blogz

xISBN blog to watch out for

I almost never link to new blogs with less than a few weeks of posts in them, but Glenn Fleishman [you may know him from such hits as isbn.nu] has a proven track record and is a delight to read. His new blog ISBlogN which tracks the “authority problem” with the ISBN system for most people’s real-world search needs. He’s got big plans, it will be fun to watch them unfold.

Authority doesn’t mean that the information is correct. Rather, it means that you have authoritatively settled on a single form of a category of information that might be represented in several ways. It’s a way to collapse lots of individual information that is fundamentally about the same think into a single set of information that is mapped to the same thing. This is closer to how people conceive of what they want from a book search than any of the tools I’ve seen….. I believe that with a little effort and some coordination, along with the tenets of Feist v. Rural, the Internet community could develop a WikiBook-a-pedia, or a compendium of updatable bibliographic information along with authority and chunky linkages that could be distributed freely.

feed of the day, again?

Posted on 05Oct04 by jessamyn

It’s sort of flattering to be Feedster’s Feed of the Day twice in two weeks, but I bet it’s just because they have a lack of strong authority control and spelled it once with an uppercase L and once without.

Library Juice, juiced

Posted on 01Oct04 by jessamyn

If you like Library Juice, Rory has put together a “Selections from Library Juice” page which is a best-of sort of thing. If you don’t know Library Juice, this is a good place to start getting acquainted with it.

why aren’t the vendors blogging?

Posted on 29Sep04 by jessamyn

Jenny tosses down the gauntlet “Why don’t OCLCs blog or news releases talk about the new OCLC stuff?” OCLC [or the staff that maintain a non-official blog] responds. This sort of notification would have been really handy during the whole OCLC sues the Library Hotel flap where we had to dig through press releases from them to get any news. I’m not sure we would have seen more than a few official announcements but it’s better than nothing at all. ALA could benefit from this as well. Right now most of the rotating content on the ALA front page is sales and marketing and public information office news. Nothing wrong with that, but I’d like to read the news that’s relevant to me as a member of the organization, not as just a potential buyer of products or services. Things like “The search engine wasn’t working earlier, it’s fixed now” or “A list of hotels is now available on the conference site” or “New councilors added to roster” or “List of new committee appointments made by incoming ALA President.” Part of the problem is that this sort of effort requires either coordination [to get news in] or trust [to get people using the tools that affect publicly viewable content] both of which are hard to come by in an organization that is tight on funds and short on IT staffing. As it stands there is currently no way to figure out what content has been newly added to the site which means users spend a lot of time clicking through to all the pages that reflect their interest. What was it that Ranganathan once said…? Incidentally, if you want to help out with the “What We Want In Our OPACs” wiki, please email me and I’ll give you the URL.

LISCareer has a blog!

Posted on 26Sep04 by jessamyn

Great news, LISCareer has a new blog where you can get updates on articles added to LISCareer. Priscilla’s also getting some help from new assistant editor Rich Murray.