Category: ‘puters

I’m sure you’ve all heard the maxim “the internet inteprets censorship as danger and routes around it” but did you ever wonder how? Paul Jones from ibiblio has been preparing a talk on Censorship on the Net and has put a short list of resources on his blog.

New regular feature at Resource Shelf: new librarian web domains. Anyone know the guy who registered nakedlibrarian.com?

Aaron has a great list of tips for making sure your tech works at your library. I can not stress #4 enough. If you want to provide public access computing and you don’t have time or money to train the entire public on your weird banjaxed system, make the computers in the library work like the ones they use at home and at work, or provide clear instructions when they don’t.

I was consoling a friend yesterday who is an expert in online and database searching. “Everyone wants to hear about Google” he said “my job is becoming all Google all the time” I paraphrase, but we all know how it is. I’ve become increasingly leery of Google lately as they form more and more partnerships with fee-based publishers and vendors and also index their sites for Google’s master index. Can anyone explain to me why a Google search for jessamyn ineligible academy [backstory] nets me five results, one of which is a PDF, with no accompanying “show as HTML” link, and flavortext that is from the article itself [or its abstract] that is not available via the linked site except through a subscription? I’m sure there’s an obvious explanation — like maybe the article was online for free and now it’s not — but why no HTML link, and where did that text come from if it’s not in the linked page? I sent Google a note and trolled their FAQ for details, but all I can deterrmine is that, according to the current FAQ, Google isn’t supposed to do that. I’d love to hear some reasons why it does.

Note from a reader, apparently Google Scholar may crawl full text, and show the abstract in the results, even if it only allows access to a citation. Is it too much to ask that Google have a way to avoid these fee-based results, or mark them somehow? I know how to remove PDFs from my search results, but not how to remove all non-full test sources. Even my library can do that. Then again, they’re not trying to make money off of their search results.

The titles that libraries are removing to remote storage facilities often are the same ones that have the least rich library records, thus dooming them forever to being less and less frequently accessed. What to do? Enter the Library of Congress Catalog Enrichment Initiative.