Laurie N. Taylor January 30th, 2008
Librarian subject specialists build guides based on subject area to help students and researchers quickly find all of the most relevant resources available at a particular library easily. Given the cost of commercial databases, different libraries will necessarily have different databases, and some of the most popular resources are in multiple databases. Thus, researchers going to a new school may find their key journals in a different database, in different databases, or in the same database but one with such an updated interface that it’s basically a new database. Finding the right resources in the right way becomes a complicated act of mapping needs to resources within the correct service frameworks.
Given this complex meshed-mapped of resources, a quick reference is essential. Some librarians are looking at commercial services like LibGuides. Services like this are useful because they allow the specialists to spend time optimizing content instead of working on the nitty-gritty of site design. I’m hoping that there’s an almost-as-easy solution that’s also Open Source and nearly free (other than setup and related costs). I’ve been looking at Drupal, since I’m familiar with it, but I haven’t found a set-up made exactly for subject/content guides in libraries. The UF Libraries already have awesome content, so we’re just looking for the best way to deliver it–that could be a content management system like Drupal, a wiki like MediaWiki, or a service like LibGuides.
In evaluating the different tools for presentation and delivery, we need a simple, yet flexible framework that’s easy for the subject specialists to update and that’s just as easy for patrons to use, and one that also has a consistent look and feel across the many subject guides. The sheer abundance and variety of information requires this to be a solid, elegant design, as shown through the pages for psychology. The pages cover basic resources on using the library resources, tutorials on using those resources and on using the resources for completing common research projects, explanations of what to use and why, links to help from a subject specialist, information on related fields, space for comments on all of these resources, further details on some of the materials, and more. These pages are currently divided on the UF Libraries’ webspace and a separate wiki because we don’t have a dedicated service for supporting the diverse needs of the subject specialist guides, but we’re in the process of selecting what to use and how to use it to best serve our needs.
Laurie N. Taylor January 26th, 2008
Like the Library of Congress, the National Museum of Health and Medicine has also been exploring using Flickr to share images. The images are great and include historical photos and documents. Some, like the Malaria Joe comic are humorous images from their eras, but some of the photos are strikingly beautiful, painful, haunting, and inspiring snapshots of life, offering glimpses into their time and into people’s lives. Everyone should be able to wander through these images, and it’s an amazing gift to have them online for us to see:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/99129398@N00
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7438870@N04
http://www.flickr.com/photos/22719239@N04
Laurie N. Taylor January 22nd, 2008
The Mobile World Congress is coming up soon (February 11-14) and it should lead to exciting new advances for libraries, and general mobile users as well. A recent AP story covered the rise of geotagging photos and creating mashups from the geographically referenced photos. While this is wonderful for small projects and for much larger projects (of the scale that will later build into Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web), it’s also great for the middle area of development where academic institutions like libraries are slowly building geographical information into our collections.
It’s great to see a friend’s vacation images tagged with locations, but it’s much more interesting to see all of the historical photos from a library or museum collection all geographically referenced so that everyone can browse spatially through the photos of the past. In order to make this possible, the collectio owner’s either need to build all of that information after the fact–which is a monumental task, especially for underfunded academic institutions–or that information needs to be collected in a systematic manner when it’s created and that’s where the Mobile World Congress can help.
The Mobile World Congress showcases the work of the Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) Association, which serves over 82% of the world’s mobile users. The GSM Association is currently focused on enhancing services for existing users and on enabling access for new users by delivering services to new areas. This means that it’s poised to help academic institutions on two fronts, by enabling more services like georeferencing photos for more users and by bring phone service to more areas creating access to extend and use research. With seminars on topics like “Open Connectivity” which seeks universal standards for interoperability, the work at the Mobile World Congress will definitely help some of the current or coming needs for libraries and museums in terms of cataloging, describing, and connecting material to users within the best possible interfaces for usability and extensibility. The GSMA Global Mobile Awards categories show some of the areas being explored, and hopefully soon more will be added that reflect the growing needs and possibilities for connecting with library and museum archives.
Laurie N. Taylor January 21st, 2008
Augment or alternative reality games combine the digital and the physical to create innovative and interactive games. Notable examples could include geocaching games, and games where players decode information on websites to find information on other websites, call or email the “decrypted” phone numbers or email addresses, or any one of many other activities based on the information learned from the digital site. The real play of ARGs comes through in the back-and-forth from digital to non-digital and in the gaming communities these types of games create. While I’m familiar with ARGs from game studies, it seems like some library and archival materials almost invoke the concept with as oddities that seem to need to be used in some way.
The image above is an example from the USX National Defense Program, Identification Card Listings - 1940’s Series (Source: UE/Labor 91:6, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh.). The University of Pittsburgh Library’s website explains the origin of these ID cards:
In the 1940’s, workers at US Steel’s National Works (sometimes known as the Tube Works) in McKeesport, were photographed for identification cards, which also provide social data on individual workers. The Archives Service Center is hereby making available a name index to its collection of these cards, numbering more than 10,000 in all, approximately 25% of which contain the abovementioned thumb-nail sized photographs. The social data on the cards have thus far been used for a variety of scholarly research projects: e.g. for a study and oral history on women crane operators at the National Works during WWII and for a book on Jews of Hungarian background who worked there. By combining cards belonging to members of a given, defined group, one can form conclusions about the connections between race/ethnicity and job classification or promotion, or about the geographic origins of selected groups.
The card almost calls out to be used in a game that requires additional research, making it perfect fodder or inspiration for an ARG. With so many related materials on the University of Pittsburgh Library’s site, and with material from places like the Typographical Union,
I’m amazed this hasn’t yet figured into an ARG already. Of course maybe it has, but I just haven’t found it yet. At any rate, wondrous materials like this seem to hide or simply sit waiting in all libraries and museums. Given their historical significance, ability to inspire, and usability for projects like ARGs, it’s hopefully only a matter of time until we all stumble across them through a game or an internet search.
Laurie N. Taylor January 17th, 2008
The Library of Congress is now using Flickr, and Flickr’s new commons area, to load images for collaborative tagging. This is wonderful because the Library of Congress has built so much core infrastructure using hierarchical definitions and adding Web 2.0-style folksonomy information to that is exactly what the Semantic Web (sometimes called Web 3.0) is all about.
The Library of Congress has a Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (with more than 1 million images and growing) that have been available online for over 10 years and now they are also selling some of their materials via print-on-demand. Because the Library of Congress is so important to the history of libraries and information architectures, any new project they get involved with matters a great deal to the content of that project and to all related systems of information. While it could seem that this is “just another” site testing Web 2.0 tools, the Library of Congress has defined so much of the commons and information sharing that even their frivolities are important.
Laurie N. Taylor January 11th, 2008
Like many other librarians, I’m going to the ALA Midwinter conference. ALA is the American Libraries Association and its conferences are massive. I’m really excited to attend both this conference and the annual conference. I’m more excited about this conference because I’ll be there tomorrow and because the midwinter conference deals with more of the business-meeting concerns and so it’s smaller than the annual conference. For a first-time attendee and a feral librarian (who are librarians without official library training), the smaller conference size will be helpful. Even with the smaller size the conference has loads of great programs, many of which run simultaneously.
I’m hoping to attend as many of the great meetings as possible and I’ve currently narrowed my schedule to the list below. While I hope to make all of these meetings and more, I’m likely to miss many of them for other meetings or for the things that always come up at conferences like getting lost in good conversation or while searching for coffee. Despite that, I’m including my schedule below to see how my blogging during or after the conference compares to my plans.
Saturday
- 8:00-10am: NMRT: Pennsylvania Convention Center 111A/B (after check in to pick up meeting guide and badge holder, Grand Hall, Level 2, Pennsylvania Convention Center)
- 10:30-12pm: Web 2.0, RUSA MARS: PCC (Pennsylvania Convention Center-PCC, Room: 201 B/C)
- 12-1:30pm: E-Science@Your Library (Radisson Plaza Warwick, 11: Grand Ballroom)
- 1:30-3:30: Digital Media Discussion Group (Sheraton Philadelphia City Center in Logans 2)
OR: Preservation Reformatting Discussion Group (Ritz Carlton; Petite Ballroom)
OR: Emerging Technologies (Philadelphia Convention Center-PCC, Room 108A)
- 4-6pm: Collaborative Digitization Discussion Group; Convention Center Room 202A
(I wish I didn’t have to miss the ALA Virtual Communities and Libraries, Member Initiative Group, in Franklin 10 Room; Philadelphia Marriott Hotel, 1201 Market Street.)
- 5:30-7:30pm: NMRT Midwinter Social; Off-site
Sunday, January 13
- 8-10am: PARS Digital Preservation Discussion Group (Radisson, Crystal Ballroom)
- 10:30-1pm: LITA: Digital Library Technologies Interest Group (DLTIG); Marriot in Salon K/L.
- 1:30-3:30pm: NMRT All-Committee Meeting
OR: LSTA Coordinators Discussion Group, Pennsylvania Convention Center in 202
OR: AAUP Book Selection Committee Meeting; Pennsylvania Convention Center in 309
OR: OCLC CONTENTdm User Showcase: Digital Collections Delivered; Pennsylvania Convention Center in 307 A
OR: University of Michigan Text Creation Partnership - Project Update; Marriott Philadelphia in Room 406
- 2:30-4:30pm: ACRL Copyright Meeting; Loews Philadelphia in Regency BR B
OR: ACRL Marketing Libraries; Loews Philadelphia in Regency BR C2
- 4-6pm: Diversity Research Tea & Poster Sessions (Four Seasons, Adams Room)
OR: PARS Preservation Forum; Pennsylvania Convention Center in 103 C
OR: Scholarly Communication Disc. Group; Marriott Philadelphia in Franklin 11
- 6:30-8:30pm: Ex Libris Reception; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; Samuel M. V. Hamilton Building; 128 N. Broad Street; Philadelphia, PA 19102 (One block from the Convention Center at the corner of N. Broad St. and Cherry St.)
Monday, January 14
- 8-10am: (Re)thinking Subject Guides: Interactivity Unbound (Loews Phil., Lescaze)
OR: LITA Town Meeting; Pennsylvania Convention Center in 103 A
- 10:30-12pm: LITA ITAL Editorial Committee (Loews Philadelphia in Tubman)
OR: ALCTS Forum; Pennsylvania Convention Center in 108 A
OR: Virtual Library; Marriott Philadelphia in Room 307
- 12-1:30pm: Exhibit floor exploration
- 1:30-3:30pm: LITA Emerging Technology Interest Group; Penn Convention Center in 109A
OR: ALCTS Scholarly Communications Interest Group; Marriott Philadelphia in Franklin 6
- Leave for airport
Laurie N. Taylor January 4th, 2008
The Harvard Law School Library just announced a new digital collection highlighting crime broadsides. The collection is online here and the collection description is: “Just as programs are sold at sporting events today, broadsides–styled at the time as “Last Dying Speeches” or “Bloody Murders”–were sold to the audience that gathered to witness public executions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.” The broadsides span 1707 to 1891 and include accounts of executions for various common and uncommon crimes. Now, researchers can see both the cultural reception of sentences as well as the court documents from London’s central criminal court, the Old Bailey (the proceedings of which are now online). Having these materials online is a boon to researchers for seeing the culture at the time in terms of law, news, and media. The entire broadside, zine-esque form is also interesting in light of blogs and online newszines.
Laurie N. Taylor January 3rd, 2008
While it’s a bit late, January 1 is normally the magical day when new items pass into the public domain. It doesn’t mean too much for the United States–and in fact it won’t mean much until 2019 because of the way our copyright laws are designed–but it’s still something to celebrate. Everybody’s Libraries has a nice overview of January 1’s significance and new gifts to the public domain.
For anyone holding copyright, Creative Commons has ready-made licenses available for easy use to ensure that new works are available before 2019. UF’s Digital Library Center also has handy forms for granting Internet Distribution permissions to UF. The forms are easily formatted to assign permissions to the public organization of anyone’s choice and our copyright information page even has a nice draft request letter and links to other copyright resources.
Laurie N. Taylor January 2nd, 2008
The discovery of Kryptonite, or at least a new mineral matching the chemistry described in Superman Returns, was found earlier this year. As a feral librarian (a librarian who hasn’t attended library school) I haven’t had a cataloging course, so I’m curious as to how articles on the new mineral will be cataloged for both its scientific and humanistic uses. Articles on a regular new mineral would just need to be listed via scientific categories, or so I’d think. But the hierarchical nature of subject headings would seem strange–at least to me–if the full scientific and full literary/popular culture hierarchy were included in the same manner. However, the popular culture study might intersect with the scientific so it could also be beneficial to list both on even footing.
Laurie N. Taylor January 2nd, 2008
Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Library of Babel” told of a fictional library with every possible book. Within the vast library, all useful books and books of gibberish would be included together putting the process of finding information into a desperate state.
The rise in digital archives without a corresponding rise in organizational structures could lead to a “Servers of Babel” scenario, at least for awhile, when we’re archiving 27 exabytes (27,000 petabytes, or 27 billion gigabytes) of data in the next two years. Finding new ways to organize and create useful means for accessing this information–and finding ways to preserve decaying, deprecated, and dying files and formats–will make for exciting research and work for 2008 and beyond.
