Hi. Today officially kicks off National Library Week. I don’t know about you, but where I live libraries are closed on Sundays, as are most liquor stores and about 90% of everything else that isn’t church. I had a crazy weekend in a good way. Gave two talks [or one talk twice] met some excellent librarians and library students and went to BloggerCon. Jessica has a few good notes. I had a good time there & learned some things, but felt overwhlemed trying to have a “conversation” with 30-40 people in the room, even though I fend for myself okay in such situations. More fun was lunch with some folks afterwards where we rehashed and debriefed about how we felt about the session, and blogs in general. Most fun was meeting all the excited happy Simmons students, friends, professors and others who came up and said hi before and after my talks. It’s great to see people so enthusiastic about the profession, and good to have some good things to say to them.
The nature of meaning in the age of Google
“The nature of meaning in the age of Google” a paper by my former professor, Terry Brooks.
“Google may index billions of Web pages, but it will never exhaust the store of meaning of the Web. The reason is that Google’s aggregation strategy is only one of many different strategies that could be applied to the semantic objects in public Web space. Hidden in the ‘dogs’ retrieval set of 14.5 million are special, singular, obscure, unpopular, etc., Web pages that await a different aggregation strategy that would expose their special meanings. To charge that Google has a bias against obscure websites… is to expect Google to be something other than Google. Google finds the common meanings. Many other meanings exist on the Web and await their aggregators.”
xreferplus, free this week, also
xrefer plus also is offering a week of free access for National Library Week. Strangely, their normal offer seems to be for a free trial month. Here’s some more information on what xrefer plus is.
ranganathan
I talked a bit about Ranganathan in my talk(s) and was pleased that so many people knew what I was talking about. I like him, his laws are sound. I forgot that “Karen Elliot had mentioned him in her classic essay “What I Really Learned in Library School”
If you can’t quote Ranganathan’s five laws of library science verbatim, you suck.
ALA + community software = ???
According to the info-commons blog, “ALA is investigating online community software.” While I commend them for putting together an RFP [which they did not do for the website] I think jumping on to the online community bandwagon when there are still serious issues with ALA’s online interactions with members [via the website, via balloting, via email lists, via opt-out initiatives] is a mistake that is going to cost more of ALA’s money for less value and more confusion for ALA’s members. But perhaps you disagree? Feel free to fill in ALA’s survey and tell them what you are looking for. My suggestions: open source platform, ADA compliant, cross-browser/OS compliant, no email feature, strong privacy policy, no opt-out crap, preferably developed in-house so that it can be modified in-house in response to user feedback. Is that too much to ask?