Author: Paul R. Pival
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When is a book alive, and what if you have the dead version?
My head’s spinning a little right now. Just had a visit from someone in our DocDel dept. who was trying to track down a chapter from the 2nd revised edition of Encyclopedia of Biopharmaceutical Statistics, which our catalogue says we have through Ebrary. Except that the cited chapter had a publication date of 2006, while…
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Federal Register 2.0
Cool, the Federal Register is now available in XML! “With an XML edition, independent organizations can reorganize the Register’s contents in ways that are more meaningful to you and address your personal interests; track issues that are likely to affect your community or your profession; and even engage in real-time public discussions about its contents…
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Feed2JS moving to Google Code
Alan Levine posts that he’s moving the source code for the most excellent Feed2JS tool to Google Code. If you haven’t played with it before, Feed2JS was one of the first and best tools to take RSS feeds and provide you with javascript that allows you to embed those feeds within a standard web page. …
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After Losing Users in Catalogs, Libraries Find Better Search Software
The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about next-generation catalogues. While the article provides a pretty good background of the issue (IMHO), the comments provide an excellent summary of librarian psychology. What’s only touched upon briefly in the article is the ability for these new “web-scale index searching” tools to search so much more…
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Digsby now works with LibraryH3lp, but Pidgin no longer does
We’ve just started testing LibraryH3lp at the U of Calgary as a probable replacement for Meebo in offering IM / Chat reference service. I switched from Digsby to Pidgin in order to be able to monitor queues from a desktop client instead of having to log in to the LibraryH3lp website, but yesterday the LibraryH3lp…
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Putting your money where your mouth is
Last week I wrote about indie publishing innovator MCM's challenge to TV viewers in the US to watch the US premiere of his cartoon, Rollbots. Well the results are in, and it looks like he'll be donating nearly $10,000 to the EFF!!! In addition, and perhaps even more significant, he'll be relinquishing all copyright claims…
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Archive now available for Returning the Researcher to the Library: The Summon™ Service in Real Life
This past Tuesday I participated as a panelist in the the fourth and final Library Journal session in the “Returning the Researcher to the Library” series: The Summon™ Service in Real Life. The archive of that webinar is now available for your listening pleasure . Let me know how you think I did, and if…
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Support a publishing innovator by watching TV
I’ve mentioned MCM before. He’s the author of The Pig and the Box, and a true innovator in the world of independent publishing. I’ve been fascinated reading his blog posts over the past year as he explores one interesting idea after another for publishing via crowd sourcing, PDF, print, epub, donations, sponsorship, releasing work under…
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Webcast: Returning the Researcher to the Library: The Summon™ Service in Real Life
Library Journal and Serials Solutions are presenting the fourth and final session in the “Returning the Researcher to the Library” series: The Summon™ Service in Real Life. I’m one of three panelists, joining librarians from Grand Valley State University and Western Michigan University in discussing why we’re exploring the idea of Web-Scale Discovery (that appears…