With OCLCs reader review capability, who will own the data? Asked and [sort orf] answered on the Web4Lib list.
Category: ‘puters
worldcat wiki where?
I added a review to a book in Open WorldCat after reading about this functionality in Catalogablog. I’m not certain how having a “post a review” feature or any user posting rights makes this a wiki. Maybe once my comment is approved on this post [if you see it, it’s been approved] I’ll know more. I think these features are great, don’t get me wrong, but a wiki is something pretty specific and at first and second glance, this is not in any way a wiki.
TimesSelect and institutional access
The NYTimes new Times Select service requires a fee for online access to op-eds, editorials and other online content. Home delivery subscribers get access to this content for free. Of course, I live far enough away that home delivery is not an option for me. So I inquired to see if I were a librarian, at a small library, [which I sort of am] if my patrons could use Times Select via my subscription. Answer: no. The same is true if you are a student at a university and get it delivered to your dorm. Of course librarians know that you can get access to the “select” content via Lexis Nexis anyhow, right? Princeton is at least one library lobbying the New York Times to allow some sort of access to content for Institutional subscribers. Perhaps your library should be another?
[Princeton’s] Firestone Library has already contacted the newspaper to determine if institutional access rates might be established for the Princeton campus, said Kevin Barry, head of the Social Science Reference Center.
“It is our intention to lobby hard for an educational institution arrangement,” he said. “I expect that our concern over how TimesSelect restrictions have upset daily patterns of reading key features and opinion pieces is shared by most academic libraries. I hope that those of us who represent the library and its community can prevail successfully upon The New York Times to find a way of opening up the website fully to institutional subscribers.”
a world with the $100 laptop
How does our thinking about the Digital Divide change if it were a world with $100 laptops? What if they were rugged laptops with cranks for backup power, and straps. What if they had wifi? What if all the software needed to run it were free?
public access computing vs. OPACs
How does your library determine how many computers to “set aside” for OPAC-only use? Is that decision based on anything? At the library I used to work at, we had about 15 public access computers with fully five of them OPAC-only. The other ten computers were mobbed. TechnoBiblio looks at whose using which comptuers at San Francisco Public and has some questions as well.