Lis News

Sometimes I like to check lisnews.org for library-related info. Every-so-often I find some strange articles there, keeping things interesting. Recently a poor little kitty was found after someone dumped it in a book drop-box at a library. In other news, a statue of Frank Zappa was situated in front of a Baltimore library. His wife said Zappa would have approved of the location, as his mother was a librarian.

Libtypos Regroups

After losing its host from organizational changes in NELINET, the Libtypos forum has regrouped in a new location at Google Groups. The forum is now found at http://groups.google.com/group/libtypos/. This project, now more than 10 years old, tracks typographical errors found in library catalogs and encourages other librarians to maintain clean databases. The unfortunate part is that the content cannot be viewed until you are approved as a member, which I am not.

Librarian Hypnotizes Lobsters

Apparently in the early 20th century librarians did much more than their desk job required. Here is an article I stumbled upon from 1921 that describes F. Martin Duncan, librarian to the Zoological Society, in his attempt to hypnotize a "wild, uneducated female lobster...selected at random from a fish monger's slab."He was able to put the lobster in a trance long enough to stand it on its head for about five minutes.

Just goes to show librarians are jacks of many trades. What will we do next?

Faceted Classification

While reading a chapter by Vanda Broughton on faceted classification, I couldn't help but relate it to another reading in LIS2000, Linked by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, in which he describes the relationships of items to each other and how they become linked in a network. He used a great classification system example to highlight how things must first take on many characteristics before they can be classified in a scheme that is categorically efficient; the periodic table of elements. Before it was created the elements needed defined by various characteristics, such as atomic number and weight. I think this is what Broughton is saying in that "faceted schemes are composed of all these little bricks and building blocks which must be put together to achieve the end result." I recommend the chapter for anyone interested in classification schemes.

Broughton, Vanda. “Faceted Classification.” Chapter 20 from her Essential Classification. New York: Neal Schuman, 2004.

American Notes

This is my American Notes fragment that I inline styled using Kompozer. I found the exercise to be fairly easy, once I figured out that I needed to create my own html folder in the public space of the server. I also found some basic ftp info here for anyone who still needs help with the assignment.

LC Subject Headings

Library of Congress subject heading results per OPAC searches can be an easier way to get more relevant search results than with Boolean keyword searches. An article that gives a great example of Boolean vs. OPAC search results can be found here.

Another related article describes algorithmic relevancy in subject heading searches.

Semantic web

For LIS2000 we had an online discussion that dealt with the web and it's effects on librarianship and scholarly communication. From the discussion, what interested me most was how the emergence of the Semantic web might impact cataloging. Clearly new standards for metadata will have to be established as "data about data" will increase ubiquitously. What is unclear is whether or not librarians will have a role in determining a new language for such standards, or web administrators will use an open access model or user data-seeking behavior to come up with a meaningful system.

"The Nature of Meaning in the Age of Google" by T.A. Brooks is an interesting take on this topic and can be found at http://informationr.net/ir/9-3/paper180.html.

Copyright

A few readings for my copyright class are really worth taking a look at for anyone interested in copyright law:

Google's senior copyright counsel William Patry's Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars deals with the history of copyright in America and his views on current copyright trends.

Kembrew McLeod's Freedom of Expression is also very interesting and deals more with the cultural repercussions of intellectual property rights.

McLeod's can be found online in its entirety at the link above.

Blogging cont'd

For some reason I thought I had already posted twice this week, so to accommodate the requirements of the class I'm posting twice today.

In LIS2000 we are to participate in weekly online discussion groups regarding issues in library sciences. Each week a student or two is in charge of moderating the discussion, this week belonging to myself. The general topic is how the web has influenced scholarly communication and publishing, and what implications its had and will have on libraries. Being the tech geek that I am (haha), my co-leader and I agreed that I would tackle discussion related to Web 2.0 and the Semantic web.

For anyone interested, I stumbled upon this blog from the Semantic Library blogroll. It contains an archive of topics related to new technology and library futurism, if for in the future you find yourself having to discuss these issues with colleagues.

http://www.semanticlibrary.net/author/fiona/

Blogging

Hmm...what to blog about...

So I finally took advantage of the university's free software and picked it up at the computer lab, but then I discovered I cannot use it. My CD drive seems to be broken. I looked up some instruction for what to do, and after attempting to reinstall through the control panel I have realized it is purely a failure of the hardware to operate. Not looking forward to dealing with this conundrum, but I will keep my ever-so-eager readers posted on the situation as it unfolds.

Another Post

I used to work for a national teleservice corporation, which owned several centers across the country. These centers would compete with each other for call-conversion on sales. Previously, the site that I worked at was the leader in sales/conversion for the same products on calls that were equally routed to the national centers. However, this changed when we decided to switch to VoIP phones. What I believed to have happened was that the IP address was changed with the switch, therefore rerouting the calls first to the other centers, and then back to the Erie site. The tech people at the corporation failed to realize this, and as a result lost a few clients due to the declining sales that ensued.

Anyways, I don't recommend anyone with a decent set of morals to work for a teleservice (not to mention telemarket) company, especially if you're sensitive to being screamed at. I should mention that teleservices involve handling inbound calls related to print and electronic ads, but mostly TV infomercials.

Jing Video for Zotero Installation

Another Post

I'm starting to enjoy the readings for my others classes a bit more than when the semester first began. The other day I finished Freedom of Expression©: Resistance and Repression in the Age of Intellectual Property by Kembrew McLeod. McLeod actually licensed the term Freedom of Expression© to show how copyright laws have taken a turn for the worse when it comes to the free flow of information and free speech. The book gives several cultural examples of how copyright "bozos" are taking unfair credit for authorship, preventing new scientific discoveries, and stifling new authorship.

For anyone interested in copyright and fair use, I recommend taking Dr. Currier's class, if time and class schedule permit.

First Assignment

After finishing the first assignment, which was to export 50 citations from both Scopus and Google Scholar, I feel I have a pretty good understanding of Refworks. I've used Refworks before, in my undergrad career as a history major, but not very much. I feel that after this assignment I will only use Refworks to import my bibliographic citations.

During the assigment I observed that the bibliography for the Scopus references included where it was retreived from, while the Google Scholar references (also in 5th APA edition) did not. I hope this disparity does not affect my grade on this assignment, as I created both lists using the same format.

Zotero

After coming across a job post for a part-time virtual bibliographer, for which knowledge of Zotero was a requirement, I am eager to learn the ins-and-outs of the program. Other requirements included expertise with LaTex and Bibtex, so I hope that somewhere within the year I acquaint myself with these systems as well. Tech courses are one of many banes of my existence, but their necessity seems ever present in my hopes of obtaining a career in library/research. It may be because the language involved is mostly alien to me, but I foresee that in time I will come to rely on the skills I build in classes like LIS2600 everyday.

LIS 2600

This blog is primarily to meet the requirements for the class Intro to Information Technologies, but along the way I hope to learn something about myself; not only about the methodologies that compose the way I think and learn, but how to effectively communicate that internal data to others.