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)