Via a link from iLibrarian I just discovered another library trying out the roving librarian model.
This reminds me I need to work on our report from our second trial (which went even better than the first trial, and we’ve got some great statistics).
I’m also steadily working on tidying up my list of libraries roving beyond the library walls. If anyone knows any more examples I could add to the list, please let me know!
Roy Tennant writes that “Tags, ratings, and reviews should help enrich the whole, not one particular library catalog.“
The problem is (after convincing TPTB that tags etc really do enrich the catalogue) how to get the data from one library to another. We’re not really set up to share metadata like this with each other. –Uh, no, wait a minute. Isn’t sharing metadata what copy-cataloguing is all about?
What if we simply (went through a huge bureaucratic decision-making process and) created some new MARC fields for tags, ratings, and reviews?
Then it’d be (a programming nightmare to allow customers to update these MARC fields and then to allow libraries to update to and from the network, but otherwise) dead simple to share tags, ratings and reviews with other libraries through the standard metadata-sharing networks.
Playing with Page2RSS, I discovered that Google have found a way to fix its hidden privacy policy. (I’m blase about such controversies, but I like an elegant solution.)
I’ve worked out the mystery from my last RSS alerts post: search alerts can be created on Ovid for Forest Science Database and GEOBASE but not for Biological Abstracts.
And I can now confirm that those RSS search alerts do in fact work (I got an alert for 58 new items including the word “properties” from the Forest Science Database this morning). So Ovid is redeemed.
Still catching up, so pulling together a bunch of French content this time:
Bernard Rentier writes “A university which wants to be on the cutting edge of information as a communication tool cannot be unfamiliar with these new practices. It must even use them, not to “reform” them, even less to control them, these two objectives not being acceptable, but if it’s a tool frequently used by many students, the Institution must be able to adopt this new concept and make itself a usage of it that is “sympathetic” and perceived as positive by everyone.“
Risu suggests an easy method of increasing your library’s visibility: enter it into Google Business Center with contact details, website, description, photos and videos, opening hours etc. “The whole thing takes 5 minutes and it’s free.”
Thomas on Vagabondages talks about “Lottobook”, a game where every participant pledges to send a book to the winner. The winner is drawn and receives n-1 books, while a runner-up receives 1 book (from the winner) as a consolation prize and so even the winner doesn’t know they’ve won until all the books arrive in the mail.
A meme being passed on via Marlene’s Corner: “to give you the contents of my day as a 2.0 librarian on Monday”.
In Bibliobsession:
On DLog, Dominique writes about The two branches of the library:
Let’s not confuse
- the physical item;
- a particular edition of which the physical item is a clone among clones;
- the work, which is immaterial
And:
I draw from this a new conception of conservation: no longer only for the future or for researchers, but also for the public, here and now.”
And a new report has been published, Report on the digital book (pdf) by Bruno Patino, 30 June 2008. Very roughly, from the executive summary:
The entrance into the digital age seems to be happening later for the book than for other cultural industries. However, many publishing sectors such as professional, practice or reference books are already largely digitised. This development, so far, has challenged neither the commercial model, nor relations with authors, nor the customs of readers. But what would happen if digitisation were to accelerate, even to take over? Such a hypothesis, even if it cannot be predicted with certainty, still merits that the key players in the sector prepare for it, bearing in mind the very important effects that it could lead to on the precarious equilibrium of the book industry.
A particular vigilance should especially be brought to a possible new competition between the rights holders (authors and publishers), whose remuneration of their creations should be preserved and increased, and the access and network holders, who don’t necessarily have any interest in increasing the intellectual property rights.
In this context, two elements are essential: intellectual property must remain the cornerstone of publishing, and publishers must retain a central role in determining price.
The committee therefore recommends a series of measures organised into four actions:
- Promote an attractive legal offer. [eg look at interoperability of digital content – formats as much as DRM; interoperability of existing metadata; pursue the policy of supporting digital books[
- Defend intellectual property. [don’t modify intellectual property law, which can accomodate digitisation; open inter-professional discussions about the rights of authors]
- Put in place provisions allowing rights holders to have a central role in determining prices.
- Conduct an active policy with respect to community institutions. [Establish a bureau to promote intellectual property-related policy; request a lower TVA tax for digital cultural content.]
Discussion in various venues has ensued and seems likely to continue apace….
I’ve been saving up a whole pile of stuff and then more came in when I was down with a cold, and then I just got behind. So I’ll start off with a bunch of old content from Dutch blogs — fair warning, it turns out that my Dutch is even worse than I thought it was. Hopefully it’ll improve, and in the meantime, machine translation is improving all the time…
On ZB Digitaal:
And on the Bibliotheek 2.0 Ning group, Jeroen van Beijnen writes about one solution to writing in the margin of library books: transparent post-it notes. [I personally as a reader don’t mind if someone had pencilled in one or two notes. In pencil. And not many of them. OTOH, I do think that (following links all English) readers should be careful, when correcting a book’s historical details, to ensure first that it’s not an alternate history book. The author of the book in question maintains that “we should hold off on the brain-wipe until the second offence“; a comment on her post leads to a LiveJournal community for found marginalia.]
A few things I missed the first time around:
Concluding my investigations of what alerts various engineering databases provide (part 1, part 2) with a few loose ends…
Factiva
GeoRef
Ovid (eg GeoBASE, Biological Abstracts, Forest Science Database)
And various databases that have no RSS capabilities:
At some point I’ll catch up from when I was down with a nasty cold and do a proper non-English blog roundup installment. In the meantime this leaped out at me:
Marlen’s Corner (French) quotes from a survey about catalogue use (also French) saying approximately: “[…] we must say that the quality of library data is their advantage compared to other data sources. The problem currently doesn’t come from these latter, but rather from the lack of exploitation of the library data’s potential by search engines, and from the lack of visibility that the interfaces give them.”
Every now and then I talk about how I want a catalogue that lets users search by colour. There’s just that tiny detail that we’d first need to catalogue the colour of a million-odd existing volumes and redesign the search interface… But seriously, we catalogue books with all sorts of obscure information — by size, for example. Why do we do that? More to the point, since we do do that, why don’t we exploit the fact that the information’s there: why can’t users search by size? Why can’t we limit our searches by “has illustrations”, “has colour illustrations”, “includes maps”?
(Is there any catalogue that can do any of this?)
Continuing on my investigations of what alerts various (engineering) databases provide…
ACS
ASCE
Earthquake Engineering Abstracts
IEEE Xplore
ProQuest
NZ Index
I’m continuing to wish that databases wouldn’t automatically form RSS feeds to include the ezproxy.institution.ac.nz stuff which has to be edited out by hand before the feed is any use at all. Really how hard can it be to provide an url that works out of the box?
