Just a bit of a teaser….for all my library peeps out there, there is awesome approaching.
Oh yes, there is.
Very soon it will be unleashed. ALA Annual 2007 will be the site of something new, and you will all be invited to partake.
Watch this space for more information.
I call upon the wisdom of the Intertubes: Help me decide on a smartphone. Our cell contract runs out this month, and I need to get a Smartphone of some type.
Needs:
Here are the contenders:
I like the form factor of the Blackjack, but both it and the Treo lack 802.11 support, and I’d like to be able to browse/IM/Email via wifi if I’m somewhere with a signal. Hell, I’d love to be able to Skype with it if possible. The 8125 has wifi, but is the largest of the bunch…on the other hand, the slide out keyboard is pretty great. As much as I lust after the iPhone, Apple is not known for flawless first-gen products, and the $$ is a bit to drop in the foreseeable future. I like the Treo because I’ve always had a soft spot for Palm, and the secondary software support is huge, but Palm is, frankly, dead.
So I’m torn, Intertubes. Anyone use any of these phones? Got a recommendation for me for something I haven’t looked at?
A new “search engine” went live this week calling itself Mahalo. How does it distinguish itself from the big guns of search (Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN)?
Mahalo is the world’s first human-powered search engine powered by an enthusiastic and energetic group of Guides. Our Guides spend their days searching, filtering out spam, and hand-crafting the best search results possible. If they haven’t yet built a search result, you can request that search result. You can also suggest links for any of our search results.
Yep, they are human-indexing the web! Disregarding the “first human-powered search engine” bit, since they aren’t a search engine (they appear to be an index, with a search on top) and they clearly aren’t the first in any case (Yahoo started out exactly the same way, and the Librarian’s Internet Index is the same thing done by information professionals).
I wonder what Weinberger might think of their attempt?
In their FAQ, they handily tell you they selection criteria. Here’s the couple that stood out to me:
Sites they will not link to:
… sites of unknown origin (i.e. we cannot establish who operates the site).
… sites which have adult content or hate speech.
Establishment of “who operates” the site on the Internet? Really? Does a nom de plume count? How about a site whose authors must remain anonymous for political reasons? And that’s setting aside the longstanding legal precedent that anonymity in speech is a necessary for free speech. (see: McIntyre v. Ohio or Talley v. California)
Restricting Adult Content and Hate Speech makes it sound like those are two very clear categories. I’m always wary of groups who feel like they should be the ones making content decisions…one of the reasons I’m so happy to be a librarian.
They will link to:
… sites that are considered authorities in their field (i.e. Edmunds for autos, Engadget for consumer electronics, and the New York Times for news).
I swear on a stack of pancakes, I will get off my ass this year and write that article that’s been rattling around in my head about how Authority as a criteria for ANYTHING is old and busted.
Google Offline access! Google Gears is a beta that allows for offline access to Reader (your feeds, no internet access needed) and is going to support Gmail very soon.
Not always needed, but invaluable during those long flights.
If anyone hasn’t heard about the Swarm of Angels project, they just started their movie poster contest, and it’s a great time to read up on the project and get your fingers into some Open Source movie making.
NB: I’m a Angel…joined 5 May 06, and if the “user count” on the URL is correct, I was Angel #29. Crazy!
So the ALA has launched a Librarian Salary Database, which collects (according to the email press release):
The Library Salary Database includes aggregated data from 10,631 actual salaries for six librarian positions in 1053 public and academic libraries.
The site itself, however, says:
The Library Salary Database has current aggregated salary data for 68 library positions from more than 35,000 individual salaries of actual employees in academic and public libraries in the United States.
So which is it? 6 positions, or 68? I’m certainly not paying to find out! Jenifer kindly clarifies in the comments…
As unclear as the actual sources may be, no one disputes that the data they are aggregating is collected from their own constituents. Who else is reporting this, if not ALA members. So the ALA is collecting the info, and then selling it back to us. For an annual rate of $150!!!!!
This is yet another of the absolutely insane things that come out of ALA. I might understand charging outside interests for the information, but this should be free for members. Then again, I think that the ALA should be operating in a far more open and free manner than it has for years (some of you might remember my Master’s Paper, which, flawed as I admit portions are, spoke strongly against the locking up of ALA content)
I’ve not talked at length about my individual issues with the organization yet, but if I could be a LITA member without being an ALA member, you can bet I’d go there. ALA as a whole is overgrown and needs a good weeding.
So pretty much everyone is convinced that their OPAC sucks. With the exception of the GA system, is there anyone out there actively trying to switch to Open Source?
I admit, I desperately want to give it a go, but it’s the backend stuff that gives me pause. I would be curious if others out there are tinkering, behind the scenes, out of sight. If so, let me know…
Updating to WP 2.2 today…if there is weirdness, that’s why.
More, including a review of new features, after the upgrade.
The most excellent Tim Spalding announced today that LibraryThing for Libraries officially went live with the Danbury Library in Danbury, CT.
I’m in awe of the results.
Seriously, I’m certain this is the future of the catalog. Not just the specific tools, but the idea of leveraging one set of data against another set using easily modified and extensible tools. It’s many-pieces-loosely-joined for the OPAC, and it’s brilliant.
I particularly love the tag browser, as well as the similar books links. Leveraging the LibraryThing data is a wonderful way to start this, but eventually libraries will need a way to share in a P2P system rather than having a central storehouse. We need to be sharing our data in a P2P format, with always-on trickle-and-compare running, updating the tag clouds and recommendations. If we just managed to collect the click-through data of our catalogs, we could manage to put together some pretty robust recommendations, all driven by scholarly activity.
I just had to laugh at one of the more recent posts on the ACRLblog about questioning the standard spiel of authority in Information Literacy instruction. Mark Meola says:
This is very simple advice yet I seldom see it recommended outright in the checklists. It’s a tricky balancing act, but in our drumbeat for students to “use authoritative sources†let’s not forget to recommend questioning authority.
I seem to remember someone talking about it at length over the course of the last few years.
Indeed, that is the focus of an entire class that I do, using the sources on this slide (also, up for many years).
Information evaluation without reliance on authority is being taught, and I maintain it is the way it should be taught. Authority is the thing we used to have to use as an explanation, back when actual verification wasn’t possible except for those willing to spend weeks/months/years doing so. We relied on the magical word “authority” in the same way we relied on phlogiston and ether. And just like those, authority is just an explanatory shortcut that is no longer needed.