LJ, fix that URL. (link via ResourceShelf)

RIP Ref Grunt. You will be missed. Thanks Peter.

I gave a silent “Hip Hip Hooray” (it’s getting late) after reading the following quote from Harold Check’s interview with Mark Fletcher of Bloglines

“HC: My analogy about bookmarks was really just about numbers. People can navigate a few hundred items, whether it’s websites or email addresses or whatever. Beyond that, we start to have trouble. With syndication driving us to content, not just on the level of the page, but at the level of the post, and increasingly, at the additional level of the comment, how do you see readers coping with this? Will they just happily add their first 50 feeds and then get more and more reluctant to add new ones? Will additional levels of filtration be needed? I guess I’m saying: Syndication-reading tools not only have to scale massively, but need to help the user to scale his/her consumption massively. Do you have any ideas on how we’ll accomplish this?”

“MF: You’re absolutely correct. It’s all part of the information overload problem that I talked about earlier. While Bloglines already has many features that help people deal with information overload, we’ve only just begun tackling the problem. I believe there are three areas that need to be addressed: additional filtration will be part of the solution, but only a part. In addition, it’s also a major user interface issue and it’s also a data collection and analysis issue. We have several initiatives designed to address these areas; indeed it’s our main focus going forward. I can’t detail what we’re working on, but over the next several months you’ll start to see some of the results of our work.”

Yes! Additional filtration will be a part of the solution. I personally think that it needs to be done on the part of the content provider, but if Bloglines is going to help filter out specific keywords from feeds (which is kind of what he is implying), than it will soar above the rest of the aggregators out there. Instead of giving me the stories from the New York Times in my aggregator, only show me stories with certain keywords or phrases. Customize, customize, customize. Let your aggregator go from bringing in 80% relevant content to 95% relevant content.

About.com points out that Blogger has introduced photoblogging, via Hello. The service is free (for now, I assume), so maybe I’ll give it a try every now and then and post pictures of Hallie every once in a while. (link via Topix)

Last week, I asked Blake to set up Feed on Feeds on the LS domain. After my begging and pleading, he finally installed it yesterday, and I have been playing with it. I’ve always wanted a web-based aggregator on my own server that would update the feeds on an hourly basis and cache them. Feed on Feeds does all of that. It’s password protected, so only I have access to it, which is important. While Bloglines is amazing, I hate to be stuck using third-party software just in case it goes down, which Bloglines has on occasion, or if they are working on the software, which again, Bloglines does on occasion. Anyway, I’m migrating my feeds from Bloglines to Feed on Feeds (FOF) now (and purging during the process – a bit of spring cleaning) and will no doubt mention it again in the future. So far, I am very impressed.

Also, as I mentioned before, I am in the middle of a few projects that need to be finished by the end of May. I have been saving sites that I was hoping to mention here in more detail, but it looks like I’m going to have to do a link dump. I’ll hopefully get to that tomorrow. I’m saving most of what I see on my Del.icio.us feed (which is now displayed on the front page of LS, thanks Feedroll), so you may just want to subscribe to that. Most of what I save there will probably make it on the main LS blog with more annotations at some point.

I know nothing about Enterprise Architecture, but this Stephen Cohen does. Of course, he spells his first name wrong…

I was quoted in an article in the ABA Journal entitlled, “TOWERING TITANS: LexisNexis and West Are Still Battling for Dominance”, written by Jason Krause. This is a well-written article. A must read for anyone working with these two databases. My quote:

“As the two behemoths work toward competitive balance, lawyers, paralegals and librarians have perhaps lost some allegiances that might have existed for one service or the other. In fact, large law firms now often maintain both, and many smaller firms use whichever one offers the lowest price. In response, both companies now offer a variety of pricing plans, including a feature that lets people who do not subscribe to the service pay for searches by credit card.”

“The main difference for me is that we have a contract with Lexis,” says Steven Cohen, a law librarian with Rivkin Radler in Uniondale, N.Y. “There are a few things that are not available in Lexis, which is why we keep both available, but if you’re asking why pick one over the other, the answer is usually money.”

“In fact, the companies have been chasing each other so aggressively that some lawyers and researchers may be surprised to find that one may have leapfrogged ahead in an area that used to be the other’s strength.” (Thanks Denise via PubSub for the heads up)

An interesting article in CIO Magazine entitled, “The Virtues of Chitchat”, by Michael Schrage, discusses the use of blogs within corporate IT departments, most notably with keeping everyone informed with ongoing projects. Schrage calls them project logs, or “plogs”. A few quotes:

“Curious, I pinged a few of those Fortune 500 friends. To my astonishment, I discovered that while internal IT blogs may not be commonplace, they’re not exactly rare. Though utterly unscientific, my informal queries found several major companies allowing blogs to coordinate and annotate project status information. At least one global IT consultancy has a rather witty blogger—I can’t find out if it’s approved or not—whose work is apparently required reading for his associates. The blog’s hotlinks to internal reports, presentations and client reviews are reportedly first-rate.”

“Why wouldn’t it make sense for an IT project manager to post a blog—or “plog” (project log)—to keep her team and its constituents up-to-date on project issues and concerns? Is it inherently inappropriate for an individual to post constructive observations about a project’s progress? IT organizations that can effectively use blogs as managerial tools (or communication resources) are probably development environments that take both people and their ideas seriously.”

“From a managerial perspective, I can hardly think of a better way to get new members of an IT team contextually grounded than to give them plogs to peruse, rather than make them read the outdated project sheets or suffer through a hasty luncheon debrief by the current project leadership. Of course, that’s contingent upon the quality of the plog—but then again, the utility of virtually all management tools ultimately depends on their quality.”

I am in the beginning stages of putting together a memorandum to the management in my firm about the benefits of weblogs and this article will fit right into the articles that I am collecting for it. In addition, I am hopefully going to start a weblog in my library so that we can always be in touch with one another on the various and numerous research projects that are currently being worked on. A “plog” is the perfect concept for this issue. (article link via Topix)

Jessamyn has created a Save LISNews button. I’ve placed it on LS and encourage you to do it as well. If you can save it on your own server and not just link to mine, that would be appreciated. How ironic would that be…