I am a sucker for these sweet obituaries of librarians. MáirÃn O’Byrne not only beefed up the libraries in Dublin city and county, she was very professionally active and provided home and hearth to many members of her family who were also involved in good works. We should all be so lucky to be so fondly remembered. [thanks eoin]
Month: August 2008
Flickr Commons project – one organization’s report
I wrote a little bit about the Flickr Commons project in an article for Computers in Libraries magazine. You may have seen it mentioned here and elsewhere in library blogland because two prominent libraries, the Library of Congress and Bibliothèque de Toulouse have put collections there. I’m most fond of the Smithsonian’s collection though I pretty much love all of them and love seeing No Known Copyright Restrictions next to all those images. So yay, I love Flickr.
However, a question many people ask is: is this project working to do anything other than give librarians fancy 2.0 tools to use? In a recent lengthy post by another participating cultural heritage organization, The Powerhouse Museum, they explain what the project has done for them. I’ve pulled out a few quotes. [thanks peacay!]
In the first 4 weeks of the Commons we had more views of the photos than the same photos in the entirety of last year on our own website. It wasn’t as if we made the images on our own website all that hard to find – they were well indexed on our own site by Google, they were made available to the national federated image search/repository Picture Australia, and they also existed in our OPAC. Still, that was no match for Flickr.
Whilst some of the information we are learning about the images this way could probably have been discovered by the Museum itself, that the public has been able to do this for us and often within hours of new images going up on to the site speaks volumes… This is also very much about empowering and acknowledging the importance of ‘amateur’ knowledge, which in the networked environment can often outpace, and sometimes outperform, isolated ‘professional’ knowledge.
Tags are easy and we’re treating them just like our other community generated metadata. Now we’ve passed the 3 month mark we’ve pulled all the tags to date back into our own collection database online where they will soon appear alongside the tags that have been on our own site.
WorldCat’s meme requests
The funny thing about memes is you can’t force them. I mentioned this particular issue on Twitter a little bit ago but I find WorldCat’s Meme Request [update: link suddenly broken, see comments for text. another update: the post is now back. Huh.] post to be a little sketchy-seeming.
Maybe this is because of my particular perspective of not feeling that I get a lot of value for me or my library from WorldCat. Here’s the thing with this request. If this is a legitimate and okay use of Wikipedia — to add links to WC identities to applicable pages — Wikipedia has an open API, just go build a bot and do it, on the level. If it’s not okay, and my reading of the Wikipedia guidelines seems to indicate that it may not be, trying to end-run this by faking a grassroots movement seems to not be in the best interests of either Wikipedia or WorldCat. I don’t think WorldCat is trying to be shifty or sneaky here, I just don’t think their approach is as helpful as they may think it would be.
Also, let me state for the record, that I think the WorldCat identities project is really smoking hot. However there is still a huge difference between “all libraries” and “OCLC member libraries” and I’ll continue to raise these polite objections to the willful blurring of the line between the two until the point at which WorldCat can direct me to the actual nearest copy of Jane Eyre to my house.
why I’d try an API
A few neat announcements in libraryland concerning data or connectors being made more open and available. These two examples may not seem as linked as they are.
- LibraryThing releases (sort of) (almost) a million book covers, free for your use, under most circumstances. You can also cache the covers locally as long as you don’t do it in such a way that you support LT competitors. While I understand why this isn’t linked with the Open Library project, I’d love to see it get there in the future sometime. update: John Miedema reminds me in the comments that I’d meant to also link to the openbook WordPress plugin for people using WordPress.
- WorldCat released their search API over the weekend. As with many OCLC things, this is great news for their member libraries and not that great for anyone else, but it’s a real step towards letting (their) people get at their data, not just their web pages. You can get some details, in slightly dense format, on this page.
EPA Libraries coming back… sort of
Via resourceshelf, this account of the Memorandum of Agreement that was the result of arbitration between the American Federation of Government Employees Council 238 and the EPA. Please see the linked documents for information from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility on why the EPAs compliance — which they termed “grudging” — was not acceptable to EPA library workers.
“Even as many collections remain in crates, EPA has decided to micromanage what is left,†[PEER Director Carol] Goldberg added, noting that the agency has still not accounted for many of the library holdings it had removed. “Professional librarians should be making these management decisions, not political appointees.â€