Archives
Friday, December 23, 2005
LibriVox
LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then we release the audio files back onto the net (podcast and catalog). Our objective is to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet. We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project.
Open Access — laura
Thursday, December 22, 2005
Clam Chowder: Carnival of the Infosciences #18
Clam Chowder: Carnival of the Infosciences #18
I made it into the carnival again!
Library Links — laura
Friday, December 16, 2005
Folksonomies Revelation
I have had several things in mind to talk about but time and energy have been rare commodities recently.
The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging is an excellent overview of the pros and cons of folksonomy organization. They’ve proven to be useful and popular with communities on the Internet, including the librarian community.
But I have to reveal a deep, dark secret. I don’t use tags. I don’t tag my own content and I don’t use them to find other people’s content. First wikis, now this. I may have to turn in my geek license. (Note: I have been extremely impressed with St. Joseph County Public Library’s use of a wiki for managing their subject guides. My library also hosts a number that are edited by different people with no html skills. I can easily see them just clicking an edit button and working away.)
Maybe I drank too much library kool-aid. Maybe I just think too much like a computer. But when I’m browsing a website, I naturally head to the formal categories. So I’ve been ambivelent about integrating tags into library websites. It’s very Library 2.0 and even useful to many (most?) people. But it doesn’t always work. Does it mean I have to give up my beloved subject headings? Authority-controlled classification of content is one of the basic parts of librarianship, one that should remain even into Library 3.0. People come to us not just for information, but for reliable information.
And then there was my revelation. No. We can keep both subject headings and add tags. Like keyword searching they can be used for casual information seeking. But if that doesn’t work or a more in-depth search is needed, the precision of subject headings will still be there. So I’m probably the last one to figure this out. So now I’m headed over to John Blyberg’s to see what he has on tag clouds for the catalog. 
Web Tools — laura
Wednesday, December 7, 2005
DRM screws my fans, so it screws me
DRM screws my fans, so it screws me is a musician’s view on DRM (digital rights management software). He hits several excellent points about what’s wrong with the current implementations.
Is it just me or does anyone else think it’s really screwed up that musicians and authors as content creators have so little choice in how their content is distributed to start with?
Copyright — laura
Tuesday, December 6, 2005
Student ethnographies of World of Warcraft
COMM 3344-1 :: Games for the web
Below, you will find term papers written by undergraduate students in the class “Games for the Web: Ethnography of Massively Multiplayer On-line Games.”
These students used a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods to explore sociological issues associated with massively multiplayer virtual worlds. Each student in the class pursued a different research question. Their term papers (and web logs) are linked below.
For now they’re exploring the social dynamics in the game but someday they may use the interaction in the game to explore RL (real life) society.
Gaming — laura
Monday, December 5, 2005
More evidence that OA increases citation impact
Open Access News- Effect of open access on citation rates for a small biomedical journal
CONCLUSIONS. Open access was associated with increase in the number of citations received by the articles. It also decreased the lag time between publication and the first citation. For smaller biomedical journals, OA could be one of the means for improving visibility and thus citation rates.
Open Access — laura
DMCA exemption process is completely scr0d
Boing Boing: EFF: DMCA exemption process is completely scr0d
Every three years, the Copyright Office holds hearings to determine whether they should allow some exceptions to this law. But the process is so tortured and the criteria are so absurd that this process practically never grants an exemption:
Copyright — laura
