E-Books Coming of Age?

Bernie Sloan on web4lib 10/26/07 points to this article by Chicago Tribune "Internet critic" Steve Johnson, and notes the "suprisingly positive" experience had by this otherwise e-book-skeptical English major.

Sloan shares this telling excerpt:

"I just read 'Pride and Prejudice' on my BlackBerry. And, reader, I liked it. Against all my own prejudices, all my own pride in the history and tradition of the printed word, I liked it...The experience taught me that a book is not what I had thought it to be. It is not, in any important sense, typeface, paper stock or cover art. A book is, foremost, the arrangement of words in sequence, and they are, to borrow a buzz-phrase from the digital folk, platform agnostic."

Exploding Your OPAC (NELINET)

I attended a NELINET workshop with Ed Sperr on October 25 entitled "Exploding Your OPAC ." I posted my notes to the CMS blog in case others our curious.

The Open Library (John Hostage memo)

John Hostage mentioned via Autocat a presentation by Aaron Swartz of the Open Library Project, held at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. The project's goal seems to be a wiki-like "Web page for every book," including descriptive metadata and hyperlinks to full-text copies, library holdings, online booksellers, etc.., where available. It is also to include print- and scan-on-demand services and social tagging. Hostage said the audience included the likes of Tim Spalding (Library Thing) and David Weinberger (Everything is Miscellaneous). "Someone even mentioned FRBRoo, the object-oriented model of FRBR that is being developed."

NYTSL 2007

The NYTSL Fall 2007 program on Libraries and Free and Open Source Software Movements, will be presented by Edward Corrado of the College of New Jersey.

Ed co-authored a winning IMLS grant toward developing an open source OPAC and is a member of the Code4Lib Journal editorial board.

Mass Digitization and Open Access

According to a September 13, 2007 news release, the Yale Library is partnering with Microsoft to scan 100,000 of its public domain books:

Yale is committed to providing the widest possible access to its collection ... The full text of the digitized books will be indexed. Full text searching enables researchers to locate relevant material that they could never find through traditional indexes or library catalogs (e.g. a single paragraph in a work on an unrelated topic).

Mass digitization will certainly improve access to Yale's collections. The problem is that while the majority of Web searchers rely on Google (54% versus 13% for Microsoft's Live Search) , Microsoft requires that the new digital copies be indexed exclusively in Live Search. Google users will simply not be able to find the full texts presented or indexed there (though they may find catalog records courtesy of openworldcat.org). One wonders, therefore, whether this arrangement undermines Yale's commitment, mentioned above, "to provide the widest possible access to its collection."

Compare this to the approach taken by UConn, which is partnering with the Boston Library Consortium and Brewster Kahle's Open Content Alliance. According to the October 4th LJ Academic Newswire, Vice-Provost Brinley Franklin said, "The library staff at UConn was unanimous in its endorsement of unrestricted access to materials we digitize ... We are ready to turn down funding from companies that restrict searching digital collections through their proprietary search engine." An October 22 New York Times article (slashdotted on Oct. 23) reports that the Boston Public Library, MIT, Brown, the Smithsonian, and others, have similarly opted out of the Google/Microsoft model.

People's Choice Music

Komar and Melamid along with Dave Soldier conducted a study in 1995 or 1996 that determined:

"The most unwanted music is over 25 minutes long, veers wildly between loud and quiet sections, between fast and slow tempos, and features timbres of extremely high and low pitch, with each dichotomy presented in abrupt transition.

The most unwanted orchestra was determined to be large, and features the accordion and bagpipe (which tie at 13% as the most unwanted instrument), banjo, flute, tuba, harp, organ, synthesizer (the only instrument that appears in both the most wanted and most unwanted ensembles). An operatic soprano raps and sings atonal music, advertising jingles, political slogans, and 'elevator' music, and a children's choir sings jingles and holiday songs. The most unwanted subjects for lyrics are cowboys and holidays, and the most unwanted listening circumstances are involuntary exposure to commercials and elevator music."

Soldier and lyricist Nina Mankin actually went on to compose two pieces of music based on the survey results. I've listened to them and, ironically, the "Most Wanted Music" is so ingratiating that it's too painful to hear more than once, while the "Most Unwanted Music" is wonderfully stimulating and quite funny.

Josephus online

The Works of Flavius Josephus: "The Works of Flavius Josephus Translated by William Whiston"

BookMooch

Via Blake at LISNews (10/19): BookMooch: "exchange books and trade them, like a book swap or book barter"

World Digital Library

"The World Digital Library will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials."

Open Content Aliance (OCA) Attracts New Members

From LJ Academic Newswire, Brewster Kahle convinced the Boston Library Consortium to commit $500,000 over two years to scan public domain texts for the open access repository. Unlike the digital conversion programs of Google and Microsoft, these texts would be search engine-agnostic. UConn is involved as well, and hired a digital projects librarian to help manage its contribution. Matt W., in his reference to the news release, shared this excerpt, "The library staff at UConn was unanimous in its endorsement of unrestricted access to materials we digitize ... We are ready to turn down funding from companies that restrict searching digital collections through their proprietary search engine." Rather different from the Yale approach.

ALA Preconference on Metadata

ALA | Metadata for Digital Library Development: "January 9-10, 2008 Philadelphia, PA"

Knights Templar in the News

Pete posted this item in LISNews about re-discovered archival document that is now being published in limited facsimile edition. According to the cited BBC article, the "Chinon parchment", a contemporaneous Latin account of the investigation and trial of the Templars, was rediscovered five years ago, after having been lost for centuries due to incorrect cataloging. The document shows that the Templars tried to justify their seemingly blasphemous initiation rites (such as spitting on the cross) as necessary practice in case they should be captured by Muslims (and presumably need to feign conversion?). The Knights Templar, portrayed in the popular imagination as guardians of the Holy Grail, were suppressed by the Pope in 1312, and the last Grandmaster, Jacques de Molay, burned at the stake by order of King Philip IV on March 13, 1314.

Open Source ILS Market Penetration

In the October 15th issue of LISNews, Bob Molyneux reviews the extent of open source ILS market penetration in U.S. libraries and elsewhere. In particular, he looks at the adoption of Koha and Evergreen, based on data gathered from Marshal Breeding's lib-web-cats (library websites and catalogs) database. A growing number of public libraries have adopted open source ILSs. So far 4 academic U.S. libraries are using Koha (e.g., Galen College of Nursing); none is using Evergreen. In Canada, Laurentian University is in the process of migrating to Evergreen.

Also posted to CMS weblog.

The Israel Lobby

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
By John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 484 pp., $26)

Despite accusations to the contrary, there is nothing anti-semitic about this book. The authors are simply performing an exercise in "political realism". "Although we believe that America should support Israel's existence [i.e., for moral and historical reasons]," the authors write, "Israel's security is ultimately not of critical strategic importance to the United States ... By contrast, if oil exports from the Persian Gulf oil were insignificantly reduced, the effects on America's well-being would be profound." (p. 338). Tough words, but not racist.

The final chapter offers some policy advice: the United States should abandon its current efforts at regional transformation in the Middle East and return to a strategy of "offshore balancing" since "the United States does not need to control this vitally important region; it merely needs to ensure that no other country does" (p. 339). Israel, a regional economic and military superpower, can largely fend for itself. If (however improbably in their view) her existence should ever be threatened by enemies, the U.S. would at that point have a moral obligation to intervene. Otherwise, they maintain, Israel should be treated like any other state, based on U.S. national interest, and not subject to the "special relationship".

For Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Republic, however, this book represents "the most sustained attack, the most mainstream attack, against the political enfranchisement of American Jews since the era of Father Coughlin." Backed up by the recorded words of Richard Clarke and Lawrence Wright, he effectively challenges the book's analysis of Bin Ladin's motives (i.e. that Israel's treatment of the Palestinians was close to Bin Ladin's heart) and representation of Israel's position on Iraq (i.e., that Iran wasn't the greater threat in Israel's view). Goldberg fails to offer a counter-explanation, however, for why the Israel policy debate has been so strangely stifled in the U.S.. He also unhelpfully smears journalist Robert Fiske as a "rabid anti-Zionist who has lately made common cause with the September 11 conspiracy movement".

Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, also roughs up the authors a bit in his piece for the New York Times Book Review. Gelb points out some significant problems with the book (e.g., cherry-picking of quotations, absence of original research, reflexive blame on Israel for failed peace negotiations) , but, in their response the following week, Walt and Mearsheimer point out a fatal flow in Gelb's critique, one that reflects the distorted way in which he read their book: "Gelb refers repeatedly to a "Jewish lobby", despite the fact that we never employ the term in our book. Indeed we explicitly rejected this label as inaccurate and misleading, both because the lobby includes non-Jews like the Christian Zionists and because many Jewish Americans do not support the hard line policies favored by its most powerful elements." Another error was Gelb's inference that they turned their wrath on the Israel lobby out of exasperation and disbelief over the invasion of Iraq. But the Atlantic Monthly commission of the original article began in October 2002, still nearly 6 months before the war began.

Meanwhile, Ray McGovern of Consortium News has an article on Alternet (10/10/07) regarding Israel's June 7, 1967 attack on the USS Liberty. McGovern attributes the 40-year cover-up to--you guessed it--intimidation by the Israel lobby. The recent declassification of government documents along with aggressive reporting by John Crewdson make it increasingly hard to deny that the Israelis intentionally destroyed a "friendly" U.S. spy ship, and that the two governments conspired afterward to keep it secret from the U.S. public.

A Brief History of Slashdot

Last week, in honor of its 10th annniversay, Part I recounted Slashdot's origin in 1997 when it was called Chips & Dips (CnD) using flat text files and Perl. Part II, CmdrTaco picks up thread in 1998 with conversion to SQL database.

How to Eliminate Unwanted Catalogs

Brett cites Catalog Choice website on LISNews, designed to help people "reduce the number of repeat and unsolicited catalog mailings [they receive in the mail] ... Consumers can indicate which catalogs they no longer wish to receive, and businesses can receive a list of consumers no longer wanting to receive their catalogs." It's endorsed by the National Wildlife Federation and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

tikiwi "hello world"

dev.tw.o : Tikiwiki Development : Hello World

Standing up for Open source

Standing up for Open source, Lee David Jaffe, Greg Careaga

Arizona (etc.)

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Fac-Back-OPAC

The "Faceted Back-up OPAC" or Fac-Back-OPAC is an advanced catalog interface based on Lucene Solr, marc4j, and Django. Dan Scott (Laurentian University) archived the software on Google Code. There seems to be step-by-step install documentation as well.

Dan Scott mentioned how Solr dominated the code4lib 2007 conference, including all-day preconference led by Erik Hatcher and MyResource portal demo by Andrew Nagy. The Fac-Back-OPAC was derived from Casey Durfee's "Open Source Endeca in 250 Lines or Less".

1. MARC records (bibs and holdings) are extracted nightly from traditional OPAC.

2. then run through marc4j scripts (controled by Jython programming language) converting them to UTF-8 MARCXML.

3. then indexed through Solr (see tutorial) configured with bibliographic schema, run inside Jetty application server. Fields are extracted from MARCXML records as XML strings and sent to Solr instance via HTTP POST method.

4. The Django Web application framework then comes into play. It "implements the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern written in Python".

Maxie's 95th

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Richard Akerman on Library Futures

John Dupuis (Confessions of a Science Librarian blogster) interviews Richard Akerman, Technology Architect at the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI), author of the Science Library Pad, and SciFoo Camp 2007 invitee.

Dupuis: "Can academic/research libraries change fast enough to stay relevant? Similarly, can libraries rush to transform themselves into the wrong things, and just a different path to irrelevance?"

Akerman: "I think there was a big, big intermediation role that libraries just have to let go of. It isn't coming back. And there's also a big, big technology investment, in catalogues and ILS systems that worked in ways that librarians understoood, that were basically library operations, turned into computer programs and databases."

LCSH Browser

LCSH Browser: "contains a sample of 100.000 Library of Congress Subject Headings, set up for browsing by the authority headings themselves but also by phrases and even words contained in the headings. "

"Can New Haven Become a Sustainable City?"

F&ES blog posting re program on sustainability in New Haven, October 4, 2007, 6:00 pm to 8:30 pm at the Peabody Museum, 3rd floor.