Archives
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
manybooks.net
manybooks.net - Free eBooks for your PDA
All of the 13,313 eBooks available here are free!
Library Links — laura
Monday, March 27, 2006
Evaluating Website Accessibility
This three-part article series is intended to make it easier for non-experts to perform a basic accessibility check. I hope it will be helpful enough to make at least a few websites more accessible.
- Evaluating Website Accessibility Part 1, Background and Preparation | 456 Berea Street
- Evaluating Website Accessibility Part 2, Basic Checkpoints | 456 Berea Street
- Evaluating website accessibility: Part 3, Digging Deeper | 456 Berea Street
Website Design — laura
Friday, March 24, 2006
Right-wing think-tank hates DRM
Boing Boing: Right-wing think-tank hates DRM
The role of government is not to ensure that a private business’s pricing strategy succeeds, and consumers, who have not agreed to help enforce the DVD cartel’s segmentation scheme, are under no obligation to respect it.
Copyright — laura
Thursday, March 23, 2006
Pardon this interuption
I’m considering going to the SLA Conference and I’d love to find a roomate. Anyone else interested? (Planning early to submit FOL proposal.)
General — laura
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Roadshow Tools
If you’re giving a talk and you aren’t sure if there will be Internet access, powerpoint slides are a popular alternative/backup plan. However, I don’t like powerpoint because I tend to show a lot of websites and the transition from powerpoint to browser is distracting and usually an uncomfortable break in the talk. Screenshots work of course, particularly if there is no Internet, but pictures don’t make nearly as much of an impression as seeing the actual site. There are two alternatives combining the best of both options.
Basically, they use javascript to format webpages to emulate a powerpoint presentation. It takes more work to create them but the end-result is ready to post on a website or carried on a USB drive. Add Portable Firefox and you have a complete presentation environment ready to go.
Tutorials — laura
Monday, March 20, 2006
No breaking DRM, even if it’s killing you (literally!)
Boing Boing: MPAA/RIAA/BSA: No breaking DRM, even if it’s killing you (literally!)
The BSA, MPAA and RIAA have officially objected to a proposal to let the public break DRM that “threatens critical infrastructure and endangers lives.” They argue that if it becomes legal to break DRM that could kill you that it might harm their business:
(Just shakes head.)
Copyright — laura
P2P isn’t bad for business
Boing Boing: Canadian recording industry: P2P isn’t bad for business
The Canadian Record Industry Association (the Canadian version of the RIAA) has released a study in which they conclude that P2P downloaders buy lots of music, and that P2P doesn’t particularly harm their industry:
Copyright — laura
Central OA
Does the OA movement need a central organization?
Absolutely. Look at Firefox. It has taken both the concentrated efforts of a the Mozilla Foundation and the enthusiastic preaching of it’s users to get it into the public eye (not that it still doesn’t have a long way to go). OA has the grassroots support, now it needs the organization.
Open Access — laura
Good News on Gaming
Pop Goes the Library: Good News on Gaming
Very interesting links.
Gaming — laura
Friday, March 17, 2006
New Look
Nothing lasts forever, particularly my site designs. 
If you’re using a feed reader, you might want click through to see the new look. As always, I would love feedback.
Site — laura
Thursday, March 16, 2006
LibraryCareers.org
LibraryCareers.org is a new ALA site for people interested in becoming librarians.
Career Info — laura
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
New journal
Evidence Based Library and Information Practice is OA and looks really interesting but having the articles in PDF only is going to cut into their readership. Who has time (or patience) to wait for a download of an article you’re not sure you really want?
Library Links, Open Access — laura
How to lose a techie
Tame The Web: Libraries and Technology: Make a New Plan, Stan: More Ways to lose Your Techie Folks
You must read all of these. Many of them are going to be familiar to everyone, techie or not. And if I might add my own …
- Support your techies’ ideas for bringing the library forward, but not if it means making any difficult changes.
Library Links — laura
Library 2.0 websites: Where to begin?
blyberg.net » Library 2.0 websites: Where to begin?
Let me suggest five directives that may help get your creative minds turning. I want to talk about these not only because they represent common sense, good design, and patron convenience, but also because by using these directives as a kernel in your new project, you are sure to come out the other side feeling highly rewarded and sporting a new website that will invigorate your inner-geek for years to come.
Excellent points.
Website Design — laura
Friday, March 10, 2006
How well do search engines index the OA repositories?
Frank McCown and three co-authors, Search Engine Coverage of the OAI-PMH Corpus, IEEE Internet Computing, March/April 2006.
Abstract: The major search engines are competing to index as much of the Web as possible. Having indexed much of the surface Web, search engines are now using a variety of approaches to index the deep Web. At the same time, institutional repositories and digital libraries are adopting the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) to expose their holdings, some of which are indexed by search engines and some of which are not. To determine how much of the current OAI-PMH corpus search engines index, we harvested nearly 10M records from 776 OAI-PMH repositories. From these records we extracted 3.3M unique resource identifiers and then conducted searches on samples from this collection. Of this OAI-PMH corpus, Yahoo indexed 65%, followed by Google (44%) and MSN (7%). Twenty-one percent of the resources were not indexed by any of the three search engines.
On one hand, Yahoo!, with the most, still only covers 65% of the OA literature. On the other hand, how much of the proprietary literature do you think it sees?
Open Access — laura
My Alma Mater
Newfound Press: University of Tennessee Libraries
The University of Tennessee Libraries is developing a framework to make scholarly and specialized works available worldwide. Newfound Press, the University Libraries digital imprint, advances the community of learning by experimenting with effective and open systems of scholarly communication. Drawing on the resources that the university has invested in digital library development, Newfound Press collaborates with authors and researchers to bring new forms of publication to an expanding scholarly universe. We consider manuscripts in all disciplines, encompassing scientific research, humanistic scholarship, and artistic creation.
Open Access — laura
Tuesday, March 7, 2006
Postgenomic
Digesting biomedical blogs
Postgenomic tracks the biomedical papers being discussed by bloggers, identifies the most-discussed papers and journals, and shows what kinds of researchers are discussing what kinds of papers.
What I find interesting is that there is an impact tracker with 3 OA journals in the top 20.
Blogging — laura
Wednesday, March 1, 2006
Google replaces Thomson
The citation rankings from Science Citation Index are practically a requirement for university tenure these days. But the datqabase is so expensive that most libraries have to search on a for-fee basis. I did one recently that was $30 for 6 citations to one article.
Google Scholar service matches Thomson ISI citation index
The free Google Scholar service does as good a job as Thomson ISI’s science citation index for performing citation counts and could be used as a cheap substitute to the costly Thomson service, says a University of British Columbia professor. Thomson’s citation databases are accessible through the company’s Web of Science portal only by subscription, which can cost a university tens of thousands of dollars a year.
… Many of the journals indexed by Thomson ISI are not available electronically, or are available only by subscription, and so would not necessarily be picked up by Google Scholar. Dr. Pauly suspects that Google Scholar compensates for this by finding citations in the so-called “grey literature,” such as reports, books, conference proceedings and other items found on the web. The result is
you can use Google essentially for the same purpose as you use Thomson ISI.
Library Links — laura
Let us help
metaProjects » Blog Archive » Don’t need no stinkin’ proposal
My profession in general (hereinafter MPIG) hasn’t quite figured out what to do with its young professionals. It wants to harness our creativity, expertise, and energy, but isn’t quite ready to entrust us with actual decisions. Thus, lower-middle managers in MPIG who would like to effect a change are often invited to “make a proposal” and/or “lead a task force” that will take their organizations forward.
… as long as autonomy remains the exclusive province of upper management, we can look forward to an entire generation of academic library leaders without any substantive leadership experience. But man, we’ll be able to write kickass proposals.
Library Links — laura
Free/open source blogosphere
Boing Boing: Free/open source blogosphere
ibiblio.org has taken open-source blogging software (Wordpress) and altered it for massive blog management so you can offer them to all your students. Oh, if only we had php and mysql.
Blogging — laura
