Library 2.0

Tired of Twitter?

Are you tired of reading banal BS on Twitter?

Or maybe, just maybe, does it scare you that so many people Twitter the most personal things?

Well it scares Tycho too. And today's Penny Arcade tackles the topic of Twittering when it goes a little too far.

Warning: Language is not for the easily offended. Regardless, it's still hilarious.

Quiet revolution

Quiet revolution: Simon Midgley says By embracing the interactive, user-generated world of web 2.0, libraries can ensure they keep pace with bold new ways of learning, the days when libaries could sit back and wait for students to arrive are long gone. They are having to take a far more active, professional approach to marketing their services.

Can Social Bookmarking Improve Web Search?

From the abstract of Can Social Bookmarking Improve Web Search?:

Social bookmarking is a recent phenomenon which has the potential to give us a great deal of data about pages on the web. One major question is whether that data can be used to augment systems like web search. To answer this question, over the past year we have gathered what we believe to be the largest dataset from a social bookmarking site yet analyzed by academic researchers. Our dataset represents about forty million bookmarks from the social bookmarking site del.icio.us. We contribute a characterization of posts to del.icio.us: how many bookmarks exist (about 115 million), how fast is it growing, and how active are the URLs being posted about (quite active). We also contribute a characterization of tags used by bookmarkers. We found that certain tags tend to gravitate towards certain domains, and vice versa. We also found that tags occur in over 50 percent of the pages that they annotate, and in only 20 percent of cases do they not occur in the page text, backlink page text, or forward link page text of the pages they annotate. We conclude that social bookmarking can provide search data not currently provided by other sources, though it may currently lack the size and distribution of tags necessary to make a significant impact.

Link stolen from Lorcan Dempsey's weblog.

BookLamp: Finding Books Can Be Like Finding Music

BookLamp offers an interesting and (ahem) novel idea when it comes to finding books.

Those familiar with Pandora know that it works by analyzing a musician or song that you like and making choices for new songs based on the artist, style, beat, and other musical elements. BookLamp seeks to do that, but with books. Through the analysis of things like writing style, word use, and the like, BookLamp tries to make recommendations for further based on similarities between the book you selected and other books within its database.

A video on their site explains everything in greater detail.

They've only got a few items in the database, but they're looking to grow... and hopefully have their idea purchased by Google.

Assessing social technologies in libraries

Yes I "borrowed" the title of the post from Meredith Farkas, but I thought I'd post her post here to get a broader response. How is your library assessing social technologies in the library? The comments have some good thoughts, but what are others doing?

Website down for just you?

From Downloadsquad:

Ever wonder if the website is really down or if its just your computer? We've all had it happen when we need to know if maybe its really just that our computer has decided to @#$ up at the worst possible moment. Well know there's a new website to check out that will tell you...if the website is really down or if it's just you. Could prove really useful when everything else works except that one site that the patron standing in front of you needs.

The Largest Free Law Library

Fastcase recently launched what it claims to be the largest free law library. Granted, that library is online, but that's nothing to take away from the fact that it boasts a collection of 1.8 million pages of federal cases, all in the public domain. The collection also contains all US Appeals Courts decisions dating back to 1950.

The free part involves signing up for a 24 hour subscription or paying US$95 for a one month access.

More from Legal Technology.

Building 21st century librarians AND libraries

Meredith Farkas:

So, I think the problem is so much bigger than library schools still teaching students that this tech stuff is optional (which is not to say that isn’t a huge problem too). It’s also the way organizations are structured. So many libraries have a 1.0 org chart for a 2.0 world. They’re not structured to support public services technologies like blogs, wikis, etc. They’re not set up to allow for the sort of experimentation and agile decision-making that is required to meet the changing needs and wants of our users. So I don’t know that in an environment like that, hiring an emerging technologies librarian or a 2.0 librarian or whatever is the answer. You’re just putting a band-aid on a problem that goes to the heart of how your organization is structured and how decisions are made.

The two ways of Web 2.0

Over on Lorcan Dempsey's weblog he has A Neat Post on twopointoh stuff:

When we discuss Web 2.0, there is a temptation to think about blogs and wikis, RSS and a Facebook application, and to stop there. There is also some useful thinking about how to expose web services or data in ways that they can be remixed into other applications. However, Web 2.0 is also about concentration, concentration of data, of users and of communications. We need also to think about how libraries reconfigure services in an environment of network level gravitational hubs, driven by network effects. This will involve greater concentration of library resources in various ways, and also - probably? - greater reliance on other web presences to deliver their services.

Library 2.0 Community on Ning - 1 year old!

The Library 2.0 community on Ning is now one year old. You can find it at http://library20.ning.com/. There are now over 2700 members. I am amazed at its growth. I started it as a place to play with the new technology, never expecting it to take on a life of its own. It is now self sustaining with little work needed from me as its creator. As Frankenstein said," It's alive!"

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