Category: Ideas
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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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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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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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No place for state in our hard drives?
U of Calgary affiliate Kris Kotarski has a thought-provoking op-ed in the Calgary Herald about the Copyright/DRM debate that’s about to be reborn here in Canada. “Simply put, if society settles on laws enforcing copyright provisions such as a ban on breaking DRM locks on CDs and DVDs, or taking down SIM locks on cellular…
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LJ Webcast Archives
I haven’t had a chance to listen to/watch them myself, and am bookmarking them here as much for my use as yours, but two recent webcasts in the Returning the Researcher to the Library series are now archived at the LJ website: Webcast: Returning the Researcher to the Library: Building ROI through Discovery Webcast: Returning…
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ALA Conference 2009: Ubiquity of Mobiles Greatly To Affect Libraries
Library Journal reports, "Libraries had better prepare for an explosion in the capacity of mobile devices as well as the transformative increase in user capacity and expectations. This was the message conveyed by a panel yesterday at the American Library Association's (ALA) Annual Conference on Libraries and Mobile Devices: Public Policy Considerations."
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Wikipedia in the catalogue?
Image via Wikipedia I learned from Eric Rumsey that the State Library of Kansas includes Wikipedia articles in their OPAC. Here are some examples: http://topekalibraries.info/search/awikimedia. About 15 minutes later I saw that Aaron Schmidt posted on the DCPL Labs site that in a recent survey 88% “of people responded that they prefer the content from…
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Many libraries are lending Kindles
While we wait to see if BYU will reinstate their Kindle lending program, take a look at the list of libraries that are still lending them put together by iReaderreview. I's not just a list; there's a fair bit of supporting content in the post. Kindle, Libraries