Simon Chamberlain’s library weblog

Free Legal Web is a new UK site. Its homepage states:

We have a thriving web of free-access legislation, judgments and other materials on OPSI, the Statute Law Database, BAILII and government websites, and thousands of useful free guides, articles and updaters published by solicitors, barristers, law firms and private and third sector law publishers. But it is incomplete and unreliable and it is not joined up - it is not practically accessible.

FreeLegalWeb is a project designed to deliver a web service that joins up and makes sense of the law and legal commentary and analysis on the web, providing a substantially more reliable, useful and efficient service to both lawyers and the community at large than is currently available.

Via Law Librarian Blog.

(via Library Tech NZ). The Pew Internet & American Life Project has a new report out, on the different ways in which people make use (or don’t) of mobile/wireless ICT. As is common for Pew, they’ve divided users into a number of typologies, which broadly break down into those who use mobile ICT regularly, and those who don’t. While I’m often sceptical of Pew, I did think that I fit into one of their groups pretty well (Desktop Veterans - those who spend plenty of time online but don’t use the mobile internet much).

As you might expect, Pew is somewhat negative about those of us in the non-mobile-ICT group. But from my perspective, not having this technology isn’t a great loss: I’m very rarely mobile for very long. I’m either at home, or at work - both with good desktop access. My commute is 30 minutes, but most of that is spent walking (the rest by Tube). There isn’t a lot that I can do in 10 minutes or so on the train that can’t wait until I get to the office.

Mobile access would be good for navigating London, maybe, or for checking movie times/restaurant reviews, that sort of thing, or the odd bit of fact-checking that occurs when you’re sitting in the pub and a question comes up. But there’s no killer app for me, yet. My £10 phone lets me text and call my friends, and listen to the radio. For now, that will do.

Press release; Report.

A quick roundup of reaction to the Taiga Provocative Statements (2 page PDF): a collection of statements about the future of libraries (though the focus appears to be on academic libraries, with a US flavour: unsurprising given that the authors are senior US academic libarians).

Walt Crawford finds them “A little extreme” and links to John Dupois, who finds them “unsupported and unsupportable”, and offers a detail critique.  Meredith Farkas isn’t impressed either. Dorothea Salo went looking “for antidotes to Taiga poison” - and found some, if you’re interested.

The Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians are getting a more positive reaction, though not from everyone. Me, I’m not a huge fan of manifestos (they always seem vague, I like/need to have things a bit more concrete) but mostly this is good stuff - I want to engage and debate with it rather than trash it (go read the comments; there’s a nice discussion about the Platonic ideal of the Library…).

I would agree with Annoyed Librarian that these sorts of statements and manifestos tend to focus on public libraries first; maybe include academic libraries, and pretty much ignore corporate, government and other special libraries.  One could also argue with “continual change”, perhaps changing it to a willingness to be prepared for change, and to advocate for, or be willing to accept, change when necessary. Then there’s the problem that the Statements talk about users engagement with the Library (not individual libaries)…well, if the Library is an ideal, how do users engage with it?

But like I say, it’s mostly good stuff… go read.

Techdirt reports a study that workers who surf the ‘net at work are more productive. I’m simultaneously rejoicing and bookmarking this.

Paul Reynolds reports that the very wonderful Powerhouse Museum in Sydney is releasing all its collection data under Creative Commons.

Law Librarian Blog on a guide to social media for law students.

Reaching users through Facebook applications - an article from Code4Lib by Wayne Graham at Swem Library, William and Mary University.

Dynamically generated library course pages - again from Code4Lib, this article is by Jason Casden, Kim Duckett, Tito Sierra and Joseph Ryan of NCSU Libraries.

ReadWriteWeb asks: Is Facebook a cult? but defends the site from accusations on Fox News that Facebook will spoil your grades.

ReadWriteWeb lists occasions when you should NOT use social media.

What I Learned Today has a history of the open-source ILS software Koha (developed just up the road from my hometown).

The UK has the worst record of balancing consumer and producer rights in terms of copyright (Techdirt).

Luckily just a silly article, rather than another statement about the decline of the profession:

Homo Britannicus by Professor Chris Stringer, a groundbreaking historical biological work about the origin of humans in Britain, was met with confusion at Manchester University, where librarians have filed all their copies in the “gay and lesbian” section.

Source.

Not sure where they get ‘all their copies’ from as the catalogue shows one holding only, and it seems to be shelved in 913 (Ancient World)….presumably the power of the Observer’s scorn has corrected any classification errors [Still, one wonders where the error could come from; either the cataloguers are copy-cataloguing from an authoritative source, or they’re doing it themselves by carefully cataloguing from the item; either way they should see what it’s actually about….)

LibWorld is a recent publication that’s worth a look for anyone interested in library blogging worldwide. It’s a collection of 30 articles, originally posted on Infobib.de. Each article discusses the library and information blogosphere in a different country; from the large and well-established (USA) to the smaller and perhaps more obscure (Trinidad and Tobago, Malawi). Walt Crawford did the introduction. And I did the New Zealand chapter. I’m mentioning that several paragraphs into the post because I’m not 100% happy with what I wrote; it was a bit of a rush job and I didn’t revise it subsequently for the book (the idea for the book came about when I was offline for several months).

However, there it is, in print. Go take a look, I’m sure something in it will be of interest. You can purchase a copy from the link at the start of this post, or download it for free (PDF, 211 pages).  Kudos to Christian, Nadine and Sarah for making this happen, it must have taken a lot of effort to coordinate with all the authors.

Getting started on Twitter, professionally

I’ve been using Twitter casually for a year or two, but purely as a way of keeping up an ongoing, semi-random conversation with a group of friends, almost all in the USA, some of whom I’ve met, some I haven’t. I was most definitely not using it for anything professional. But now that I’m trying to get back into blogging and professional reading and all that good stuff, I thought I’d better look at whether Twitter would be of any use to me.

So, I leave the old account for my personal conversations (and switch emails so that the random librarians who were finding me via my email address now get my professional account instead) and start up a new account. Slight annoyance: I can’t use my full name (the curse of the 11-letter surname). SChamberlain and S_Chamberlain are taken so I have to default to the clumsy use of both initials. My fault for not being an early adopter.

Finding people to subscribe to was a lot easier than I thought. Twitter suggested I follow some librarians that were in my email contacts list, and from looking at their followed list I could easily identify another 50 to follow (either because I recognised the names or because they had ‘librarian’ somewhere in their user name, or because they represented a blog or company like Read Write Web or Yahoo).

I’ve been on less than a day and I can already see how compelling and how useful this is. I’m picking up blog posts from sites that I wouldn’t bother to subscribe to in Google Reader, but that I’m happy to read tweets from (figuring that tweets are easier to skim over; the transaction cost of following on Twitter is less than the cost of subscribing to hundreds of blogs and having to read through thousands of posts if I miss a few days).

Will have to lurk a while and watch the back and forth of conversation before leaping in. But so far, I’m liking this.

Some interesting posts on Twitter from the last few months, some of which were influential in me signing up:

• Twitter: Your First 24 Hours (Phil Bradley)

• Twitter on ALA, and Some Advice (The Shifted Librarian)
• WeFollow - user powered Twitter Directory (Phil Bradley)
• Netvibes and Twitter and Multiple Accounts (Phil Bradley again) - I’m definitely going to need this - logging in and out of Twitter accounts is annoying
• TTwitter - Zero to Amazing in 30 days (Chris Oien, guest post at Tame The Web) - a great post that was instrumental in inspiring me
• Four Ways Companies Use Twitter for Business (Read Write Web). In another article on RWW, the author says that he would pay at least $50/month for his Twitter account.
• What Does that Hashtag Mean? (RWW again, explaining how to find out what different # (hashtags) stand for)
• Finally, a poll from Law Librarian Blog which shows that the majority of law librarians do not use Twitter

I’m clearing out my Google Reader ‘to read’ list and posting quick links to anything that still looks interesting…some of this is kinda old.  Also playing around with themes on the blog itself, and I upgraded to the latest WordPress, which looks great…

Comments should be turned back on now, as well.

Interesting article from Read Write Web, noting that search queries are getting longer, or, at least, that the number of 7 word or 8+ word search queries has increased. Worth pointing out that though the increases are reasonably large in percentage terms (12% and 22% respectively) they are small in real terms - only around 6% of all queries are 7 words or longer. A case of increasing sophistication among search users, or the opposite - users typing in long and unformed questions? One commenter suggests autocomplete could be the reason, noting that typing curi in Google will give you the option of ‘curious case of Benjamin Button’. This makes sense - pre autocomplete, I’d bet a number of searches would type curious case button or some similar combination of words from the title, knowing that such a search would be ‘good enough’.

The article also points to an increase in the use of Google, from 66% market share to 72% between Jan 2008 and Jan 2009.

RWW also reports that citation manager Zotero is embracing cloud features, enabling users to sync between machines and backup their databases automatically online. More interestingly, it’s enabling social networking so you can connect with other users.

A poll on Law Librarian Blog indicates, unsurprisingly, that most law libraries are expecting budget cuts over one or both of the next two years, and most expect to manage this by cutting collections.

Techdirt has an article arguing that social pressure can solve the problems of copying/copyright infringement, even without the existence of formal copyright measures. I’m not sure that I totally agree, though they use an interesting example of online copying of content from Metafilter to another website. It’s mainly of interest to me because I’ve met the Metafilter member whose work was copied.

Techdirt also argues that the Google Books settlement was a bad move, because it has priced other players out of the market for scanning and indexing books. The argument being that prior to the settlement, there was at least an argument that such scanning could be fair use. Now that Google has set a price, it indicates that any other market entrant would have to pay a similar price. The result is an effective monopoly for Google.

Another Techdirt article discusses the Wall Street Journal getting rid of its research librarian. I won’t preach to the choir here, but note that the comments are (a) mostly supportive of the work that special librarians do and/or (b) posted by librarians [depending on how cynical you feel].

Interesting article on copyright in the age of YouTube, from the ABA Journal, via Law Librarian Blog. The article discusses fair use considerations in relation to YouTube takedown notices, safe harbour provisions under the DMCA, and discusses various recent cases.

Mary Ellen Bates has a nice article in Information Today titled ‘living large in lean times‘. Her advice includes looking at the long-term, thinking strategically and emphasising how your library/information centre adds value and is seen as a revenue-generating function. She also gives some useful advice on how to cut back on non-essential items in your budget. Worth a read for all of us, especially relevant for me right now, as my firm is introducing a ~10% reduction in business services staff…  

Tame The Web has a post on the use of Twitter for internal communication.  Sounds like it could work better than IM, which was something we’re thinking of using at MPOW.

Legally Minded  is social networking for US lawyers. It also has resources about technology, careers etc. Could be interesting - it’s not just targeted at lawyers but at all legal workers (librarians aren’t mentioned specifically, but I’m sure we’re in there under ‘legal support staff). Via OPL Plus.  Another potentially interesting site is Rate A Partner, where lawyers and clients can rate the partners of different law firms. Given that it’s anonymous, it’s hard to see how useful it could be (the obvious risk being that disgruntled employees could misrepresent their own firm’s partners, or that rivals could do the same thing…users would have know way of knowing if any criticism was legitimate).

Google has changed its search options so you can rank your results (obviously, you need to be logged in). I’ve used this a little bit, just to tweak results so they’re more useful for me. For example when I search Law Library of Congress, I really want the LLC’s ‘Guide to Law Online’, but I can never remember what it’s called. Of course, when I type that, I realise that just bookmarking the page that I want would be easier, even though I regularly use 4 or more different PC’s.Via Phil Bradley, who has some concerns.