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).

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

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.

findanyfilm.com is a neat site for those of us in the UK that does exactly what it says – lets you search for any film that is available in the UK. Most interestingly, it lets you search for films that are in cinemas, or available on DVD or Blu-Ray or on TV, or even for download or to watch online. You can set your location, so that it will find films near you, and lets you set up alerts so you are notified when the film becomes available in any format. The interface is clean and easy to use, and I probably prefer it to something like Time Out’s film search function. There are a few limits – it seems to skew towards commercial publishers (iTunes) when considering whether a film is available for download, ignoring films that are available on the Internet Archive. While there’s a lot to commend in FindAnyFilm’s statement that “Film downloads should be problem free and the highest quality, which is why FindAnyFilm.com only finds film downloads that are guaranteed to be legal, virus-free, first-generation releases”, I think the Internet Archive has enough credibility to be considered as a source.

Via Phil Bradley.  

I’m back to reasonably regular posting. My apologies to the two people who left comments on my last post; I had over 10K spam comments, I was trying to delete those and approve the good ones, but somehow deleted the good ones as well. I’ve turned comments off temporarily, until I can install anti-spam plugins. Right now I’m just clearing up some items that I’ve got saved in my Google Reader. Seeing  as I’m in one of the live music capitals of the world, I thought I’d start off with a roundup of some music-related posts from the past few weeks/months. This Unshelved strip made me smile, and will be appreciated by any fans of the Wellington (or Great Britain) Ukulele Orchestras.Techdirt notes that CD sales are down 14%.And points out the flaws in EMI’s lawsuit against MP3Tunes. (wherein MP3Tunes is being sued for linking to MP3s online; but EMI is posting many of those same MP3s itself, for free). More Techdirt: this time news from back home that New Zealand musicians are opposing a law that makes ISP’s responsible for policing piracy, and assumes that if someone is accused of file-sharing, they are guilty.  Although looking at the source site, I can’t see any musicians involved, so I’m not sure where Techdirt got that from.Techdirt also reports on the MPAA supporting the idea of ISP’s kicking off users who are accused of file-sharing. From ReadWriteWeb: the best selling album on Amazon last year was available as a free download. (technically, all albums on Amazon are available somewhere as free downloads; I suspect they mean ‘free and legal’ ). Via RWW again, HypeMachine has the music blog zeitgeist for 2008 - the top 50 albums (aggregated from music blogs), available to download as radio shows featuring songs from the albums and interviews with bloggers, or play the full album in your browser. It looks good, but judging by the top 50 I’d say there aren’t too many black music blogs/bloggers: Kanye and Lil Wayne is about your limit if you’re looking for something that isn’t white rock/dance.Audiolizer lets you take your iTunes with you, writes RWW, who also suggest other streaming music sites. And recommend Mufin for better music recommendations in iTunes. Phil Bradley recommends Songza.Warner Music wants more money for having songs on YouTube, and musicians aren’t happy (Techdirt).   

Chris Anderson’s article in Wired discusses why free is the future for businesses. Guess who already gives stuff away for free? (Via several sources including Librarian In Black). He doesn’t write directly about libraries, but it’s worth a read for anyone who wants an insight into (one view of) a new economy.