Libraries/Info Sci

I’ve been subscribing to Blockbuster’s online rental service (like Netflix) on a trial. I like the service overall, despite some recent shipping delays. Not sure if I’d pay for it long term though.

Coincidentally enough, a few days before Johnny Carson died I added all three DVDs of “Ultimate Collection Starring Johnny Carson”, a collection of Tonight Show clips from his stint, to my queue of wanted DVDs on Blockbuster. At the time I added them to my queue, all 3 were listed as “Available Now”. Now two have “Long Wait” and the third is “Short Wait”. Tons of people are suddenly interested.

The change doesn’t surprise me really, but its amazing to be able to see such a large community’s shifting interests change in almost real time. Truly we are in the information age.

As a side note, I did manage to get ahold of a VHS collection of Johnny Carson clips. Every clip I saw NBC play in tribute the last few days is drawn from these two videos. I’m surprised they didn’t have a better archive available.

I’ve spent the afternoon playing/wrestling with Greenstone, an open source digital library creator. I’ll be using it for my term project in, appropriately enough, Digital Libraries this semester.

While it does some very cool stuff (I might try to get an example set up on the site), it desperately needs a user interface overhaul. The GUI would look at home in Windows 3.1. Greenstone 3.0 is in alpha release, so maybe that’s an improvement. I’ll probably check it out at some point.

And I’m still not sure how I got it to work with images! I tried everything I could think of, but it simply ignored all jpeg and gifs. I downloaded an example library of images from Greenstone’s web site, loaded that, and it worked fine. Then I re-loaded my own library and it has worked since as well. Loading the existing one must have changed a setting somewhere, but I’ve got no idea where. Oh well, good that its working I suppose.

Google has started offering a beta of a new “Google Video” search. The function is a little counterintuitive given the name. No actual video files are searched – instead Google searches transcripts of TV shows (essentially the closed captioning).

I’ve been playing with it for a few minutes, and its kind of a neat idea. More useful for searching news programs than anything else, as it only covers what has already aired and not what is upcoming. And as anyone who has ever looked at closed captions knows, they are often riddled with errors (especially on live broadcasts). See here for a particularly bad example. There’s a limited number of stations covered for now as well (largely California network affiliates). But it’s still in beta and better than nothing.

For now, Google has no ads on the video search results. And as with Google News, the big question is how can Google claim the right to make money off somebody else’s content? I’ll be interested to see if they can spin this or their News section into profit-making.

My introduction to Flickr, combined with Nick‘s comments on tags and Technorati’s addition of searchable tags, have really got my brain moving.

(For the novice, tagging is the practice of assigning identifying keywords or ‘tags’ to a document stored online. Pictures on Flickr, links on Del.icio.us, blog posts on Technorati, etc. Even my ‘category’ assignments for each post could be considered tags. Metadata use in tag form makes searching for documents much more practical.)

My first thought was a knee-jerk reaction: metadata in this form would be much more useful using a standardized vocabulary. Something more along the lines of the Library of Congress Subject Headings, for example. Wouldn’t you rather know that searching for ‘China’ returned everything relevant, and you didn’t miss out on results tagged with ‘Chinese’ or something similar?

But then I got to thinking: The amount of human effort required to make such a standardized vocabulary useful would be staggering. Using an interface like Google Suggest might help in implementation, but wouldn’t solve the issue of creating a definitive tag list in the first place.

So let the creators of content do their own tagging. Yes it’s freeform, but it’s better than nothing. It’ll take time to develop, but perhaps harnessing the power of a group in this manner is the solution. And isn’t a librarian’s job to sort through information and organize it into a useful form? Doing that with tags is no different than other sources.

In the end, the idea of tagging documents has re-introduced the concept of metadata to a wide audience. And that can’t be bad for organizing the web.

Later today when I’ve got a bit more free time I’ll look into adding technorati tags to my own posts.

Tame the Web has a great article up, summarizing 12 tech-related issues and practices librarians should be on top of. I’m to to speed on most of them, and I find the idea of iPods in libraries particularly intriguing.

A few years back the library I worked at experimented with offering audiobooks on 64mb Rio 500s. It didn’t really catch on and the Rios were tossed in the bargain bin at the annual book sale (and thus one became my first mp3 player). I tried out the audiobook service the library offered on them, and the sound quality was the real issue for me. I don’t know what bitrate was used, but it was artifacting all over the place. With an iPod though… the extra storage space really opens up doors for such a loaning program to be successful (including a car adapter would probably help as well). The only stumbling block might be what to do when a patron breaks an iPod accidentally… replacement charges would be rather high.

I also love the idea of libraries creating custom browser toolbars. I wonder how hard that is to do, cause I’m tempted… Or even to figure out how to add a library system’s catalog to Firefox’s plugin type search engines. Hmm, thinking to do!