Category: ‘puters

google book search, info from the source

Posted on by jessamyn

James Jacobs — the guy from diglet who had been writing to Google to try to get “find in a library” added to ALL Google Book Search results — went to see Daniel Clancy, the Engineering Director for the Google Book Search Project speak at Stanford. While the talk wasn’t to librarians and wasn’t really about the social implications of the book search, James did learn a few things.

– Clancy mentioned that Google was NOT going for archival quality (indeed COULD not) in their scans and were ok with skipped pages, missing content and less than perfect OCR — he mentioned that the OCR process AVERAGED one word error per page of every book scanned
– about 70% of the book project use was coming from India.
– 92% of the world’s books are not generating revenues for copyright holders or publishers

If Googl Book Search really interests you, you might also like to read The Google Library Project: Both Sides of the Story [pdf, today’s library link o’ the day] which discusses some of the misinformation and lawsuits surrounding the Google Library porject and comes down on the side of Google’s fair use position.

using itunes as a cheap and easy music preview tool

Posted on by jessamyn

While we’re talking about social software, let’s talk about libraries using the tools that their students and patrons are already using. Union College in Schenectaty NY takes advantage of iTunes’ feature allowing other people on the same network to listen to each other’s music. So, if I’m at the library using the wireless and someone else is at the library using the wireless and has decided to make their music available, I can listen to it as if it were my music. The library uses their own copy of iTunes to offer tracks of new music that is available for checkout at the library. Innovative, free and clever!

co-browsing: why use software that you can’t use and patrons don’t like?

Posted on by jessamyn

The Librarian in Black has a few more things to say about co-browsing in her post How much is co-browsing really helping our users?

I stopped trying to use co-browsing a long time ago. It’s bad customer service to give something to someone that has a good chance of not working. Period. Everyone touts co-browsing as the cat’s pajamas, and it is kind of cool A) when it actually works, which is rare and B) when the user’s question actually warrants it…. I am not a co-browsing fan. At all. If the big-name software companies can get to work on a Mac with a firewall and a dial-up connection running Firefox, then rock on. I’ll be a fan.

librarians do and do not need to be coders.

Posted on by jessamyn

When I said “librarians need to be coders” I mostly meant that they need to involve themselves in their technology. Science Library Pad has gone further and explicated this idea with a fancy diagram and some smart talk. Go read librarians 2.0 don’t need to be coders 2.0

Don’t try to build big complex systems. Live in the beta world. Get some chunk of functionality out quickly so that people can play with it. The hardest part is having the initial idea, and the good news is I see lots of great ideas out in the library blogosphere. I can understand the frustrations in the gap between the idea and running code, but I hope I’ve presented a bunch of areas above in which you can work to turn the idea into the next hot beta, without necessarily needing to code it yourself.

The systems world is not just buy/build. It’s buy, build, transform, collaborate, extend, transform, inspire, lead…