Category: ‘puters

It really seems to me that one of Google’s biggest strengths is taking things that others offer in a saturated-with-ads way and giving it to you with a clean and simple interface, and easy permalinks. In case you’re wondering what my commute to work is like [and I’m home today, snowstorm] that link goes there. Big bummer, doesn’t work with Safari.

One thing we know about the web is that it’s very easy to index and store and retrieve text, and very very difficult to make ISAR systems for other sorts of media. We’ve seen an inkling of what’s to come with Google Video which uses the nifty hack of indexing the closed captioning to give entry points into visual content. Of course, as we know, closed captioning isn’t perfect.

Moving on…. there have been a few library bloggers podcasting lately, including Open Stacks’ Greg Schwartz [welcome back!]. Matt Haughey has been talking about podcasting on his blog for a while now. It’s an interesting idea, and a great way to push regular audio content, if you’re already creating it. I’m personally very rarely plugged in to my ‘pod for that long at a stretch, and I’m just not sure the usual format of “hey get this MP3 stream automagically in your feed” works for the way I currently consume media, but I’m willing to be persuaded otherwise. I’d love to see some good indexing/search features so you didn’t just have a title/author to go by: where’s all the spicy metadata?

On the other hand, visually disabled patrons who have been after us to get more information accessible via the voice mail system [new titles, possibly even book chapters] might find this really incredibly useful. This whole post was really just a way to get around to mentioning PennSound, a directory of poetry recordings. While the site has some interface design issues, it has a great vision and so far a pretty good execution. I feel like I could spend entire days digging around in poetry audio archives [a favorite], perhaps I should try podcasting that?

A good point to remember from a panel discussion that Stephanie attended, discussing Google Scholar. “Users don’t care. They want quick, they want cheap, they want easy….As much as we want them to enjoy finding information, they don’t.”

What is missing from a lot of library weblogs? Fun graphics! Thanks, Aaron for making a whole new graphic out of my old tired Encyclopedia Britannica.

Speaking of folksonomies, I would like to mention that the very first time I came across this group tagging phenomenon, it was not at del.icio.us or flickr, it was at the Gimp Savvy Copyright-Free Photo Archive where they have selections of unindexed images and invite users of the site to help classify them. Just by looking at their list of tags, which they call master keys, you can see how this works and does not work. In specific, see this example.