Digital Library Will Automatically Identify… Fish?

Bet you didn’t see this one coming. Digital libraries may soon come to the rescue of perplexed anglers. (And maybe others later).

World’s Largest University-Based Digital Library

The Universal Digital Library has now digitized over 1.5 million books in more than 20 languages. This differs from the projects discussed here earlier from Microsoft and Google in that it’s sponsored by  universities — in this case universities in the US, China, and India.

Open Source Open House Report

Missed the Open Source open house hosted by SLIS-LITA on November 15th? Don’t worry- we have the overview up on the wiki!

Can An Online Dictionary Be Addictive?

Yes. Yes it can.

Try the word “library” for a good example.

Top Nonprofit Website Is A Library

The Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange has named the Solano California library website as the best nonprofit website. This story in The Reporter has additional background.

Perhaps not surprisingly… it’s a really nice site.

Digitizing the Oxford Bodleian Library

In this Times Online article, Ben Macintyre waxes poetic on the far-ranging implications of book digitization, particularly inspired by the digitization of books from the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

“According to one estimate, Google is digitising books at the rate of ten million a year, and it is not alone. Microsoft, Yahoo! and Amazon are all taking part in what amounts to a digital-literary goldrush.”

I’m still trying to understand where the gold is. Ads?

Peek Under the Hood of a Search Engine

The people behind the hakia search engine have opened up some of their inner workings to the public. The hakia-Lab is worth checking out. Just be careful with their ontological semantics (OntoSem) demo, though- it can be a very effective work/school attention distracting device (like a certain person found out…*whistles*).

The Wikilibrary of Alexandria?

Wikimania, the Wikimedia Foundation’s annual conference, will be hosted at the Library of Alexandria in 2008. That’s Alexandria, Egypt, not Alexandria, VA.

RFID in Libraries

EMediaLive has a brief story about the growing adoption of RFID in libraries.

Hackfest 2007 Results

I posted a little while back about Hackfest, a one-day event during the Access Conference where people get together and brainstorm solutions to some of the tech-oriented problems facing libraries. 2007’s results were not easy to find, but I found its hiding spot, thanks to the K-State Libraries blog. Out of the 24 listed items, 8 were chosen for the event. A couple worth checking out:

Fantastic Folksonomy Validator:
(slide #2 text)-

Scenario: Users tag their documents with uncontrolled vocabulary terms: e.g. bunnies, sugar beets, combine harvester. These terms are compared manually to existing thesauri, and if necessary corrected. The result is a hybrid: not a folksonomy, but not a rigidly controlled vocabulary.

Problem: All of the manual checking that is required! Right now, the user goes to several web sites, searches for a term, views the results, pulls them all together, and decides what to do with the submitted term given how it is (or isn’t) handled in the authoritative thesauri.

Object: Make machines do the manual work!

Specification for user-contributed enhancements:
(Slide #1 text)

Develop a specification for user-contributed enhancements to digital collections, entries in a library catalogue, entries in a bibliography management system, or any other type of objects that users comment on in libraries. ‘User-contributed enhancements’ include comments, tags, ratings, etc. The goal of this specification is to define ways of describing user-contributed enhancements so they can be migrated to new host systems, counted for statistical reporting, clustered for analysis, etc., or to guide libraries in selecting systems for implementation.

 Face the Facebook Facts:
(Slide #3 text)

• Make an application package for “non-coders” — other libraries (i.e. Ryerson) have documented their Facebook app process, but we wanted to build on that, making something as close to “ready-to-run” as possible
• Make a “pull” NOT “push” application — don’t try to push a library app out over a Facebook network
• Keep users in Facebook environment for as long as possible (i.e. viewing catalogue results in Facebook “wrapper”)