Programming Skills Recommended for Librarians

There's an article by David Stuart in the latest issue of Research Information entitled: "Research Skills could Transform Librarians Roles". Because someone tagged it "code4lib" in delicious , the citation showed up in Planet Code4Lib. I was happy to discover it there since it helps me understand my own growing enthusiasm for programming. The reality today is that most people search for information on the web and most are satisfied with 'good enough' results rather than 'most authoritative' results.  No need for librarians in this scenario. For research purposes, though, 'good enough' is often not good enough. In an age of inoformation superabundance, separating the wheat from the chaff (or what librarians call'selecting') may be more important than ever. At the very least we can help our readers make this distinction for themselves by designing transparent, user-friendly research portals.. Stuart points out that while the traditional document-centered work of librarians is disappearing there's a growing need to help make sense of vast amounts of digital information published on the Web. Getting programming skills in the hands of librarians can help. APIs makes it easier than ever to create mashups of web content from debatable sources like Wikipedia as well as more traditional sources like the New York Times. While it is preferable in the long-run to harness APIs through a programming langauge like Java or PHP, there's a lot one can do with freely-available mashup editors like  Yahoo! Pipes and Openkapow, along with open data sources like those tracked in programmableweb.com. 

Here at Yale, Yufind is using the Amazon, Google, xISBN, and Wikipedia APIs, plugged in mostly through PHP scripts. After reclamation with OCLC, we'll probably add the WorldCat Search API which should help display Yale's holdings alongside those held by peer institutions.  While APIs allow us to integrate a host of data sources into our web applications, some of the most important data sources are necessarily firewalled. For example, we might want to use circulation statistics at some point to support a recommendations engine (e.g., '90% of people who read this book have also read the following'). Because we have access to these data, and because we understand local user needs, librarians are well placed to integrate them into new discovery tools. And programming knowledge can help make happen a lot more quickly.

Report on Harvard Libraries

A high-level Harvard task force urges closer cooperation and a unified strategic plan among the university's 73 separate libraries (and with peer institutions). I posted a few notes on the CMS blog.

Report on the Faltering MARC Market: Call to Action? Defense of LC? (Both?)

I just posted some excerpts from the Study of the North American MARC Records Marketplace (along with a bit of commentary) to the CMS blog .

Stephen Abram's anti-OSS position paper

I posted some links about Abram's position paper (and mostly negative feedback) over at the CMS blog

Cartoon Worth a Thousand Words

I think this Jim Morin cartoon pretty much hits the nail on the head:

White House deploys Open-Source Drupal

Whitehouse.gov is now Drupal-powered. I commented on this (and Drupal use in libraries) over at the CMS blog.

Squeezing 1TB of data onto a fingernail-size chip

See article in computerworld.com about breakthrough at NCSU: "Engineers create fingernail-size chip that holds 1TB of data", and featured today on slashdot. 

U.S. Industrial Decline (as viewed from Germany)

A thoughtful and poignant (if also left-slanted) essay from the Berliner Umschau, translated by Watching America: "American De-Industrialization Continues Unabated."

This part in particular made me wince: "When word gradually spread that Detroit automobiles were of inferior quality, all three American car manufacturers responded with attempts to inoculate their customers with doses of chauvinism: Buy American! Dealerships were festooned with American flags and banners. This took on a life of its own with auto dealers competing with one another to have the biggest flag. When the foreign journalist mentioned earlier last returned to the United States, he reported seeing a gargantuan American flag flying over a dealership on a 150-foot flagpole. Instead of flying gigantic flags, no one apparently ever came up with the idea of building better cars."

(Note: glancing at the car section of the Consumer Reports Buying Guide for 2008, it's clear the U.S. still trails Japan and Germany on quality and reliability.)

Jung's Red Book to be Published after typed drafts found at Beinecke and Elsewhere

The New York Times Magazine 9/30/09 cover story, “ The Holy Grail of the Unconscious: What the Unearthing of Carl Jung's Red Book is Doing to the Jungs and the Jungians (and maybe your Dreams)", recounts how the “most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology” is now about to be published.

Jung's complete illustrated manuscript had been locked away in a safe deposit box for many years by his heirs. Recently, though, two incomplete and un-illustrated typed drafts of the Red Book were discovered, one at the home of Jung’s transcriptionist's daughter, and the other at Yale’s Beinecke Library "in an uncataloged box of papers belonging to a well-known German publisher."

In order to prevent selective, unauthorized quotation from the typed drafts, the family decided it was time, 100 years after Jung wrote it, to allow the original mansucript to be scanned and published .

A 1,300-year-old Japanese Hotel

Hōshi Ryokan, featured today on gizmag.com, is the world's oldest hotel and its oldest continuously-operating business, owned and operated by 46 generations of the same family over 1,291 years so far. According to gizmag, it was established by a Buddhist disciple at a hot spring in Komatsu, Japan, after its location was revealed to his master in a dream.

"Nine Weirdest Things at Yale" (YDN)

Yale Daily News article suggests "The Nine Weirdest Things at Yale", two of which are in the Library: the Voynich manuscript at the Beinecke, and the Greco-Roman-Egyptian Magical amulets in the Babylonian Collection.

"1959: The Year that Changed Everything"

Just finished reading Fred Kaplan's "1959: the Year Everything Changed", and while I'm not convinced  1959 qualifies as the singular hinge year of the 20th century, I'm not sure that matters (even to Kaplan), and it's a good book in any case.

He analyzes and weaves together a wide variety of events, e.g.: Castro seizing power in Cuba; Allen Ginsberg reading poetry to rapt audiences in New York; the Lunik 1 spacecraft breaking free of Earth's orbit; William Burroughs publishing "Naked Lunch"; John Howard Griffen publishing "Black Like Me"; Miles Davis recording "Kind of Blue"; John Coltrane, "Giant Steps"; Dave Brubeck, "Time Out"; Ornette Coleman, "The Shape of Jazz to Come"; Jack Kilby introducing the integrated circuit (the microchip); IBM selling the first 'modern' computer: the model 1401;  Malcolm X traveling to Mecca; the opening of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum;  Searl Pharmaceuticals submitting Enovid, a.k.a. the birth control pill, for FDA approval, etc., etc .

The common theme is a sense of liberation from traditional constraints (e.g., hackneyed art, pervasive racism, the 'tyranny of numbers', and an optimism (and dread) toward the emerging "new frontier" in politics, technology, and art.

"Emerging Technologies in Academic Libraries" (International Conference in Norway)

Per emtacl10 announcement: "The future success of academic libraries is dependent on in-depth understandings of the relevance of emerging technologies. Our focus must be on accessibility, interaction, intuitivity, sharing, user-driven content and other web 2.0 challenges. This is a conference for academic library workers and others with a general interest in emerging technologies and electronic information services."

Learning Languages on the Web

I'm grateful to dchud for pointing out to me these two outstanding open-access web sites: lang-8 and smart.fm . I'm particularly intrigued by the way lang-8 connects people around the world who are trying to improve their language skills. For example, it lets you keep a "journal" that native readers will review and correct for you (and you do the same for them), and might even help you make new friends along the way. You collect something like karma points for correcting other people's journal entries and doing other helpful things, which then elevates your site ranking. What I like about smart.fm are the language tutorials (along with toolkits for building your own tutorials) with digital flash cards, vocabulary quizes, example sentences, native speaker pronunciation, usage notes, and other features. I wonder if these kinds of sites will soon be putting the text book publishers out of business.

Nicholson Baker reviews Kindle 2

Nicholson Baker asks in this week's New Yorker, "Can the Kindle really improve on the book?" His answer, so far, seems to be "not yet." The Vizplex electronic paper is less legible than print, and DRM constraints are especially problematic: "Kindle books aren't transferable. You can't give them away or lend them or sell them. You can't print them. They are closed clumps of digital code that only one purchaser can own. A copy of a Kindle book dies with its possessor" (p. 27).

"Semantic Interoperability of Linked Data" (Conference)

Another potentially great conference, "Semantic Interoperability of Linked Data," is now open for registration. The program will "explore the conceptual and practical issues in breaking the constraints of data silos and connecting pieces of data, information, and knowledge. Metadata is a key to these processes supporting publishing and interlinking structured data on the Semantic Web." Takes place in Seoul, South Korea.

Code4Lib 2010

Code4Lib 2010 is Monday February 22nd through Thursday February 25th at the Renaissance Asheville Hotel in Asheville, NC (compare air fares). There's a conference planning Google Group and a wiki page for signing up as a volunteer. I volunteered to help with documentation and selecting a keynote speaker.

TouchTable geodata visualizer

My dad shared this link to a Wired Science demo of the very cool $59K Touchtable, a flat-panel, wide-format, high-resolution, touch-sensitive screen, combining satellite imagery with other data sets, navigable with iPhone-like finger movements. Danny Hillis and others at applied minds did the initial development work.

Fun with METS

See notes at CMS Web Log

The Case against Social OPACs

Jim Michalko had some interesting observations on the June 3rd OCLC user studies symposium. I posted a response on the CMS Web Log

Microformats Explained

John Allsopp has a nice article on microformats at the mixonline site. If you want to include microformats in your own web pages, you can embed elements in classes with values taken from the hCard standard, .e.g,. p class="country-name" USA /p (I'm leaving off the angle brackets here since they trigger HTML formatting and obscure the code).

To see your microformats or those embedded by others, download the Operator plugin in Firefox or Oomph in IE, restart browser, and you'll see them appearing on your screen, ready to be clicked and imported into various map applications, address books, calendars, whatever.

Here's a hCard fragment for geographic center of New Haven:

N 41° 31'
W 72° 92'

Cf. geo-cheatsheet for example syntax and Wolfram Alpha (for coordinates)

Here's a non-functional hCalendar fragment for the upcoming NELINET course (based on another cheatsheet):

Intro to METS to be held on July 7 from 9:30am until to 3:30pm EST in Southborough, MA

Google Public Data

This is cool (from Information Today via ILS News): "go to Google.com and type in 'unemployment rate' or 'population' followed by a U.S. state or county; you will see the most recent estimates and then get an interactive chart that lets you add and remove data for different geographical areas. Users can customize the graphs and share them with others."

Return of LSCH in RDF SKOS

See post in CMS blog.

"Wolfram Alpha" Computational Knowledge Engine

Stephen Wolfram presented his "computational knowledge engine" at Harvard's Berkman Center. You can find the video on YouTube. Over at the code4lib discussion list, some are debating if it threatens research libraries or even Google. Hard to tell until it gets switched on later this month.

This topic was just slashdotted (5/5/09)

The Research Library in the Age of Google

SRA cited a nice article by Anthony Grafton, "Apocalypse in the Stacks?" in the journal Daedalus . I posted a few excerpts to the CMS blog.

World Digital Library goes Live

The World Digital Library (WDL) was formally released yesterday. Yale University is a founding partner and Dan Chudnov (formerly at Yale; now at LC) helped develop it. You can find brief descriptions in the Chronicle of Higher Education and New York Times and more details on the site itself. It was also discussed on Slashdot. According to the Mission Statement, the WDL "makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world." Interactive maps and timelines (along with more traditional textual metadata) provide user-friendly access to the collection. (Speaking of timelines, I keep hoping we'll find a way to deploy this very cool SIMILE widget at Yale.) According to the Yale Bulletin, Yale has contributed 22 pencil drawings of the 1839 Amistad captives, an 1810 map of North America by William Clark, an Arabic calligraphy primer, and Magellan's journal from his 1522 circumnavigation of the globe. More items will be added over time.

OCLC announces new Cloud-based ILS

I posted some thoughts about the new OCLC ILS here.

Yale Budget Woes

Deputy Provost Charles Long, quoted in the Yale Daily News: "Every month, [Chief Investment Officer] David Swensen has to write a check for $100 million to the University. Imagine you're Swensen. What're you going to sell?"

Library 2.0 Symposium: Highlights

I wrote up some of my notes in the CMS blog.

Library 2.0 Symposium (Yale Law School)

I'm looking forward to the Yale Law School's Library 2.0 Symposium this weekend. According to the home page, "This symposium will lay out a vision for the future of the library and digital collections; the ethical implications of Library 2.0, including data retention and patron privacy; intellectual property rights in user-generated and traditional digital library content; and the challenges of digitizing library collections."

This Week at Yale: Clifford Lynch and Aaron Swartz

Clifford Lynch and Aaron Swartz visited Yale this week. I had an opportunity to speak with both of them, and I've posted my notes to the CMS blog (where I seem to be posting everything these days).

Brewster Kahle interviewed in the Economist

See article link in CMS blog.

Notes from Code4Lib 2009

I've posted notes from the Code4Lib 2009 conference on the classes*v2 server.

Henry Hey is Awesome

My brother sent out a link to Henry Hey's amazing musical accompaniment to a speech by George W. Bush. And there's another one I found that accompanies some quotations from McCain and Palin.

It turns out Hey has a jazz trio that performs in New York and is signed with Nineteen-Eight Records.

Reconsidering the Library Web Portal

Steven J. Bell has a thought-provoking piece in the Feb. 17th issue of Inside Higher Ed : "The Library Web Site of the Future". Bell's jumping-off point is an August 2008 Ithika Group report, "Studies of Key Stakeholders in the Digital Transformation of Higher Education, which showed, he writes, that "faculty no longer perceived the library as an important portal to scholarly information."

Another indicator of this trend is a 2008 Simon Inger Consulting report on "How Readers Navigate to Scholarly Content" which showed that the two preferred starting points for researchers are specialist databases and general Web search engines. Library web portals ranked below email journal alerts and publisher Web sites.

Despite the best efforts and intentions of librarians, researchers will "invent their own backdoor routes to the content" that they need, and librarians need to meet them where they are rather than to to force them to come through official channels. Rather than spending time and money tweaking the resource portal, he recommends highlighting the services we provide, e.g., "the community activities that anchor the library's place as the social, cultural and intellectual center of campus." He sees a lot of value in tools like LibGuides, since they embed appropriate resources immediately at the point of need, rather than expecting people to navigate the vast expanse of library content.

"From Linking to Thinking"

I attended the OCLC Symposium at ALA Midwinter 2009: "From Linking to Thinking: How We'll Live When Information Surrounds Us". The panelists were David Weinberger (Harvard Berkman Center fellow, author of Everything is Miscellaneous, etc.) and Nova Spivack (founder of Radar Networks, twine.com, and a leading figure in Semantic Web development, etc.). The moderator was OCLC's Roy Tennant (list owner of Web4Lib and XML4lib, columnist for Library Journal, editor of Current Cites newsletter, etc.).

My notes are a bit patchy, but I was able to fill in some gaps thanks to a "pre-conference conversation" transcript.

Evolution of the Web

• Transition from a Web 1.0 publishing medium to a Web 2.0 communication medium (Spivack); or: Web was primarily a communications medium from the moment it escaped Tim Berners-Lee's lab (Weinberger)
• Transition from directory structure (nodes arranged hierarchically) to more of a relational database structure.
  
• Web of humans morphing into Web of machines
  
• "Web 3.0" involves Web-based operating systems and "Web 4.0" is the "Intelligent Web" (Spivack)
• Emergence of "augmented reality", for example LED output and geo-aware cameras embedded in contact lenses that providing schematic overlays and commentary for objects in one's field of vision (Spivack). Similar to "Semantic Earth" idea (Weinberger).
• Emergence of the "Internet of Things" including not just Web sites and abstract concepts but physical objects giving and receiving information on the network ; the Web is "becoming the nervous system of the planet" ... "This is truly as if our species is evolving to a new level of collective intelligence." (Spivack); Weinberg is "more excited about the rise in human connectedness ... the mere fact that more and more humans are able to touch one another, in conversation and through their works, this is what's truly transformative."
  

Libraries and the Web

• The library as a "giant brain" firing in slow motion. Digitizing the contents will simply make it fire more quickly (Spivack)
  
• Library of the future will have "everything" digitized and available on-line, customized interface for individual user or group, intelligent assistance, and machine ability to detect and adapt to changing user needs (Spivack)
• As to whether we're losing our ability to negotiate long-form arguments (e.g., thinking in book-length format versus Web snippets), and whether this contradicts the idea that the Web is making us smarter. Perhaps there's some truth to it, but it's a fair trade-off. (He compared Plato's warning in the Phaedrus about relying on books rather than oral instruction and memorization.) We have to get away from the notion that intelligence is something specific to the individual brain, the important thing now is to be part of an "intelligent network". (Weinberger)
• Librarians should "scan the books already." Also we should do something about the fragmentation of literature in different journal aggregator databases. There should be a single integrated interface to all periodical literature owned or licensed by the library, as opposed to our users having to check EBSCO, JSTOR, WilsonWeb, etc., figure out which journal titles are indexed by which of these aggregators, and how to use their unique interfaces and search parameters. Also, that we should be more political in promoting open access (Weinberger)

(To be posted on CMS SharePoint site)

Conference on "Semantic Interoperability of Linked Data"

See posting on CMS Web log.

"A Unified Discovery Interface"

I posted something on the CMS blog about the new "Summon" service from Serial Solutions, the Andrew Nagy connection, and how it all relates to what David Weinberger said at the ALA 2009 OCLC Symposium.

Rochkind on the "State of the Future of Cataloging"

Rochkind is a fan of metadata and professional cataloging, but he worries about the future and for good reason. I've posted a summary of his recent comments on the CMS blog

Goal: VuFind via Ubuntu via VirtualBox on Mac

Yesterday I finally was able to get Sun's VirtualBox configured properly on my MacBook, and then install Ubuntu 8.10 as a guest O.S. My longer-term goal was to install VuFind using these installation instructions, but I got tripped up after the Oracle InstantClient download when I tried to execute "sudo pecl install oci8" and received the error message "Oracle client libraries not found". Steve Thomas reported a similar problem 5/27/08 on the vufind-gen discussion list. Wally Grotophorst's instructions may suggest a workaround, but at the moment I'm not even able to pull up my Apache home page..

Something to remember about issuing shell commands as root in Ubuntu: start with sudo -i, enter password; then, until otherwise instructed, shell will interpret all commands as coming from superuser. Prefacing individual commands with "sudo" doesn't work. Neither does "su".

Brad Wheeler on HathiTrust and the Importance of Librarian + Technologist Collaboration

Stefan K. cited a recent Chronicle.com letter to the editor by Pat Steele and Brad Wheeler of Indiana University, who write that the traditional rift between librarians and technologists is damaging both sides. They mention the HathiTrust shared digital repository as an example of successful collaboration between these two groups and across multiple institutions.

Wheeler gives a more detailed description of HathiTrust in his Jan. 6 interview with Library Journal Academic Newswire. For example, given the gargantuan size of the database, index "shards", metadata facets, and relevance-ranking algorithms can optimize system response time and enhance findability.

He mentioned that two of the HathiTrust partners, Michigan and Indiana, had already "benefitted tremendously from our past cooperation in the Sakai Project for open source courseware management software. Learning to work together across institutions to deliver production services is an important capability for the foreseeable future."

This seems like a point worth remembering as we track our involvement in the VuFind project.

2008 OSS timeline

LWN published its 11th annual timeline of significant OSS events, interspersed with quotations from key players. Here's one I liked from incoming Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst: "Open source is a way to focus on the customer, letting us grow, succeed, and change the technology landscape...all while doing something that is fundamentally good. Fighting for open standards and open formats. These things will change society. I'm thrilled to be here. "