Professional Reading Shelf
Public Libraries–Canada
Public Libraries–United States
Source: Counting Opinions Ltd.
Libraries411.com: Maps “Mashup” Combines Public Library Location Info And More with Maps from Yahoo and Google
Yes, it’s a mashup/public library locator from Counting Opinions (SQUIRE) Ltd. This service combines location info (and more) about more than 20,000 public libraries in the US and Canada and then merges the data on to maps from either Google or Yahoo. Search by name, Zip Code or Postal Code. Maps contain location markers. Click on the marker to get precise location info, web url and in some cases hours and library size. Narrow results to central libraries, branch libraries, and/or bookmobiles. Results pages contain no advertising. To switch between Google Maps and Yahoo Maps look for the link near the bottom of the right column. Libraries411.com went live in December.
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Digital Libraries
Source: D-Lib
The January 2006 Issue of D-Lib Magazine is Now Available Online
Articles include:
+ Folksonomies: Tidying Up Tags?
+ UKWAC: Building the UK’s First Public Web Archive
+ Automated Capture of Thumbnails and Thumbshots for Use by Metadata Aggregation Services
+ The Digital Library for Earth System Education Provides Individualized Reports for Teachers on the Effectiveness of Educational Resources in Their Own Classrooms
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E-books
Source: Guardian Unlimited
E-read all about it
“The word, written and spoken, remains at the heart of our civilisation. There is every reason to want to see the printed word enhanced by something more in tune with current information technology, but until the geeky entrepreneurs of MIT, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and the rest can come up with something that looks like a book, feels like a book and behaves like a book, those who handle such items every day, and marvel over the magical integration of print, paper and binding, will probably continue to read and enjoy books much as Caxton and Gutenberg did.”
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Academic Libraries
Source: California Digital Library
New Report: Shared Print: The Patron Perspective
“Findings from a round of focus groups conducted at UCSD in November 2005 to identify any potential barriers to adoption of a shared print collection by faculty and graduate students.” PDF.
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eGovernment–Wikis
Semantic Web
Source: Electronic Government (Wagner, Cheung, Rachael, Bottcher)
Building Semantic Webs for e-government with Wiki technology (PDF; 963 KB)
“E-government webs are among the largest webs in existence, based on the size, number of users and number of information providers. Thus, creating a Semantic Web infrastructure to meaningfully organise e-government webs is highly desirable. At the same time, the complexity of the existing e-government implementations also challenges the feasibility of Semantic Web creation. We therefore propose the design of a two-layer semantic Wiki web, which consists of a content Wiki, largely identical to the traditional web and a semantic layer, also maintained within the Wiki, that describes semantic relationships. This architectural design promises several advantages that enable incremental growth, collaborative development by a large community of non-technical users and the ability to continually grow the content layer without the immediate overhead of parallel maintenance of the semantic layer. This paper explains current challenges to the development of a Semantic Web, identifies Wiki advantages, illustrates a potential solution and summarises major directions for further research.”
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Newspapers–Australia–Databases
Source: National Library of Australia
More of The Argus Online
An online index to The Argus newspaper for the decade 1870-1879 has been published on the Library website. The Argus, the major Australian metropolitan daily of its time, was published in Melbourne from 1846 to 1957. It is the primary resource for data on 19th century Australia, widely recognised as the general Australian newspaper of record for the era. The 1870-1879 index is part of La Trobe University’s Argus Index Project and the first available in this form. However, others will go online as they are completed. The entire Ned Kelly story is contained in this index.”

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