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.”
Category: ‘puters
iRead shuffle – enjoy uncertainty
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.
more on folksonomy, earlier examples
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.
what I was talking about
Jenny chimes in on what the library overlap is or could be with the social bookmarking services we’ve been seeing get so popular lately. She’s doing a tech summit to tell librarians about it which I’ll be sorry to miss.
When someone gets used to retrieving items using the words they think of, not the words we think of, do you think they’ll still be willing to type “LastName, FirstName” to find an author? Will they understand a title search that accepts exact phrases only? (Those are rhetorical questions and the correct answers are “no” and “no,” even if you offer keyword searching hidden elsewhere on your catalog.)
radref tooklkit, fair use with cut-and-paste restricted pdfs
Some non-ALA stuff. Sethf has reposted a worth-reading post that’s a bit of a DIY “how to” on how to exercise your fair use rights with PDFs that have cut and paste functionality removed. Why might you need this? He also has a post addressing that.