Category: ‘puters

Jenny is back on the scene with a Movable Type based site. As you may or may not know, this site runs on Movable Type as well. I’ve got other sites running on WordPress, Blogger, or even just old hand-coded goodness. In preparation for the Information Commons symposium this weekend, I’ve been thinking a lot about online products versus online content. We all know how smart Jenny is technologically, and yet she was temporarily brought down by non-functioning software. Jessica is also a smart cookie but has been drowning in comment spam. I like to think I’m pretty bright, but I’m dead in the water when ibiblio goes down, or gets a DoS attack.

How many times do libraries say their internet connection isn’t working when what they mean is Internet Explorer has been taken over by browser hijacks? How much do we wince when we see AOL advertisements claiming to be able to “fix” the internet? In my beginner email class, people have a lot of questions about attachments, thinking that “the internet” is causing their frustrating attachment woes instead of conflicts between proprietary software. Wouldn’t you like to read a news article that described a new virus in terms of the operating systems and/or software that was vulnerable instead of just painting the danger with the widest possible strokes? There’s a larger point here, beyond just pointing out deficiencies. As librarians, we need to be able to deliver information. If the technology is keeping us from doing that, we should hope that we’re not so married to the information delivery mechanism that we can’t retool and endrun and deliver the goods, not just say “computers are hard” or “we’ve got a licensing agreement” or “this software doesn’t do that” and throw up our hands. It’s been fun watching folks grapple with this in their weblog worlds, I hope we can apply the same troubleshooting and solutions to our libraries as well.

What does he mean by self-censorship? Check out this ISP example from Copyfight

If anyone asks you about the whole “libraries and weblogs thing” anytime soon, just send them straight to this page and then ask “any questions?” I bet there won’t be, except maybe “why don’t I know more about this woman?”

I am feeling better so I am messing with Google Print. Andrea inquired whether, in addition to showing us places where we could buy these books, Google Print might use its comfy relationship with OCLC Worldcat to also show us where we could borrow these books. The reply she received was not encouraging. Tara has more info on Google Print from a discussion with a Google rep. Google does specifically say they are not a library in their FAQ.

A few other things you might want to know about Google Print…

• Publishers can join for free. Google serves their “relevant” ads next to publisher’s content & splits the ad revenue with the publisher. I was pleasantly surprised to see a book by McFarland [my publisher] available.
• Google print currently only accepts — and dismantles — print copies of books and cannot currently accept pdfs or other digital formats. This will be a great bar trivia question a few years from now “which company destroys the most books? Google!”
• Google claims that “pages displaying your content have print, cut, copy, and save functionality disabled in order to protect your content.” and yet that’s not strictly true [see figure 1 and figure 2] The page image actually displays as a background image in a weird inline stylesheet, but it’s just a jpg with a URL like any other image on the web. More explanation here.
• Tara has a few more tricks up her sleeve. Can’t afford Library Journal? Read it via Google Print.
• According to Jason Kottke’s non-scientific method, Google Print had about 8,000 titles on December 2003. This was back when you could search for the acronym ISBN in the URL, limit results to Google Print, and get a title list. There’s no longer a handy ISBN in the URL, you’ll notice his title links from that entry no longer work.
• Once you’re looking at a book, searching for a word like “the” can give you a rough idea of how much of the book’s content is available
• scary line in publishers terms: “Google may retain and use for its own purposes all information You provide”

This ebook/library press release [which was emailed to me in its entirely in my comment box] makes the “virtual library” that patrons get to use until the new library is built sound about as fun as watching the Macy’s Parade on a tiny black and white television. Residents of Cherry Hill do get to visit the Cherry Hill Digital Community Center [sponsored by Sirsi, makers of non-Netscape compliant OPACs] which the library web site says is “an online place” available for residents. I’ve got nothing against eBooks conceptually, but can we agree that, just like Google Answers, they’re supplemental to other library services, not replacements for them? Just like the profession’s reliance on major book distributors has narrowed our easily-purchased titles to a smaller subsection of available books, so does the eBook program’s interaction with big name publishers subtly, or not so subtly, shift the library’s collection focus from comprehensive to popular? Library/business/vendor partnerships can be a really good thing, but they have to be entered into thoughtfully and consciously. Do you think overdrive’s privacy policy is the same as your library’s?