‘puters

not that kind of weblog, analyzing your server logs

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.”

some content isn’t there and you can’t get the old stuff

Posted on 29Dec04 by jessamyn

Why searching Google for online resources is like buying a CD at Wal-Mart. [libinblack]

DRM – start learning

Posted on 29Dec04 by jessamyn

All librarians who interact with multimedia at all [that is to say “all librarians”] should start understanding Digital Rights Management issues now. Jenny has a few good anecdotes about why buying items with DRM can be the equivalnet of bad customer service for libraries.