‘puters

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

Posted on 16Jan05 by jessamyn

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.

not that kind of weblog, analyzing your server logs

Posted on 11Jan05 by jessamyn

Having a library web site is just the beginning of reaching your patrons. You can analyze your web server logs and learn what they’re looking at, and not looking at, to learn to serve them more effectively.

The most surprising of these is a page that lists the library’s periodical holdings. The heavy use of this page has emphasized the importance of creating complete holdings for our journals in the Web catalog. Additionally, users prefer the alphabetical listing of the library’s database to a list of full-text databases or a list of databases by subject.

wikipedia disliked by librarians because it operates without privilege?

Posted on 05Jan05 by jessamyn

A quick nod to librarians in a longer article about Wikipedia. What do you think of this quote?

Of course librarians, teachers, and academics don’t like the Wikipedia. It works without privilege, which is inimical to the way those professions operate.

best practices for OSPs

Posted on 02Jan05 by jessamyn

Because your library IS an Online Service Provider, and because your library has a commitment to patron privacy, you should read the EFF guide to Best Practices for Online Service Providers.

“OSP owners must deal with requests from law enforcement and lawyers to hand over private user information and logs. Yet, compliance with these demands takes away from an OSP’s goal of providing users with reliable, secure network services. In this paper, EFF offers some suggestions, both legal and technical, for best practices that balance the needs of OSPs and their users’ privacy and civil liberties.”