as told by the Librarian in Black

pdftoword.com

Ever wonder what the licensing breakdown is? Check this out.

Prototype as if you are right.
Listen as if you are wrong.

Helene Blowers

In 1985, alone in his home in Bonn, Germany, Friedhelm Hillebrand sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper. As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks, and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always clocked in under 160 characters. That became Hillebrand’s magic number—and set the standard for one of today’s most popular forms of digital communication: text messaging.

Los Angeles Times, May 3

Two PhD's???

Found by Orange Crate Art

Burn the metadata

More

Marshall McLuhan would enjoy this extension of man...

Peter Funch

http://www.globalforesight.net

Ithaka's 2006 Studies of Key Stakeholders in the Digital Transformation in Higher Education

Ross Housewright and Roger Schonfeld (2008)

Shortcovers
Discover thousands of bestselling books, chapters, news and magazine articles, short stories, blog posts and more, anywhere, anytime online and on your mobile device.

Bookcoverarchive.com

Not sure how they can do this legally, maybe they are claiming "fair use"..?

The latest attempt to take on the challenge of indexing the "deep", "hidden" or "grey web".

Here is the write up.

Confessions of a Science Librarian

1. Ithaka’s 2006 Studies of Key Stakeholders in the Digital Transformation in Higher Education
   
   
2. How Readers Navigate to Scholarly Content: Comparing the changing user
   behaviour between 2005 and 2008 and its impact on publisher web site design and function
   
   
3. College Students' Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources
   
   
4. Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World
   
   
5. Generations Online in 2009
   
   
6. The Future of the Internet III
   
   
7. Networked Workers: Most workers use the internet or email at their jobs, but they say these technologies are a mixed blessing for them
   
   
8. Use of Cloud Computing Applications and Services
   
9. 2009 Horizon Report
   
   
10. Scholarly Information Practices in the Online Environment: Themes from the Literature and Implications for Library Service Development
    
    
11. National Consultation on Access to Scientific Research Data
    
    
12. Agenda for Developing E-Science in Research Libraries
    
    
13. Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources
    
    
14. Skills, Role & Career Structure of Data Scientists & Curators: Assessment of Current Practice & Future Needs
    
    
15. Semantic Enrichment: The Key to Successful Knowledge Extraction from STM Literature
    
    
16. No Brief Candle: Reconceiving Research Libraries for the 21st Century
    
    
17. Preservation in the Age of Large-Scale Digitization
    A White Paper
    
    
18. A Survey of Digital Humanities Centers in the United States
    
    
19. Library as Place: Rethinking Roles, Rethinking Space
    
    
20. Current Models of Digital Scholarly Communication: Results of an Investigation Conducted by Ithaka for the Association of Research Libraries
    
    
21. The Next Generation of Academics: A Report on a Study Conducted at the University of Rochester
    
    
22. Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester
    
    
23. The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2008
    
    
24. Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models: Exploring the costs and benefits
    
    
25. More People, Not Just More Stuff: Developing a New Vision for Research Cyberinfrastructure
    
    
26. Our Cultural Commonwealth: The report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences
    
    
27. Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
    
    
28. Transformational Times:. An Environmental Scan Prepared for the ARL Strategic Plan Review Task Force
    
    
29. Finding Context: What Today’s College Students Say About Conducting Research in the Digital Age

Web Designer Depot.com

Part 1: The Market.
Part 2: The Technologies.
Part 3: The Publishers.
Part 4: The Languages.
Part 5: eBooks and Summary

Goto Advanced

Expand the date range.
You can search by "crawl date"

Academic Earth.org

see also: Researchchannel.org

Seems there is an aggregator for everything these days....

Clickstream Data Yields High-Resolution Maps of Science

Johan Bollen, Herbert Van de Sompel1, Aric Hagberg, Luis Bettencourt, Ryan Chute, Marko A. Rodriguez, Lyudmila Balakireva

Abstract:
Intricate maps of science have been created from citation data to visualize the structure of scientific activity. However, most scientific publications are now accessed online. Scholarly web portals record detailed log data at a scale that exceeds the number of all existing citations combined. Such log data is recorded immediately upon publication and keeps track of the sequences of user requests (clickstreams) that are issued by a variety of users across many different domains. Given these advantages of log datasets over citation data, we investigate whether they can produce high-resolution, more current maps of science.

Want to track your stuff or your loved ones? Pocketfinder offers 30 foot GPS resolution. Charge the tag (it lasts about a week), attach it and login to a website or call a number to find out where your tag is on the planet, all for $129 and $13 a month. You can even preset designated areas and if the tag leaves it you get texted a warning message. Start tracking your teenagers now!!!

Booktype

Thanks Fubiz!

seems ebooks are beginning to gain traction in North America. Amazon's Kindle is doing well, iPhone has a lot of titles, Chapters/Indigo has a big collection, all for sale of course. How many books does your library have available for download to PDA, iPhone, etc.? I'm guesing, not many. The question seems to be are publishers and traditional library vendors planning to let us hook our car to this train? or are we going to be passed by?

In today's IP environment, libraries would never have been able to emerge. If we get starved of content, we'll be seeing the Dodo sooner than later. Think about it...every week I see something the library used to be able to buy but no longer can due to technology barriers or licensing barriers.

By the end of 2009, tens of thousands of new books will be added to the approximately 6,000 items in Cornell's collection already available on Amazon. All of the books are in the public domain in the United States, and many are currently out of print.

"Although demand for online access to digital books has been growing, books as artifacts continue to have a real value," said Oya Rieger, associate university librarian for information technologies. "This initiative supports the reading and research patterns of users who prefer the affordances provided by physical
books - they support deep reading, underlining and writing comments in the margins. The Web is great for easy access and browsing, but because digital content can sometimes be ephemeral, physical books continue to serve as valuable reference sources on your shelf."

For a sample of the titles offered on Amazon, go to http://bookstore.library.cornell.edu, and check Amazon.com throughout the year to see new titles as they are added.

Gwen Glazer, Cornell

Mashable.com

By Jonathan Rochkind

"why content providers might increasingly prefer electronic versions to paper versions–users actually have fewer rights with them."

Association publications, pdf downloads, license forbids libraries from holding them. Not a great trend....

Visualization of Circulation Data

Read all about it.

"“We have all operated for the last few years with the idea that online piracy was something that publishers of Tolkien or science fiction had to worry about, but who would bother with the specialized books coming out of university presses?” Now, he said, it’s clear that many will bother."

— Scott Jaschik

Marc Cote writes in the Globe and Mail that Canadians lack awareness about Canadian authors because our media is heavily U.S. centric and produced and schools are not giving enough attention to Canadian authors. I get confused between what is a Canadian book: one with a Canadian author, or a book produced in Canada? Does it matter. Don't the best authors travel the world to hon their skills? I read alot of Canadian Non-fiction, and so do others I know. Fiction is fickle, like movies I tend to not care who makes they only that they are great. I find a away to find them. Yes I agree, Canadian students should maybe read Earth and High Heaven instead of To Kill a Mockingbird. The point of literature courses however, is to read, comprehend, discuss and learn how to craft a story. In that case the title itself should not matter only the themes should be relevant to the experience of students. Seems like a few publishing/author folks are crying foul because they don't get as many blockbusters as they would like. Maybe the blockbuster economy or business model is not sustainable anyways?

In Web Age, Library Job Gets Update
Feb. 15th 2009

Start Here

O’Reilly Media by John Broughton.

Click on the map to download the pdf (810KB)

Created by Richard Watson, the 2009 trend map moves on from the subway map theme of the last years to show the year ahead.

Comic Book Type

A great video report (love the idea!) on an internal research finding at NASA.

1.5 million public domain ebooks + 230 000+ licensed ebooks are coming to a cell phone soon. Woohoo. Japan has had this for years now. Should we be impressed?

Until the collusion here gets nipped in the bud, we won't see true innovation for years to come. Our firms only plant seeds they know will grow to be blockbusters. They don't experiment. Look at all the publishers closing down units in this tough economy. Maybe they would not have to if they dropped their greed and took a few risks.

Google Books Mobile

Location Awareness comes to Google Maps.

Google Latitude

Richard Florida's Report on the Good the Bad and the Ugly in Ontario's economy

Although I have read everything Richard Florida has written, and enjoyed the inspirational nature of his talk today, being an urban studies scholar myself, Mark Leggott blew my mind, and it seems, many others that attended too, from what I heard in the halls of the convention centre. While Richard talked about changing the world we live in to harness our talents, Mark Leggott and his teams are doing it FAST, and NOW. No talking, no consultations, no debates. He has a vision and he is on a journey to get there. He is building the world we have dreamed about or never even thought possible. Speechless. Should keep my noodle figiting for months to come.

Labels: OCULASC09

UNC Flashmob

Maybe we need one at SuperConference on the exhibition floor?

This is my website of the month! Failblog.org


see more pwn and owned pictures

Written by Derek Law

This new breed of information user doesn't simply want everything made simple. They have a quite different value structure. On the one hand they want choice, being much less clear that there is right information and wrong information, but at the same time they want selectivity. They want instant results and instant gratification because a fundamental tenet is that convenience trumps quality. They want just enough to complete the task in hand - not complete or perfect. So it has to be cheap, fast and good. Both information and technology have to be mobile and available anytime, any place, anywhere.

Such users expect research to be easy and feel they can be independent in the process. They don't seek help from librarians and only occasionally from teachers or peers. As a result, when they can't find what they need, they give up and assume that the information cannot be found. Students often stop after their initial searches thinking they have completed the research process and fail to choose a particular focus. If it's not on the Web, it doesn't exist. Access to full text articles seems to have changed students' cognitive behaviour. Instead of having to read through material at the library, they can now download material at their desks. They do not have to take notes or read through them to develop themes and ideas, an activity central to a focused research project, because electronic articles enable cutting and pasting, almost certainly leading to increased plagiarism - although I suspect that this is done through ignorance more often than malice.

EDUCAUSE

Icons away!

From LibraryThing

From Gutenburg.com

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Heard this back in 1998 too.

1. NEW EBOOK READERS WILL MAKE LAPTOPS AND IPHONES LOOK OLD
2. CRITICAL MASS HAS BEEN ACHIEVED, NOW ITS ABOUT GROWTH (see the Overdrive link below)
3. MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WILL EXPERIENCE DIGITAL INK FOR THE FIRST TIME AND THEY WILL LOVE IT
4. IF THERE’S ONE THING EVERYONE WANTS NOW, IT’S COMFORT
5. WHAT YOU WANT, WHEN YOU WANT IT? – NOW THAT’S PRACTICAL
6. DO YOU WANT TO DOWNLOAD 1 MOVIE OR 1,000 EBOOKS?
7. THE MONEY PEOPLE: COST OF ENTRY IS STILL LOW, POTENTIAL HIGH
8. A MILLION EBOOKS AT YOUR FINGERTIPS: IT’S THE “OTHER INTERNET”
9. THE BOOK IS JUST A FORMAT, NO DIFFERENT THAN A CD, VHS, OR DVD
10. ONE WORD: POWER
11. AUTHORS, PUBLISHERS, AND DISTRIBUTORS BENEFIT FINANCIALLY
12. PLAYING AROUND WITH BOOKS IS OK, READING THEM IS BETTER
13. A TRULY GREEN TECHNOLOGY – WITHOUT EVEN TRYING
14. WITH A CHALLENGING ECONOMY, COMPANIES WILL LOOK TO ENTER EBOOK BUSINESS
15. TRY IT ONCE, YOU’RE HOOKED FOR GOOD
16. THE IPHONE, NINTENDO DS WILL INSTANTLY EXPOSE AND PROMOTE EBOOKS
17. RIGHTS FIGHTS: IT’S ALL-GOOD WITH EBOOKS
18. THE HUGE NUMBER OF FREE EBOOKS AVAILABLE
19. A NEW GENERATION OF INDEPENDENT AUTHORS WILL NOW COME FORWARD
20. IT’S THE CONTENT, STUPID

Reported by iLibrarian

Cool.

Googlization of Everything