Hello, my name is Roy and I have aided and abetted spammers. Here is my story. I meant well, I really did. I have a site that has a group blog -- some half-a-dozen people can post on it. Since I manage the site I also must approve all comments so that I can filter out spam (Yes, Virginia, there are other ways to do this but I'm either too stupid or lazy to use those methods).

So I had been happily approving comments that seemed legitimate, although at times with one commenter I noticed I would need to remove a gratuitous link that they insterted in their comment. Eventually I noticed that this one person continued to comment on posts long past and I grew suspiscious. After a recent spate of three comments in one day, I looked more carefully and noticed what I felt was an oddly on-topic comment that also managed to be somewhat tangent...Read More

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Perhaps it is the Google Book Settlement that has started me thinking about this. Or maybe it's other things that are happening in my world at the moment. But whatever the reason, I've been thinking lately about one of the best parts of libraries. It's civic responsibility.

We think about the long haul, whether we're serving our communities in local public library branches or at large research universities, or the many other diverse locations where we're found. It's our mission, our raison d'etre, our joy and our struggle.

Being responsible to our citizenry comes at a price. It's like the classic Three Little Pigs story. Unlike our happy-go-luck brethren, we work hard to ensure a good tomorrow.

We think about things like last copies of books and making sure that som...Read More

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Yes, Virginia, I did claim that the Resource Description and Access (RDA) draft would be released before now, but I'm just reporting what others have said. So sue me. Now the latest word, posted on AUTOCAT on November 11 is:

Dear Colleagues,

Due to complications in software development, the Committee of
Principals has determined that the full draft of RDA will be issued
in PDF files. It will be available on November 17, 2008. We will
provide the appropriate URL for accessing the full draft at this
time.  We will also provide an update on the software as soon as possible.

Nathalie Schulz, Secretary, JSC
for the
Committ

...Read More

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A while back I predicted that despite predictions to the contrary (and all we have are guesses since Amazon is not talking) that the Kindle would go down in flames (that is, not sell). It's now five months later and I have absolutely no evidence upon which to revise my prediction. In fact, in revisiting this issue I feel even more confident that my prediction is true, despite much feedback on my original post that largely attempted to set me straight (it remains my second most commented on post). Why do I still feel this way? Let me count the ways:

1. If people are buying it, they're not using it. I get out of the house quite a bit. Some would say I travel a lot, actually. I am a "1K" flier with United, which means I fly at least 100,000 miles a year. I

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The Hathi Trust has now launched an experimental search service of about half-a-million digitized books:

As an initial public beta of full text search functionality, we are offering a simple
mechanism to search across all of the fully viewable works (both those in
the public domain and those for which we have permissions) and a sprinkling
of search-only works (i.e., in-copyright works where we may not show the
text of the work). The size of the content indexed is approximately 500,000
volumes, and the majority of the works are fully viewable. Although this is
a fully functioning and reliable search mechanism for these works, we
provide

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Somehow I missed the news, reported here at LJ on October 7, that the Librarians' Internet Index (formerly known as the Librarians' Index to the Internet or LII) had been taken over by the Internet Public Library. It makes all kinds of sense, since California had exhibited less and less interest in maintaining it in recent years. I hope that this move provides it with a firm and renewed lease on life, although any endeavor that is dependent on grant funding cannot be said to have a firm grip on existence -- especially as our economy enters a significant downturn. Nonetheless, I'm hopeful that working with the Internet Public Library project will be a better situation than standing alone.

I watch these developments like an interested parent, si...Read More

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More than ten days ago I stated here that a full draft of the Resource Description and Access (RDA) work would be posted today. The release has apparently been delayed until next week, according to the Joint Steering Committee web site. Frankly I'm not sure which is scarier -- releasing on Halloween, or the week of U.S. elections.

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The University of Rochester Library has released a new report, "The Next Generation of Academics: A Report on a Study Conducted at the University of Rochester" by Ryan Randall, Jane Smith, Katie Clark and Nancy Fried Foster. It is an interesting report, and well worth the time of any academic librarian, but in particular for librarians interested in helping their graduate students and faculty manage their writing projects.

This research "reveals several ways in which current and emerging generations of faculty members need better, more powerful, and less complicated tools to support their writing and publishing." Plus, they argue, solving this problem well enough will have the added benefit of capturing the output of such work in an institution repository as a matter of course. Those insti...Read More

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David Walker of the California State University has developed an open source front-end for ExLibris MetaLib users (a metasearching application), called Xerxes. In what I believe is the first institution other than CSU to install it, Jonathan Rochkind at Johns Hopkins University Libraries has recently released his implementation. He announced it with this blog post. The Xerxes web site says:
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Let me be clear. I really don't want to write this post. I don't even want to think about this post. But I also don't think it's wise to stick my head in the sand, as much as that might be preferable for whatever span of time is left of my career (and any way you cut it, it isn't all that long).

If you've been paying attention the last couple of decades have been a very wild ride. Who knew the Internet would transform the lives of nearly every citizen on the planet with access to electricity? Who knew that a 1998 startup would within a decade have billions of dollars in its pocket with which to scan the complete contents of a number of major research libraries? Who knew that people would have access to millions of books and billions of articles from their mobile devices just a few short years later? OK, I made part of that last one up, but it is no longer all that far-fe...Read More

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Word on the street (well, OK, AUTOCAT if you must know) is that the much-awaited full draft of the Resource Description and Access (RDA) will be out on October 31. The selection of release date is somewhat unfortunate, as someone has already made the obvious joke about the release coinciding with Halloween. I trust you can make up your own.

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The eXtensible Catalog Project, created and managed by the University of Rochester and supported by funding from the Mellon Foundation as well as partner institutions, has released a new web site that serves as the project's home. The new site provides more information (and creates the skeleton for upcoming enhancements) than the previous blog-based site, and reveals a snazzy new logo.

Current plans are to release software in July 2009 as open source, although it isn't yet clear what the initial release will include:

When XC is released in the Summer of 2009, much of the initial functionality will be informed by discussions among the XC project team and partner organizatio

...Read More

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