ResourceShelf

Proceedings of the 155th ARL Membership Meeting (Association of Research Libraries)

resourceshelf — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 03:20:53 +0000

The complete list of papers/presentations available can be found here. The meeting took place October October 14–15, 2009 in Washington, DC. Audio of the presentations is also available.

Here are the Titles of the Sessions (Each Session Includes Presentations by One or More Presenters):

+ New Models for Federal Depository Library Collections: Report on Findings from a Study Commissioned by ARL and COSLA

+ Potential Library Roles for Supporting Current and Future Public Access Initiatives

+ The Science, Technology, Innovation Agenda of the Obama Administration

+ Why Are Special Collections so Important? Exploring the Value Proposition of Special Collections

+ Building on Our Strengths: Opportunities for Special Collections in the Digital Age

+ The Federal Depository Library Program: A Focus on Strategies for Regional FDLs and Digitization Sponsored by the Public Policies Affecting Research Libraries Steering Committee

+ Options for Research Library Support of Small Publisher Operations

+ ARL Survey on E-Science and Data Support: Initial Findings

Who Was There? (PDF)

Source: ARL
Hat Tips: OATP (Open Access Tracking Project) and Peter Scott

Google Books Settlement 2.0: Evaluating Competition

resourceshelf — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 02:59:09 +0000

Its been a week since Settlement 2.0 was released. We have a comprehensive press review along with many related documents from the past week here.

Until the next major event and our next press review, we will continue to post Settlement 2.0 news and analysis with a focus on stories, analysis, and opinion that has a library angle to it.

We begin with this analysis of competition by Fred von Lohmann at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It includes an entire section dealing with institutional subscriptions titled, “Monopoly Pricing of the Institutional Subscription Database?”

One of the commercial services that Google is authorized to provide under the proposed settlement is the “Institutional Subscription Database” (aka “ISD”), which will provide “all-you-can-eat” access to the corpus of scanned books. The chief customers for the ISD are likely to be universities (the same folks who are providing Google with the books to be scanned), for whom instant digital access to every word in every book in Google’s collection is likely to be very compelling.

The big question is whether, over time, the ISD will become the one database that no university can do without, and the one database with no market substitute (again, because Google will be the only company who can provide a comprehensive corpus without fear of copyright liability, for the reasons explained above). This, of course, is a recipe for monopolistic price gouging, as a group of academic authors led by Prof. Pam Samuelson have pointed out. Over time, universities could face spiraling prices as Google and the Registry conspire to maximize their revenues on the ISD product.

Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation

Bing Posts “Behind Bing” Tour

resourceshelf — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:10:47 +0000

Take a multimedia tour of 14 features that Bing offers up. Each tour stop includes a video overview, some “behind the feature” comments (feel free to skip), and direct links to that specific feature. A useful way to get up to speed on a few features that are unique to Bing. Yes, it’s basically a commercial but with that understood it can be useful, especially for those who teach web search skills and want to show users that each engine (B,G,Y) offers not only a unique database but also a variety of features.

The 14 “Tour Stops” are:

+ Real-Time Search

+ Weather/Event Results

+ Bing Local

+ Enhanced Results

+ Videos

+ Enhanced Hover

+ Bing for Mobile

+ Bing Travel

+ Bing Health

+ Bing Shopping

+ Visual Search

+ Reference

+ Wolfram|Alpha

+ Search Sharing

By the way, are most favorite Bing feature is not listed. Check out the incredible “bird’s eye” imagery that Bing provides for many locations around the world. Here’s an example. The Coliseum in Rome. On the left side of the image look for a + (plus sign). Click it and zoom-in. Wow!

P2P Comes to the Aid of Audiovisual Search

resourceshelf — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 23:19:35 +0000

From the Article:

Current methods of searching audiovisual content can be a hit-and-miss affair. Manually tagging online media content is time consuming, and costly. But new ‘query by example’ methods, built on peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures, could provide the way forward for such data-intensive content searches, say European researchers.

A team of researchers have turned to peer-to-peer (P2P) technology, in which data is distributed and shared directly between computers, to power potent yet data intensive audiovisual search technology. The technique, known as query by example, uses content, rather than text, to search for similar content, providing more accurate search results and reducing or even eliminating the need for pictures, videos and audio recordings to be laboriously annotated manually. However, effectively implementing content-based search on a large scale requires a fundamentally different approach to the text-based search technology running on the centralised systems of the likes of Google, Yahoo and MSN.

“Because we’re dealing with images, video and audio, content-based search is very data intensive. Comparing two images is not a problem, but comparing hundreds of thousands of images is not practical using a centralised system,” says Yosi Mass, an expert on audiovisual search technology at IBM Research in Haifa, Israel. “A P2P architecture offers a scalable solution by distributing the data across different peers in a network and ensuring there is no central point of failure.”

Access the Complete Article

Source: ICT Results

Library of Congress Updates their Flickr Photochrom Collection

resourceshelf — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 22:46:43 +0000

From an e-Mail Announcement:

The “Photochrom Travel View” set in Flickr now features more than 750 prints, including scenes in Canada, Wales, Belgium, and (most recently) The Netherlands photographed at the turn of the twentieth century. The Belgian scenes, in particular, feature people at work and recreation, in addition to the striking landscapes and landmark buildings characteristic of the photochroms in general.

Happy Tagging!

Btw, the complete Photocrom Prints collection, more than 6,500 images, is accessible here.

What’s a Photocrom?

Published primarily from the 1890s to 1910s, these prints were created by the Photoglob Company in Zürich, Switzerland, and the Detroit Publishing Company in Michigan. The richly colored images look like photographs but are actually ink-based photolithographs, usually 6.5 x 9 inches.

Source: Library of Congress

Crossing the digital divide to Grandma’s house

ResourceShelf — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 22:46:33 +0000

Crossing the digital divide to Grandma’s house

How do you get to grandma’s house in the digital age?

It’s like asking five New Yorkers how to get to Brooklyn: Everyone’s got a different answer and no one’s necessarily wrong.

Say you live in St. Petersburg and grandma lives in Palm Beach. Mapquest would send you southeast from Tampa. The trip would be 200 miles and take three hours and 27 minutes.

Google, however, would send you northeast before sending you southeast. That trip would be 232 miles and take three hours and 50 minutes.

Mapquest sends you through Brandon on SR 60 — no fun if it’s rush hour — and then through Bartow and on to Yeehaw Junction to Florida’s Turnpike. Google sends you along Interstate 4 near Orlando — always a potential traffic nightmare — through Kissimmee and then to Florida’s Turnpike.

How can there be so many ways to get from Point A to Point B?

It’s all about the algorithms.

Source: St. Petersburg Times

Note: Shirl Kennedy, ResourceShelf senior editor, is a news researcher for the St. Petersburg Times.

Collection Development: Want a Non-Stop Stream of Recently Digitized eBooks to Choose From? Check This Out!

resourceshelf — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:58:37 +0000

A Never Ending “Virtual Stream” of Digitized Text
by Gary Price, Senior Editior

When Chris Sherman and I were writing and then giving book talks and presentations about The Invisible Web, we said John Mark Ockerbloom’s Online Books Page was an essential resource for anyone interested in digitized, full text books. Now referred by most as eBooks. More than eight years later I feel the same way about this awesome and well organized collection.

Where do you begin with a site so full of content? For me, that’s easy. Monitoring the latest additions to the catalog/page. I am always blown away by the amount of new listings (when does Ockerbloom sleep?) and the number of organizations digitizing books. If you think it’s only Google digitizing books (of course they are a major player) but not they’re far from the only one doing this type of work. Just look for yourself. The page even has an RSS feed.

So, the Online Books Page is not only a “must have” searchable directory of ebooks but it can also be a great collection development resource to find and add digitized content to your local collection/OPAC.

But wait, we’ve got more.

The Online Books Page new listings only includes some of the digitized text output from the Internet Archive (IA).

If you want to be able to review (at your leisure) all of the new digitized content text content that the IA produces, it’s possible by subscribing to this RSS feed. Even if you’re not going to review the titles, just let it run for a few days to see the AMOUNT of text material that’s digitized in variety of formats. It’s an understatement to say that the scanners at the IA are cranking it out on all cylinders. So, collection development types, subscribe to both RSS feeds and have a large virtual bookshelf to choose from each day. If you don’t do the collection development thing both feeds are useful to illustrate the amount of material being digitized each day, week, month.

UPDATE: Not an RSS user? No problem. Just visit this Internet Archive page and refresh it a few times a day. The most recent addition is at the top.

IMLS Funds Research on 3D Scanner Technology to Save Endangered Recordings

resourceshelf — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:27:16 +0000

From the Announcement:

The Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) will advance technology that can recover and digitally re-master rare early sound recordings made on wax cylinders – including experimental recordings created in the 1880’s by Alexander Graham Bell — even when the original cylinder is cracked or broken. The research project, which includes development of a mobile 2D scanning device, builds on previous successes of the “3D/PRISM” or “IRENE-3D” project, which significantly impacted research and practice in the area of early audio recordings preservation.

The current IRENE projects are funded in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) under the National Leadership Grant program. Other project partners include the Library of Congress, The Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology, The University of Chicago’s South Asia Library, The Berlin Phonogramm Archive, The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, the Edison National Historic Site, and the University of Applied Science, Fribourg, Switzerland.

Source: Institute of Museum and Library Services

Congrats and Kudos to ALA’s Washington Office Team on the New Look of their District Dispatch Blog

resourceshelf — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:57:47 +0000

The blog has a new look that’s very easy on the eyes. You’ll also find links to the District Dispatch RSS and Twitter feeds. If the intersection of the library world with the world of U.S. politics is of interest, District Dispatch (D) is essential reading. So, a ResourceShelf tip of the cap to Jacob Roberts and the rest of the staff at ALA’s office in Washington DC.

Btw, the new look is great but we do hope the “District Dispatch” powers that be bring back the mobile-friendly version of District Dispatch that we posted about last month. We just checked with a mobile browser and we are seeing the “regular” version of DD.

Source: DD

Another New Digitization Project from NARA and Footnote: The Native American Collection

resourceshelf — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:44:48 +0000

From the Announcement:

Working together with the National Archives and Allen County Library, Footnote.com has created a unique collection that will help people discover new details about Native American history.

The Footnote Interactive Native American Collection features original historical documents including:

+ Ratified Indian Treaties – dating back to 1722

+ Indian Census Rolls – featuring personal information including age, place of residence and degree of Indian blood

+ The Guion Miller Roll – perhaps the most important source of Cherokee genealogical research

+ Dawes Packets – containing original applications for tribal enrollments

+ And other documents relating to the Five Civilized Tribes

Footnote’s Native American microsite creates an interactive environment where members can search, annotate and add comments to the original documents. Additionally, visitors can view pages for many of the Native American tribes that include historical events on a timeline and map, a photo gallery, stories and comments added by the community.

Source: Footnote

Buying Your Friends and Followers on Social Networks

resourceshelf — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:57:28 +0000

From the Article:

Facebook has threatened legal action against a service that sells friends on the social networking site.

It said it would take the action against marketing firm USocial unless it stopped violating Facebook’s rights.

[Snip]

Customers of USocial use it to boost follower and friend numbers on social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

On micro-blogging site Twitter, followers can be bought in blocks starting at £53 for 1,000. The biggest block USocial is selling is 100,000 people.

Access the Complete Article

Source: BBC

Twitter Tunes: The Album, Ready for Download (Free)

resourceshelf — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:35:27 +0000

From the Article:

The tunes may be a little avant-garde for most tastes. They’re unlikely to give Britney Spears and Beyoncé a run for their money, but are impressive achievements all the same. Musical twitterers have found a way to condense entire compositions to fit in single, 140-character tweets.

The trend started earlier this year when Dan Stowell, a composer and computer scientist at Queen Mary, University of London, encoded the sound of waves crashing on the shore using the programming language SuperCollider and then tweeted the results.

Other users of the micro-blogging site responded by devising and posting their own compositions. Now a free to download, best-of album of 22 Twitter tunes has been released, entitled sc140.
Much More in the Complete Article

Access the Album

Source: New Scientist

Judge Gives Preliminary Approval to Google Deal, Sets Feb. 18 for Final Hearing

resourceshelf — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 06:31:04 +0000

From the Article:

Judge Denny Chin has given his preliminary approval to the Google Book Search settlement agreement and established a timeline to move the agreement toward a final resolution. A final settlement/fairness hearing has been set for February 18 at which Judge Chin will hear arguments to determine whether the agreement is “fair, reasonable, adequate;” consider whether to certify the class for purposes of the settlement; and to make a determination whether to approve the agreement.

Prior to the hearing, the judge has ordered that supplemental notices about the amended agreement be sent beginning December 14, and he set a January 28 deadline for objections to be filed with the court.

[Snip]

As part of the amended settlement, companies from outside of the U.S. were to be added as plaintiffs. The order notes that new plaintiffs include Harlequin, Melbourne University Publishing Ltd., and The Text Publishing Company.

Source: Publisher’s Weekly

Citizen Media Law Project Launches Legal Assistance Network for Online Journalists

ResourceShelf — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:06:09 +0000

Citizen Media Law Project Launches Legal Assistance Network for Online Journalists
Source: Citizen Media Law Project

We are delighted to announce (PDF) the public launch of the Berkman Center’s Online Media Legal Network (OMLN), a new pro bono (i.e., free!) initiative that connects lawyers and law school clinics from across the country with online journalists and digital media creators who need legal help. Lawyers participating in OMLN will provide qualifying online publishers with pro bono and reduced fee legal assistance on a broad range of legal issues, including business formation and governance, copyright licensing and fair use, employment and freelancer agreements, access to government information, pre-publication review of content, and representation in litigation.

Source: Citizen Media Law Project (Berkman Center for Internet & Society)

Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year Announced

resourceshelf — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:34:49 +0000

This has been “Word of the Year” week. First, The New Oxford American Dictionary 2009 “Word of the Year” was announced. The winning word? Unfriend. Example: Steve unfriended Julie on Facebook. Our post also includes other words that Oxford University Press was considering.

Today, Merriam-Webster released their 2009 Word of the Year list. And the winner is…admonish (verb): to express warning or disapproval to especially in a gentle, earnest, or solicitous manner.

Here’s the Rest of the Top 10:
2. emaciated
3. empathy
4. furlough
5. inaugurate
6. nugatory
7. pandemic
8. philanderer
9. repose
10. rogue

Source: Merriam-Webster
Hat Tip: L.S.

HathiTrust Offers Full-Text Search of Millions of Digitized Books and Journals

resourceshelf — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:12:04 +0000

From the Announcement:

A year after its launch by 25 leading U.S. research libraries, HathiTrust Digital Library announces a service that will transform how researchers use the more than 1.6 billion pages (4.6 million volumes) in its collections.

The breakthrough allows for full-text searching capabilities across the entire library. Researchers can now search public domain and in-copyright works by keyword or phrase.

Based on open source Solr/Lucene technology, the service expands on an experimental search of public domain volumes introduced in November 2008. Full-text search will continue to be supported across the repository as it grows at a rate of hundreds of thousands of volumes every month.

“The HathiTrust partners are pleased to offer a search service that helps mine this growing body of authoritative library materials,” said John Wilkin, HathiTrust executive director and associate university librarian at the University of Michigan. “HathiTrust continues to distinguish itself with its reliability and with its efforts to broaden the availability of digitized library collections in the flow of scholarly discourse. We see this valuable discovery service as one in a series of major steps HathiTrust is taking to shed light on this vast body of material.”

In combination with the HathiTrust Digital Library’s carefully curated bibliographic data, the new functionality allows researchers to more efficiently locate items relevant to their research. It also lays the foundation for future services such as full-text search with faceted browsing, advanced search, “more like this” options, and tools that can be used in computational research.

The effort to provide full-text searching capabilities across the repository has yielded valuable benchmarking data, methods, and code to the broader large-scale search community, said Wilkin.

The HathiTrust partners are committed to developing the repository and its services to meet the long-term needs of their academic communities, and offer a unique resource on the Web for scholarship and research.

Source: HathiTrust / University of Michigan

Building an Online Bulwark to Fend Off Identity Fraud

ResourceShelf — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:09:32 +0000

Building an Online Bulwark to Fend Off Identity Fraud

Identity fraud has been on the rise, as criminal cunning may be mixing with desperation during the downturn. Schemes seem to multiply daily, as scammers often half a world away dream up new ways to steal data to enrich themselves. According to Javelin Strategy and Research, 9.9 million Americans were victims of identity theft in 2008, up from 8.1 million in 2007.

With all kinds of private information residing in all kinds of places, vigilance can be difficult. Using caution when surfing the Internet and keeping antivirus software up to date are vital steps, experts say, but they are not enough. And most tools for fighting identity fraud — credit-monitoring services, fraud alerts and credit freezes — are reactive, not proactive, and they primarily address abuse of financial accounts, not other types of identity fraud.

But a new breed of products is tackling the trickier matter of preventing identity theft. New approaches include scouring the Internet in search of signs that criminals have your information, so you can move to block them. Others focus on keeping your data away from criminals in the first place, locking it down while you bank, shop or do other personal tasks online. Here are some ways to keep your information yours.

Source: New York Times

ALA Submits Testimony to Congress on Libraries Role in Improving Literacy Skills of Children and Young Adults

resourceshelf — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:12:49 +0000

From the Release:

Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the American Library Association’s (ALA) Washington Office, today filed testimony for the official record of the House Committee on Education and Labor’s Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education’s hearing, “Improving Literacy Skills of Children and Young Adults.”

The comments highlighted the contributions of librarians and library programs in both public and school libraries in improving the literacy skills of children and young adults.

“Public librarians have embraced their responsibility to be the first literacy coach for parents and caregivers of all children, especially children in low-income families,” Sheketoff states in her comments. “Some services provided to these families include bookmobile and storytelling mobiles, story-time kits and early literacy classes for child-care providers, Head Start staff and parents.”

Sheketoff’s testimony underscored the impact of school libraries in both traditional and technology literacy through the role of school librarians who are the central teachers who know the school’s curriculum and effective techniques necessary to cross disciplines.

Access the Complete Testimony (3 pages; PDF)

Source: American Library Association

Some Courts Raise Bar on Reading Employee Email

ResourceShelf — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:34:59 +0000

Some Courts Raise Bar on Reading Employee Email

Big Brother is watching. That is the message corporations routinely send their employees about using email.

But recent cases have shown that employees sometimes have more privacy rights than they might expect when it comes to the corporate email server. Legal experts say that courts in some instances are showing more consideration for employees who feel their employer has violated their privacy electronically.

Driving the change in how these cases are treated is a growing national concern about privacy issues in the age of the Internet, where acquiring someone else’s personal and financial information is easier than ever.

Source: Wall Street Journal

New Research from Jim Jansen: Search engines are source of learning

resourceshelf — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:39:06 +0000

From a Summary:

Search engine use is not just part of our daily routines; it is also becoming part of our learning process, according to Penn State researchers.

The researchers sought to discover the cognitive processes underlying searching. They examined the search habits of 72 participants while conducting a total of 426 searching tasks. They found that search engines are primarily used for fact checking users’ own internal knowledge, meaning that they are part of the learning process rather than simply a source for information. They also found that people’s learning styles can affect how they use search engines.

“Our results suggest the view of Web searchers having simple information needs may be incorrect,” said Jim Jansen, associate professor of information sciences and technology. “Instead, we discovered that users applied simple searching expressions to support their higher-level information needs.”

Jansen said the results of this study provide useful information about how search engine use has evolved over the past decade and clues about how to design better search engines to address users’ learning needs in the future. He and Brian Smith, associate professor information sciences and technology and Danielle Booth, former Penn State student, published their findings in the November issue of Information Processing and Management.

“If we can incorporate cognitive, affective and situational aspects of a person, there is the potential to really move search performance forward,” Jansen said. “At its core, we are getting to the motivational elements of search.”

Source: Penn State Live
Hat Tip: P.W.