We’re back from Croatia; got back on Tuesday night. And let me tell you, we almost didn’t. I was seriously this close to not coming home several times. I can’t speak for all of Croatia, but Dalmatia (the region from about Zadar south) is gorgeous. Plus the weather was perfect, the ocean is warm, it’s very relaxing, & every cup of espresso I had was orders of magnitude better than.. Read More
I’m off to Croatia later today for the LIDA conference. I’m presenting a paper, of course – one doesn’t travel that far just to attend a conference, or at least I don’t. I also don’t travel that far & to a place that cool without making some vacation time, so Yvonne is joining me & we’re spending several days before the conference touring around the Southern Dalmatian coast. Sweet! I.. Read More
I spoke to Dave Lankes yesterday about Reference Extract and Bibliomancer, two new projects at the Information Institute of Syracuse. Dave explained these two projects very clearly: Both are specialty search engines. The corpus searched by Reference Extract is URLs scraped from of dig ref transactions. The corpus searched by Bibliomancer is the content of the pages at those URLs. Dave is interested in having some evaluation done of these.. Read More
The librarian invasion of Wikipedia continues. The WikiProject for Librarians now has 10 members & a fair To Do list. And this past weekend I got an internal message (a function of Wikipedia that I didn’t even know existed) from Michael Snow, that he’s written a piece on this for The Wikipedia Signpost. This piece appeared in today’s Signpost. In this piece Michael writes that “some people were voicing concern.. Read More
Here’s one for all you PhD students and Masters students looking at paper topics out there: Kiernan, N.E., Kiernan, M., Oyler, M.A., & Gilles, C. (2005). Is a Web Survey as Effective as a Mail Survey? A Field Experiment Among Computer Users. American Journal of Evaluation, 26(2), 245-252. Abstract: With the exponential increase in Web access, program evaluators need to understand the methodological benefits and barriers of using the Web.. Read More
I wrote a while back about the People’s Network Enquiry Service, a pilot chat-based reference service in England, staffed by public librarians. The service had a soft launch about 6 months ago. Today, Luke points out that Enquire was launched for real recently. More remarkably, around a third of library services in England are participating! Can you imagine if a third of all libraries in the US formed a dig.. Read More
The press release on the Cornell Faculty Senate resolution on scholarly publishing, passed 11 May 2005: Cornell University Faculty Senate Endorses Resolution on Open Access and Scholarly Communication (Ithaca, NY, May 17, 2005) The Cornell University Faculty Senate endorsed a resolution concerning scholarly publishing at its meeting on May 11, 2005. The resolution, introduced by the University Faculty Library Board, responds to the increasingly excessive prices of some scholarly publications.. Read More
Thanks to Nelson for bringing this to my attention: Final ‘Star Wars’ film leaked to the Internet, from Reuters “Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith” has been leaked onto a major file-sharing network just hours after opening in theaters… At least two copies of the film, which was first shown in theaters in the early hours of Thursday, have been posted to the BitTorrent file-sharing network… …one.. Read More
An Exotic Evolution, from the WaPo Because the history of Washington has been written by humans, nobody has paid much attention to the fact that 18 Canadian squirrels were released at the National Zoo during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. Legend had it at my alma mater, UMass Amherst, that black squirrels were invented there, or rather bred there. The legend went that the black squirrel was an experiment in.. Read More
A lot of people in Mecklenburg county, that’s who. I was taking another look at the zipcode data from the NCknows pilot recently. I had already looked at percentages in the stats reports: approximately 75% from within NC, 5% from other states, 20% anonymous. (Conclusion: NCknows is primarily serving North Carolinians, with a fairly minor investment in serving non-North Carolinians.) But I recently had the thought to ask our GIS.. Read More