Library Stuff

I’ll be speaking at and attending the Beyond Blogs and Social Networks Conference in Jersey City for the next two days so I probably won’t be able to blog until this weekend at the earliest. To tell you the truth, I could use the break. See you in a few days.

BookBurro
Originally uploaded by stevenmcohen.

Book Burro is a Firefox plug-in that will magically appear on your screen (top left on the screenshot) when you are looking at a book record online (like Amazon, BN, etc) It will advise you of prices from other booksellers and whether local libraries have the book. Click on the library link and you will be sent to the catalog record. A lot like LibraryLookup but with a bit more flash and style. In fact it might be using a similar method of looking up books.

You can also change which libraries you want to search. (bottom right on screenshot). I tried the plug-in and it works great. What I don’t see is how I can add my library to the list. There is a Greasemonkey script available that may help. If anyone can figure out how I can add my home library, I’d be thrilled.

This tool is useful because I buy books as well as check them out of my library. Book Burro provides (theoretically) all of the information for me in a quick and easy method. I can choose what I want to do in one motion, saving me time in shopping around or if my library has it available. Nice.

Congrats to E-LIS for reaching the 3,000 mark for open access documents in the LIS world. The E-LIS RSS feed is one of my favorites and have found some very useful articles. (link via Open Access News)

I had to look at this page for a bit to figure out exactly what it was. Once I was able to wrap my brain around it, the more this seemed like an amazing idea. The main page is an aggregate for all of the tagged items that the UPenn community is adding to the collective knowledge base. I see it as a del.icio.us for the entire UPenn community, which is what I think it is. And all of the pages have RSS feeds! Good move for the library to take the initiative (just like Shane Nackerud took the initiative for UThink) in this way and a very cool idea, one that I have not seen in any higher education setting (please let me know if you have).

They’ve taken it a step further by creating a bookmarklet for easy tagging and adding a tagging feature to their toolbar as well. Very innovative!

It’s easy to “slap a beta” on a product and release it to the wild, with a note saying, “Hey, were in beta so if something breaks, sorry.” The WSJ has has an article on the increase of the word ‘Beta’ which really doesn’t mean anything anymore. What is not mentioned in the article the overuse of the word ‘Alpha’, which doesn’t really mean anything anymore either. My question: Why even bother with a beta release? Liability?