Simon Chamberlain’s library weblog

The Digital Futures summit is underway in Auckland, with some very impressive names presenting (including Tim Berners-Lee and Chris Andersen, though both only by video). Watch online here, read the programme here (PDF) and read Russell Brown’s commentary here (thanks to Jon P on the VUW internal staff blog).

Kawerau is the first community in New Zealand to benefit from the Aotearoa People’s Network, which provides free access to broadband internet services through public libraries to small rural areas (National Library).

Archives New Zealand have placed a selection of old New Zealand films online, for viewing (though not downloading, I think).  The films seem to be mostly (or solely?) documentaries. A nice feature is that the site is built on a wiki, and viewers can add their own descriptions of each film. A perfect example of combining authoritative cataloguing and the wisdom of crowds. (The first link goes to descriptions of the films, the second to the films themselves).

The government has launched a web standards wiki (National Library blog).

So Amazon has announced a new e-book reader, the Kinble, to retail for US$400. As well as books, it will let users read blogs and newspapers. The most interesting feature is that the Kindle has wireless internet access, you can use it to browse Amazon and download your purchased books, pretty much instantly. You can also browse the web.

Reaction has been mixed: Techdirt describe e-books as a solution in search of a problem, and general consensus over on Metafilter is not greatly positive. Tom Boone at LibraryLaws is concerned about whether libraries will be able to lend e-books for the Kindle, and is concerned about formats (it doesn’t support PDF!). On the other hand, he likes the price-per-book, the ability to search full-text across multiple books, and the ability to annotate text. Tom Peters at ALA Techsource has a mixed review.

Tim Lee at Techdirt (again) is less impressed by the price ($2 for Bleak House (which is free at Gutenberg, of course), $14/month for the New York Times, even a subscription fee for blogs that are free online. Lee doesn’t like the $10 price for books, either (I agree; if you’re not paying for physical distribution and printing, then prices should be much lower).

Without (obviously) having seen the Kindle, I’m torn. It seems like a step in the right direction, with a few problems, mostly the fact that it’s to a large extent tied to Amazon. Not such a great model. I love my iPod, but I can add any sort of music to it - I want to rip a CD or download from eMusic or from iTunes, I can. With the Kindle, seems like I’m locked in to buying from Amazon. For $400, I’d like platform independence. But downloading wirelessly, without needing to plug into a PC? Yeah, that I like.

The next question is whether libraries will be able to lend e-books to Kindle users. I read about 70 books last year, and probably more this year. Of those, I bought about two, and another three or four were gifts. The rest came from my much-loved public library, and the academic library I work in. I’m not likely to shell out $400 if I have to then buy all the content I use on the device.

But that’s OK, maybe I’m not the target audience for this one. I probably prefer reading off paper anyway (it’s not the resolution, so much as being able to flick from page to page and to have several books open at once). In an ideal world, I’d have paper and e-books, one for actually reading, the other available so I can do full-text searching when needed…

Via BoingBoing comes news that 1.8 million pages of federal case law will be made available for free online. While this won’t provide the value-add that Westlaw or Lexis do, it still looks at first and second glance like a great resource for those without access to a big law library, and will no doubt be useful for NZ law firms, many of whom don’t subscribe to Westlaw or have access to hard copies of US reports.

Can social bookmarking improve web search? (via Phil Bradley).

Journal of Computer Mediated-Communication: Special Issue: Social Networking Sites.  (via BoingBoing).

This month’s issue of Computers in Libraries has a couple of good articles on social software, too - one by Michael Stephens on setting up a social network via Facebook or Ning, and another on using a wiki to support a quick reference guide, by Tim Ribaric.

Via Phil Bradley, this article from the New York Times

Facebook began selling ads that display people’s profile photos next to commercial messages that are shown to their friends about items they purchased or registered an opinion about.

For example, going forward, a Facebook user who rents a movie on Blockbuster.com will be asked if he would like to have his movie choice broadcast out to all his friends on Facebook. And those friends would have no choice but to receive that movie message, along with an ad from Blockbuster.

Like Phil, this seems like a bad idea to me. As he says:

I don’t actually think it’s going to work that well - I have several groups of friends on FB - some of them are work colleagues, some are friends from science fiction conventions and others are friends from different places. This is NOT a homogeneous grouping of people. Sure, some may be interested in some of the things I like to read or buy, but not all of them will.

It’s also going to work the other way around as well - if friends start pumping adverts through to me… I’m still going to get the spam… and they’re not going to stay my friend for long.

Including brands in FB is fine; there’s been some interesting discussion about creating library ‘brands’ (on TameTheWeb, among other places). Something that lets an individual connect with brands or organisations that they like? Fantastic. A way for people to discover others with the same interest, all voluntarily. But something that imposes those connections on that user’s friends? Not so great. Seems like a good idea with a less than ideal implementation.

There’s also a final question: are these brands who they say they are? Which one is the real Manchester United? (sorry Phil, no Everton).

Jon Udell: “In an online world of small pieces loosely joined, librarians are among the most well qualified and highly motivated joiners of those pieces. Library patrons, meanwhile, are in transition. Once mainly consumers of information, they are now, on the two-way web, becoming producers too. Can libraries function not only as centers of consumption, but also as centers of production?” (via TameTheWeb).

Judith Siess: faculty members want online, not print - and overwhelmingly so. (Worth noting though that the original source is Ebrary, a company that provides electronic content to libraries. Which of course doesn’t mean that the claim is wrong, just that the source has a vested interest in it being right).

Jessamyn West: presentation at Michigan Library Association: What Works: More My Library, less My Space (unless My Space works for you). Which seems sensible. And wins huge points from me for including a picture of the O RLY? owl on page 4 of the presentation, an image that is pretty much burned into my retinas since someone started posting it dozens of times a day on a forum I moderate.  But I digress. Go read.

Web design on a dime - Sarah Houghton-Jan’s presentation from Internet Librarian. Too much to quote here, but talks about what your users expect, and how the library’s website needs to be treated like it is its own branch of the library. It includes a lot of suggestions of new services to implement, and gives plenty of examples: podcasting, videocasting, tools and mashups (Library Elf, LibX toolbar), improving the catalogue (or using an overlay like AquaBrowser or LibraryThing for Libraries or OCLC Local).

I found the suggestions about databases interesting: “focus on the what”, “don’t use the word database”, emphasise free, market market market!

Sarah also provides a HUGE list of free e-book sites, and finishes up with some neat-looking web design tools - all free.

I knew most of the first half of this presentation, but it will still be useful evidence if I want to promote any of these ideas. The second half, especially the web design tools, was mostly new to me. I’m sure I’ll be coming back to this presentation in the future. Thanks, Sarah!

Meredith Farkas has a long, interesting post on her project to develop her library’s online subject guides:

You could hardly call these things subject guides; they were just a bunch of Web links in different areas. Some were more useful than others. The guide for “science” had three links. In addition, a very high percentage of the links were dead, because it wasn’t anyone’s job to check them.

Meredith wanted to develop guides that were easier to update than static webpages. She considered del.icio.us (worries about relying on a 3rd party site led her to reject this option),  LibGuides (a subscription service that looks to have some very useful functionality - not all needed in her case),  and some open source guides (looked useful, but would her successor be able to maintain the software?). She finally settled on using a wiki, for its flexibility, ability to give colleagues only the rights they need, ability to include student/faculty contributions if desired, searchability, and ability to be assign pages to categories.

I’ve also been thinking about the subject guides I maintain. They’re a fairly long list of static pages. I think the content is reasonably good, but it does take a fair amount of time to check the pages - URL-rot is still a major problem on the web (which surprises me, I would have thought that most organisations have settled on their site layouts, and wouldn’t be changing URLs much -but obviously they do - and don’t leave re-directs).

I’m still quite interested in the idea of using del.icio.us, while noting Meredith’s concerns about the effect on our guides if the site went down. The advantages I see are that del.icio.us incorporates tagging, meaning a site can sit in more than one place in the subject guide (sure, I could do that now and manually add a site to several pages, but that gets clumsy and clutters the guide).

The other key advantage, of course, is seeing sites that others have tagged with the same tags that I used. This is maybe less useful when considering more generic tags (”intellectual property”, “human rights”) but when I looked at very specific tags I could see a real benefit: see my pages tagged CISG*, and all pages with that tag - several of which I was unfamiliar with, and which looked useful.

The third advantage would be that faculty or students with del.icio.us accounts could ‘friend’ the library’s account, and each other, and add useful sites to their own accounts, which would then be linked to the original subject guide.

I’m not sure I’m quite ready to push this forward yet, but I think it’s an idea that’s worth looking at more closely.

*Convention on the International Sale of Goods, an important document in international trade law.

Just going to post some quick links to posts that have caught my eye (probably reflecting my current academic bias):

• The best of Resource Shelf, 2007
• 10 WebVoyage Hacks
• Online marketing for libraries (also here)
• Building online communities (social tagging around the catalogue, blogs/book discussion sites - some interesting stuff here, an acknowledgement that it’s difficult - and some more discussion here)
• Cool tools for webmasters (they look good - I’ve already tried one of these)
• The greying of the internet

(All links to Librarian in Black, The Shifted Librarian, or What I Learned Today)

Couple of music posts: on Radiohead’s online album sales, and on new business models for bands. Some discussion at Metafilter, where Trent Reznor (of Nine Inch Nails) reveals he was an active member of the file-sharing site Oink, recently shut down by the recording industry. My comment, giving a proposal for a new business model for music, is getting ignored here.

Meantime, universities are giving content away for free.