Library Stuff

From a sidebar to an article in FCW entitled, “Finetuning Needed”:

“‘We frequently get calls from other agencies wanting to know how they can bring our information inside their infrastructure,’ said Vivian Mackey, OPM’s agencywide Web site manager. To meet this need, OPM officials came up with a way for other agency leaders to incorporate news from the OPM site directly into their sites: Really Simple Syndication (RSS), a format for distributing information based on Extensible Markup Language. By downloading XML content, Webmasters can stream OPM news at other agencies.”

You can find 3 feeds on the OPM site: What’s New, News Releases, and Operating Status.

John F. Anderies e-mailed me today to let me know that LS has been cataloged by his library, and thus, WorldCat. Wow! Thanks John.

For those that have complained that I haven’t posted any pictures of Hallie lately, here you go. This was taken on her first day of nursery school.

Barring a miracle for a playoff birth, the first season of the Metropolitans has come to an end. We had a great inaugural fall season, going 6-6 and look forward to the summer. 5 long months until spring training…

Feedster-bound Michael Fagan has added yet another neat tool to his repertoire. Switch Bookmarklets allow you to easily switch from search results on one tool to the search results on another tool. After I run a search on Yahoo, I usually then switch over to Google (as always, it depends on the type of research that I am doing), so these bookmarklets should come in handy for those that like to run the same searches on numerous engines.

In an article entitled, “RSS Feeds Hunger for More Ads”, the last sentence is a quote by Jason Calacanis:

“Visiting the website is dating; getting a daily e-mail is going steady — but subscribing to an RSS feed, well, that is like getting married to a news source,’ he said. ‘It’s really the highest commitment you can make.”

I disagree: In fact, I believe the exact opposite is true. Visiting a website takes alot more commitment than subscribing to the feed. You actually have to go to the site every day (or even more often than that) if you are not using RSS. That takes commitment. Subscribing to a feed, IMO, is like a one night stand. You’ve visited the site once, liked what you saw and threw it in your aggregator, without having to think about it afterwards. Plus, you can unsubscribe without a second thought.

Marriage requires work. RSS is easy. You don’t have to work at reading content from an aggregator.

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to chat on the phone with Allen Searls and Matthew Koll from Wondir. If you don’t know about Wondir, it’s a fully open question/answer service. Anyone can ask anything and anyone can answer any posed question. It’s almost like a Q&A wiki. The questions that are asked on Wondir range from the mindless to the eccentric to the meaningful. Some people are looking for the answers to basic questions, while others are looking for advice. No fees are exchanged. It’s actually a bit voyeuristic to look at some of the questions posed from the ticker. It reminded me of the Excite real time question ticker that was popular about 4 years ago.

Anyway, the guys at Wondir were asking me how we can get librarians involved in answering questions that are posed to Wondir, since we are the “answer people” (there’s an attorney in my office who calls me the “answer man” and I love it). My thoughts on the topic were twofold. Sure, some librarians may be interested in helping out with the librarian-type queries (factual, etc), but not the other types of questions posed. Librarians are not into offering our opinions/advice with certain types of questions. It’s not how we do business. Also, since the questions are broken down into categories, maybe some subject specialists would be willing to take a shot at those that fit their specialties.

That said, we are all very busy at our jobs and even though we like to help out others (who hasn’t answered reference questions posed by family members or friends), we may just not have the time. Some may also feel that they should get paid for their research abilities. Wondir is not the place, however, for those that fit the latter category.

There is a neat feature at Wondir that allows the person answering the question to chat with the person who asked it (using Jabber). This conversation is then transcribed onto a unique page that is created when the question is posed. I tried it out and was blown away.

So, take a look at Wondir. Maybe answer a question or two. if you feel that it is a neat tool (which I think it is), then pass it along to your colleagues. If your having a slow day at the reference desk, you may want to assist an anonymous patron.

Today, I was asked to interloan 3 books. Of course, I wanted to try out the Google/OCLC/OWC bookmarklet, so I found the books on Amazon, clicked the bookmarklet and found all three on Open Worldcat (OWC). The list interface was a bit different, and many more libraries showed up for my state (NY), including (this is very important!) my state library. After a few clicks, all of the books were ordered and will arrive in the morning via federal express. Nothing to it. We have relationships with the two libraries that I used. Relationships are important to me.

Gary and I have gone back and forth on this fully Open Worldcat issue. I think that it is going to be more for librarians than patrons, which is not necessarily a good thing. Even though our patrons may find Worldcat records with Google and/or Yahoo (and the odds are against it, as Gary showed), they won’t know what to do once they find them. The OWC interface links the patron to the catalog record. So what? What next? Does that patron have access to that library? OWC doesn’t say, because it will be unique to the user. Not good.

So, I think that OWC (and the bookmarklets) will be more useful for librarians who are asked to find books to interloan, not from the people that are asking for them.

Rebecca Hedreen of Frequently Answered Questions makes a wonderful point:

“[N]ot all libraries, especially local public libraries and private libraries, have their holdings in OCLC. Libraries can also choose to exclude their holdings from the OpenWorldCat project. In July 2005, libraries who do not subscribe to certain services from OCLC will have their holdings withdrawn from the project. Again, this is most likely to affect smaller public and private libraries.”

“What does this mean to distance students and educators? Don’t rely on technology to do your research for you. Get to know your local libraries, and check to see if they are appearing (and continue to appear) in the results for the Bookmarklet. If not, be sure to check them separately for your desired books. Educate yourself on what resources are available to you”

Well said.

The great thing about my customized Amazon feeds (made via On Focus) is that I get upcoming books on the subjects I want delivered into my aggregator (I have 4 of them set up). The bad thing is that I sometimes have to wait 6 months for a book to be published.

Case in point. A book entitled, Maintaining Community in the Information Age : The Importance of Trust, Place and Situated Knowledge just popped onto my screen. A synopsis:

“By exploring the experiences of community activists and organizations working with information and communication technology (ICT) to build communities, this book offers a grounded and informed study of the role ICT plays in people’s lives. The author emphasizes the importance of networks built around trust, shared spaces and local knowledge bases in the formation of significant relationships in contemporary Western societies and in doing so, questions many of the assumptions which inform the rhetorics of the information age.”

Obviously a book that I’m going to read. But, I have to wait until March 2005! Sometimes it’s painful to be on the cutting edge, always waiting for the new thing to arrive. Such a tease.

Jenny sent in this commentary from eweek, which discusses Audible and Podcasting:

“This functionality is already possible for customers of the Audible service, which offers its audio book customers paid subscriptions to NPR and other radio programs. Audible provides desktop client software capable of automatically downloading content from the company’s servers and loading it onto customers’ portable devices. The software also offers optional automated disk space management capabilities that store only the most current edition of specific programs on the portable.”

“While Audible is clearly a ‘pay for play’ content provider, Podcasting opens the door to a much larger universe of content offerings, available from the producers’ own servers. Podcasting seems particularly well-suited to free content downloads, and I look forward to a day in the near future when I might subscribe to my favorite BBC programming rather than being forced to listen to it live over the air or on the Internet.”

As I mentioned in my rant on Pirillo’s show, I really think that libraries can do something here. Many libraries already provide audio books in Mp3 format (some of them via Audible) and I think podcasting can be an extension between the library catalog and audible. A scenario:

A patron looks up a book on the library catalog and comes across a file in Mp3 format (maybe it’s music, a “talking book” or any other type of media) and then puts in into his Ipod. Then, he has the ability to subscribe to the feed for a particular author, genre, or subject heading and when a new file comes out that fits his criteria (just like any personalized RSS Feed), it is automatically downloaded into his Ipod.

There are licensing and copyright issues here. I totally get that. But libraries have always worked with these licensing requirements in the past and can do so in the future with podcasting.

Also, take a look at what John Anderies had to say about his ideas for podcasting and music libraries. Very interesting.