Not having a good Web 2.0 day

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It’s my late night tonight so, thrust straight onto the busy desk at 1pm after a quiet weekend I was already suffering from first-day-back syndrome. Between requests for “Mechanics of Materials” (my new canned catalogue tutorial introduction now begins with “Do you mean the ‘Mechanics of Materials’ by Hibbeler, Gere, Craig, Riley, or Beer and Johnston?”) I’ve been trying to catch up on a couple hundred blog posts. I’ve got a good system for this which combines Google Reader, Firefox’s tabs for the interesting ones, and the generally excellent Diigo’s bookmarking for the keepers.

Today Diigo wanted me to sign in. I figured this was because I’d been gone several days over Easter, so I complied and went back to bookmarking. It kept wanting me to sign in, but (between requests for “the blue Mechanics of Materials” – this narrows it down to either Gere or Beer and Johnston) I found it easier to keep complying and bookmarking than to stop and wonder why. Only after a few hours of this did I notice that one of my bookmarking attempts was giving me a small error message. And only half an hour later did I realise that nothing I’d bookmarked today had in fact been saved.

Half an hour later I worked out the reason: Diigo has been upgraded to Diigo 3.0. I had read about this earlier in the day (some guy reviewed it and complained that other reviews missed the point – but it being a bad Web 2.0 day I can’t find the review anymore) and put it on my “investigate tomorrow maybe” list. I hadn’t realised that failing to immediately download the new toolbar completely broke any functionality the old toolbar had had.

That? Not User-Friendly.

I now have the new toolbar, and it is indeed cool, but not cool enough to assuage my bitterness at having to wade back through a couple hundred blog posts and rebookmark everything of interest.

Oh – maybe I got the news about Diigo by email; that’d explain why it’s not in my Google Reader results. I can’t check right now because my institution’s email system seems to be on the blink.

Overdrive to offer 3000 DRM-free books

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Via walking paper scraps, OverDrive Breaks the iPod Barrier for Downloadable Audio – by the end of June 3000 audiobooks will be available in mp3 format with no “digital rights management” (aka “crippling”) – so they can be played on Macs, iPods, etc. They’re also apparently going to release an “OverDrive Media Console for the Mac” which presumably lets their normal range of audiobooks be played on Macs (but not iPods etc).

This is great news, and hopefully one more sign that DRM might be gradually going out of fashion. It’s not just that it’s nasty to restrict how a person can listen to something that they’ve paid for; it’s that making it hard for people to listen to your music (or watch your videos or read your books) is a great way to induce them to look for alternatives – like piracy.

And DRM does diddly-squat to prevent piracy. Codes can be, and regularly are, broken; there’s free software all over the internet to extract audio and video from ‘protected’ files, and even if there weren’t there’s still audio capture and video capture programs (just like screen capture but more so).

So DRM a) doesn’t prevent piracy, and b) induces your potential customers to consider turning to piracy. So what was the point again?

Fortunately a lot of people are starting to realise that not only is DRM fairly useless, but giving stuff away entirely free can make you money. In the science-fiction world, for example:

  • the Baen Free Library (Eric Flint writes in 2000, “Dave Weber’s On Basilisk Station has been available for free as a ‘loss leader’ for Baen’s for-pay experiment ‘Webscriptions’ for months now. And — hey, whaddaya know? — over that time it’s become Baen’s most popular backlist title in paper!”);
  • Tor’s “Watch the Skies” promotion (sign up! the editors are nice people who won’t spam you, and this week they’re giving away Jo Walton’s Farthing, which is a stunning murder mystery set in a 1940s England where Britain made peace with Hitler. Jo Walton is also nice people, and the book is brilliant. Having a pdf of it is really nice — and I’m still going to buy it in paperback).

A huge number of books on my bookshelves are there because I first read them in a library; or I first borrowed them from a friend; or I first found a sample chapter or the entire thing free on the internet. I wouldn’t have taken the risk on them otherwise. So this is money I paid because — and only because — I could use things in ways that DRM actively prevents.

So what was the point of DRM again?

Database RSS alerts

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A few months ago, a colleague and I discovered a certain database (which I shan’t name because I’ve forgotten which it was) had RSS alerts, but try as we might we couldn’t get them to work on Google Reader.

I got curious again recently – and more importantly I got time – so I sat down with a list of engineering databases and started checking them one at a time to see what kinds of search alerts they each had. My results so far:

Compendex

  • weekly
  • search alerts
  • by email or RSS

ScienceDirect

  • daily, weekly, or monthly
  • search alerts, topic alerts, contents alerts, and citation alerts
  • by email or RSS – but the RSS link has to be manually edited if you’re using the database through a proxy server

Scopus

  • daily, weekly, or monthly
  • search alerts and citation alerts
  • by email or RSS – but the RSS link has to be edited as above

Web of Science

  • weekly or monthly
  • search alerts, contents alerts, and citation alerts
  • by email or RSS – but the RSS link has to be edited

Standards New Zealand

  • when a standard is updated
  • email only

What’s this manual editing I’m talking about? Well, the typical rss feed from these databases looks approximately like: http://database.com.proxy.myinstitution.ac.nz/rss/lotsofgobbledygook
The proxy.myinstitution.ac.nz stuff allows me to access a database from anywhere in the world – but it requires me to authenticate when I do. Google Reader, obviously, doesn’t know my login details, so when it tries to follow that link it fails. (Sometimes it tells me it’s failed – “no feed found” – and sometimes it tells me it’s subscribed but there’s nothing on the feed itself.)

If I delete the proxy.myinstitution.ac.nz gunk, Google Reader subscribes quite happily and shows me everything on the feed. But I shouldn’t have to delete the stuff manually – the database should give me the correct feed url to start with. As Compendex does.

The downside of fixing library jargon

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As I was checking some broken links, I came across a sentence that puzzled me. Guess what seemed like a good idea at the time but produced such gems as:

  • “National Aeronautics and SLibrary Cataloguee Administration”
  • “the imLibrary Cataloguet of its research on economic and environmental issues”

I think this problem is limited to just a couple of our webpages… but how to be sure? To the best of my knowledge, Google doesn’t have any “search this site for places where the string library catalogue does not belong” function; that requires some serious regular expressions.

How to give a successful workshop: lessons learnt from a dream

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I don’t dream about work every night. Just the nights I actually get enough sleep to hit the appropriate REM cycle. But when I do, why not share the lessons learnt? I take no responsibility for workshops based on this advice…

  1. Know how many people will be taking the workshop.
  2. Limit the number to something you can handle.
  3. Make sure there are enough workstations for everyone to work at.
  4. If people continually arriving will disrupt the workshop, close the door soon after starting.
  5. If people continually leaving will disrupt the workshop, chain participants to their desks soon after starting.
  6. Prepare a realistic lesson plan with built-in leeway.
  7. Check all equipment, internet connections, URLs, logins, etc, beforehand.
  8. Have a list of all necessary URLs, logins, etc. In multiple handy places.
  9. If workshop participants need URLs, logins, etc, email them in advance. And have handouts ready as well.

If all else fails — as it clearly had in my dream — be prepared to be flexible:

  1. If you originally planned to run an interactive workshop and find that due to hundreds of people turning up this is impractical, just deliver a lecture instead.
  2. If you originally planned to cover two topics and are halfway through your time having barely started on the first, just shrug off the second one.
  3. If you originally planned to show examples but can’t remember your log-in / can’t find the URL / can’t get the wireless connection working, just move on to something else.
  4. If despite utter confusion and chaos you’ve managed to muddle through to the end and attendees inexplicably begin applauding, accept their thanks gracefully. It isn’t often one has an anxiety dream without the anxiety.

The debasement of Library 2.0 and definitions

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I’m not actually going to talk much about the controversy of whether Library 2.0 has been debased or what such debasement might consist of. Except to note that I’m pretty blase about the fact that everything changes as a matter of course (this is in fact one of the things I think Library 2.0 is all about acknowledging) and slapping the “debasement” label onto a change makes it harder to see what good things are coming out of that change. As an example, it’d be hard for the Library 2.0 concept to be changed/’debased’ if it weren’t spreading quite a lot beyond its origins.

My blase-itude comes partly from a linguistics background which emphasises that just because a word changes its meaning or pronunciation doesn’t mean the language as a whole is going downhill. It’s just change, y’know. Which brings us to definitions. Simon Chamberlain says that “‘we’ don’t have a clear definition of Library 2.0” and I get the impression that he thinks this is a unique and possibly bad thing.

But I’m not sure it is. After all, do “we” have a clear definition of the internet? Technical-minded people will talk about servers and networks and http protocols (and really technical-minded people will point out that the internet is far more than just http). People for whom this is so much gobbledegook might talk about Internet Explorer and Google. Other people might talk about online shopping and auctions. Others might talk about keeping uptodate with friends and family overseas, or about sharing hobbies on online forums(*), or internet dating. Others might stare at you blanking and gibber, because it’s all of these things and a whole lot more besides, and how do you sit down and define all that?

Same thing with Library 2.0. It’s about technology, and it’s about people; and it’s about a paradigm shift, and it’s doing what we’ve always done but better; and it’s about the cool factor, and it’s about making things tie together seamlessly so no-one even notices you’ve done anything.

That’s not a clear definition. But what is? We live in a complicated world; why should we expect the language we use to describe that world to be any simpler?

(*) Did I mention that language change isn’t devolution? If I were writing this post in Latin I’d say “fora” – or “foris” or however it’d be declined there – but if I were writing this post in Latin it’d be a lot shorter.

Search engine wishlist

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Blogging about technology for 23 Things…

I recently read somewhere or other about Wikia search which… is a work in process obviously and thankfully.

But it reminded me of how I’d ranted to a colleague the other day that it’s only the complete and utter lack of any programming skills whatsoever (well, Basic and html and a tiny bit of javascript) that stops me creating my own search engine which would search on synonyms automatically: so someone could type in “television” and the search engine would search for “television OR TV OR telly”. Then it’d rank the results so that results with more of the synonyms were rated higher. And it’d also know when one word can have two meanings and figure out which meaning was intended according to what other keywords were used, or – if no other keywords are available to disambiguate – can ask the user which meaning was intended.

Okay, it has potential for all sorts of havoc and it’d probably be a bit tricky, but (as a non-programmer) I don’t think it’d be *too* tricky; is there really no-one working on something like this?

Other duties as required

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I was going to write this post last year; it was going to be very witty and all. But then Christmas came up and now I’ve forgotten all the scintillating sentences I’d composed while working with two of my colleagues to move several stacks’ worth of books en masse one stack to the right. The “other duties as required” part came into it because we had the cleaners’ vacuum cleaner out and as the books moved from one stack to the next, the tops of them got vacuumed on the way; this amused me.

The reason I’m writing the post now is that we’ve just done the same thing again, with another three stacks of books and Bible-weight journals covered in dust thick enough to grow potatoes in. (We didn’t vacuum this time due to time pressures.) It’s the sort of process that looks incredibly daunting to start with, and 30+ Celsius temperatures don’t help, but what does help is:

  • teamwork. Everything’s more fun when you’ve got a colleague around to mock for breaking a shelf. (That shelf was trouble, and I got mocked in turn for breaking it myself.)
  • music. Last year we played the Beatles, this year a mixture of opera and some more modern stuff which the heat has caused me to forget, although a scary rock version of “O Come All Ye Faithful” is niggling at my mind. Music really helps, especially when one of your colleagues can be relied on to entertain us with his dance moves.
  • a break halfway through. Tea/coffee/water, chili chocolate, plums/crackers, and zoning out.
  • paper darts. Thoughtfully left for us in the stacks by years of engineering students.
  • workflow. Last year’s effort involved condensing the shelves as we went so one person loaded a booktrolley at one end, another vacuumed, and another unloaded it at the other end. This year we were just moving things straight across, so we worked in pairs, passing books through stack A to the librarian putting them on the same shelf on stack B.
  • soap. For the hands that inevitably turned black.
  • sorbets. Brought in for us when we’d completed by our thoughtful manager. Callippo All-fruit (or something like that; here endeth the product placement) mango flavoured; mmm!

Online flowchart generator

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Last year a new course started here, compulsory for all 700-odd intermediate-year engineers at the university. On the plus side, the course coordinator was wonderful about getting the library involved in their first assignment; on the minus side… well, 700 intermediate-year engineers all desperately needing to know how to cite websites and videos in APA.

So this year I’m creating an ambitious display all about citing. It’s going to have whats, whys and hows; a three-step process; links to more online information; possibly a puzzle with prizes (must ransack the drawer of vendors’ highlighters to see if we’ve got anything fun); and a tip of the day with “ingredients”, a flowchart, and “here’s some we prepared earlier” examples.

So I needed to make flowcharts. I wasn’t going to draw them by hand or mess about with Word shapes. I remembered playing with an online flowchart generator which was awkward but workable – I just couldn’t remember the name or find it again. This was lucky, because instead I found Gliffy

Gliffy’s free demo lets you have five free flowcharts – that means five at any one time, as you can create a chart, save it as a jpg (or png or svg), ‘revise’ it into a completely new chart, rinse and repeat as many times as you like (or at least as many times as I’ve needed – 14 so far).

It’s all click-and-drag, very user friendly. Far more options than I need or understand, but easy to find the options I do need. Colours, fonts, sizes and styles are customisable. Arrows attach to boxes so things can be dragged about and stay attached to each other. Copy and paste works!

An example of one of the flowcharts I’ve been making, for how to cite journal articles in APA: