Tag Archives: non-English

Non-English blog roundup #4 (Dutch)

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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:

  • comments discuss the reliability of IP address tracing to find the location of visitors — the problem being that it depends on the address provided to the registry by the server. [In New Zealand this means that no matter where you are in the country, if you use ISP X you’ll show up in server logs as being in City Y.]
  • the 7 Vs of young adult librarianship: freedom, trust, responsibility, imagination, narrative, enrichment, cheerfulness. [Alliteration loses something in translation.]

On Wowter over het Web:

  • Wouter introduces a wiki for Dutch biblioblogs, nlbiblioblogs
  • a great post discussing at what point libraries should adopt new technologies. Wouter leans towards the experimentation side of the spectrum, rather than waiting for everything to be perfect, and gives an example of the unintended benefits of a comments feature in a catalogue. “When the library as an organisation is not exploring and playing with the possibilities than the organization is not teaching learning (thanks, wow!ter, for the correction -DF 30/6) anything.” [I ended up reading this through Google Translation which is startlingly readable though it doesn’t deal so well with compound words. Where you see “commentaarmogelijkheid”, read “the ability to comment”.]

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.]

Exploiting library catalogue data

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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?)

Non-English blog roundup #3

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Via betabib (Swedish), RSS4Lib has a list of library web pages that list experimental, beta, or trial web tools and services.

Thomas on Vagabondages (French) discusses CollegeDegree’s “25 social networking tools”; I was particularly interested by Daft Doggy, of which Thomas says “If I’ve understood correctly, Daft Doggy is an application which lets you record a session in a web-browswer and then… replay the [web-surfing] visit, modify it, and add commentary.”
Thomas also quotes Fred Cavassa who says, “Have you noticed that the term ‘web 2.0’ is no longer fashionable? […] Now we speak of social media.“

Dominique, bibl. prof. (French) links to her presentation from the ASTED/CBPQ colloquium about profession wikis in libraries: the example of the University of Quebec network (powerpoint).

Via Deakialli, Desde los Zancos 2.0 interviews Dídac Margaix Arnal (Spanish). To a question about promoting collaborative library 2.0 technologies faced with hesitant managers, Dídac suggests talking about:

  1. personal experience – how web 2.0 tools have helped you professionally;
  2. experiences of other libraries;
  3. the fact that the tools are free; and especially
  4. “we have to assume that Web 2.0 is the form in which digital natives communicate, relate to each other, inform themselves, compare information, etc. If we want to converse with them, we’ll have to use these tools […]”

Bibliobsession 2.0 (French) talks about the idea of using Cover Flow for catalogue displays. There are tools for creating coverflow displays: “for the English-speaking library geeks, this post on The Corkboard presents other technical possibilities to do the same thing, and there also exists Protoflow to do the same thing.”

Marlène’s Corner (French) reports the launch of Hypothèses.org, “a blog platform destined to lodge journal blogs […] As for the journals, the blogs will be subjected to a selection process […]” The posts aren’t intended to replace articles, but to accompany and facilitate the publishing process.

Non-English blog roundup #2

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Deakialli DokuMental (Spanish) writes about navigation and filtering with tags – also discusses facets. “What is the problem? That description and navigation are different concepts.” This post made me think about searching using social bookmarking sites. I use Diigo which only has an AND search – as far as I can tell (and I hunted a bit) there’s no way to do even an NOT or OR search. Del.icio.us has a few advanced search options, but still no truncation search. As far as I know, there’s no reason this couldn’t be done, and it would make a search for “blog OR blogs OR blogging” much easier.

Documentalistes (Catalan) briefly evaluates Google Image Ripper, a site where you can type in your image search and it brings up the full-size images instead of the thumbnails. I note that it doesn’t solve the duplication problem: it would be Really Cool if a search for “madame de lafayette” didn’t include both images #1 and #5 which are identical. (Literally: Answers.com took it straight off Wikimedia. Some kind of pixel-by-pixel matching algorithm? Yes, yes, strain on the server and would slow down the results. Still.)

DosPuntoCero (Spanish) talks about some surveys described in the book “Libraries and the Mega-Internet Sites” (ISBN: 1-57440-096-7) The blog has pretty bar graphs for

  • librarians’ attitude to Wikipedia (untrustworthy, use with care, as good as print encyclopaedias)
  • whether libraries have a YouTube account (yes, no, planned for the next year)
  • whether libraries have published photos on Flickr (yes, no)

The bars are blue for public libraries, red for university libraries, green for special libraries. My executive summary: public libraries are more liberal towards all these things than university libraries; special libraries are between the two on Wikipedia and Flickr but way down there on YouTube.

Biblog (Danish) links to Intute, “a free online service providing you with access to the very best Web resources for education and research. The service is created by a network of UK universities and partners.” (quote from Intute’s page) I definitely need to explore this more. My colleague reminded me that Intute also created The Internet Detective which teaches students how to work out whether internet pages are trustworthy or not.

And just for fun, betabib (Swedish) links to an (English) interview with a helpdesk operative on the Death Star. If I weren’t hungry for my lunch I’d work out how to be web2.0pian and embed it here, but my cheese and pineapple sandwiches are calling to me.

Non-English blog roundup

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I’ve always liked learning other languages (three in high school, a couple more at university, two more when I travelled to their respective countries, medieval Danish when I started writing a fantasy book set in medieval Denmark…) and a while ago it occurred to me that not only are there library blogs written in languages other than English, but it’d be nice to make some of what they’re saying accessible to the English-speaking world.

I read two posts this morning that inspired me to start today. Note that my grasp of the Scandinavian languages remains patchy, but hopefully my translations aren’t too misleading.

  • Daniel Forsman on Betabib (Swedish) reports that “Inspired by Penn State’s work I’ve just built an ‘HTML | iGoogle gadget generator’ for our direct search function.” You can see the resulting widget on the Jönköping Högskolebiblioteket homepage under “Direktsökning” – the dropdown menu allows searching in various databases, and the “+Google” button allows users to add the search to their iGoogle page.
  • Erik Høy on Biblog (Danish) points to Mellop, a website which gives you a free email address that lasts for 15 minutes. Why would you want an email address that you can’t use for longer than that? Well, a lot of web services require you to give an email address when registering, which they send your password or confirmation to. Maybe you don’t trust them to not keep spamming you, so give them a Mellop temporary address, receive the email with the password/confirmation, and throw away the Mellop address. Warning: if you later forget your password for the web service, you’ll have a hard time convincing them to give it to you again now your Mellop email address no longer works.

LibWorld has a great round-up of blogs in various countries, which I’ll have to look through properly at some time(s). Does anyone know of any other non-English library blogs I should be following? I can probably get more or less sense out of French, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages. I probably couldn’t get much out of Korean, but it’d be fun trying.