Impress Your Professor: Legal Woes

A quick roundup of some of the week's biggest library tech news:

The fight over "net neutrality" continues, and not in a direction that will benefit end users. This week courts ruled against the FCC's efforts to prevent Internet service providers from charging certain clients extra to deliver their content to users.

Meanwhile, Google's legal woes over its Books project continue, this time over visual art in digitized books. According to the New York Times, visual artists were mostly excluded from the company's settlement with book authors and publishers.

In potentially less litigious news, the Library of Congress Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room installed a unique new scanner for patron use. The only one of its kind in the United States, the machine was originally produced by the company book2net for the British Library, and it can scan an entire newspaper page in 0.3 seconds. From photos on the site linked above, the color scans look gorgeous.

Impress Your Professor: Google vs. Amazon, Sunday Sunday Sunday!

While the media was drowning in Google Wave's backwash this week, the information behemoth more quietly announced its intent to enter the e-reader market in 2010 with "Google Editions."

An article in Wired magazine details the announcement made Thursday at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany. Five years after launching Google Books, the company plans to start selling e-books and put itself in direct competition with Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Reader. Editions users could buy e-books from Google directly or from other booksellers such as Barnes and Noble or Amazon and read them on any device with a Web browser, including smartphones.

Will Google Editions books on your phone be the Kindle killer that some expect?

Impress Your Professor: Technical Flu

Warning: This entry will not cause dizzines, dry mouth, or fever. It will, however, possibly cause you to spend large amounts of time playing on Google.

With the pig sickness cause great panic (thank you local television news) and the seasonal flu about to kick in, I thought it was about to time show you all the procrastination tool that is Google Flu Trends. While you all go check to see if the illness is lurking on your block, I'll point out that Google has just created a brilliant use of information search technology. This website employs an algorithm that tracks people searching for terms that match flu symptoms. Google then works their magic to extrapolate the data to create charts determining how the flu is striking specific geographic areas.

Cool. I know.

But there is a bigger picture to be seen here, beyond Google and beyond the flu. In putting together their colorful charts and graphs, Google is not only showing that information can be useful, they are also showing that information can be beautiful.

To check out more information displayed in helpful and gorgeous ways, I highly recommend checking out the website Information is Beautiful.

Stay well everybody, the semester has just begun.

Impress Your Professor: Google Books Settlement

I apologize for this post being late (and short)! This week, NPR had a long interview involving several people about who should control the virtual library. They brought on authors, a person from google books, and callers from libraries. It was a very interesting conversation and I highly recommend it.

Who do you think should control the digital library?

YouTube Tuesday: Google Dance

Google Books Settlement
An overview of Google Books and their take on the settlement with authors and publishers.



Just Dance
Librarian: An Interpretative Dance

Impress Your Professor: Word!

I was reading through my RSS feeds a few weeks back (Google Reader, you are so addictive) and came across a Wordle of President Obama's Inauguration speech. The word cloud shows that the words he spoke the most were "new" and "nation."

If you've never seen or heard of Wordle, it is a program that creates word clouds based on the prominence of a each word's use. It's one of those new fangled ways of reading. While I will argue that it certainly will not replace reading, it does give and interesting spin on how we can absorb the overly meaning or theme of something. These word clouds are interesting because they break an idea, webpage, or speech down into a single, textual image.

For example, the Wordle below is comprised of the text I cut and pasted from the About SLIS webpage. We are dominated by information.



I suggest inputting your own information and seeing what comes out. Warning, this may be addictive.

YouTube Tuesday: Find it Fast!

I am a Scholar!
Google it, but better.



This Is Why I Love My Public Library
No lies... I really just wanted to post something about zombies.

Impress Your Professor: Technological Preservation

Most people think of technology as that "new and shiny stuff." You know, the gleaming, uber-thing MacBook air.... or that fun new digital camera. What most people don't consider is that all this fancy new technology can also help preserve the past. In this month's ASIST bulletin, Steve Hardin writes about the role of universities and preservation of "cultural memory."

The article touches upon Google Books and other features of Web 2.0. It's an interesting read which has me thinking I should scan all my print photo albums and save them in multiple locations. The article debates whether or not universities should be the stewards of memory, but it leaves me thinking that we should do all we can (with our new shiny toys) to preserve the past.

What do you think?

YouTube Tuesday

The Wisdom of Google
A brief introduction to finding full text articles in Google Scholar.



Book Busted
This is not one of our typical "fun" post videos. But, it does involve a book... sorta.

Impress Your Professor: There's No "I" in "Team"

Google is like The Blob out of one of those early horror movies. It just grows and grows and grows, consuming everything in its path. Soon, nothing will be safe from its evil clutches. The Google Blob will just continue to grow until it covers the planet in its amoeba like form.

Or at least that's what most people think. And, with Google's current efforts to scan every book known to man, that is what many librarian's think.

What does Google think about all this: Meh. They're ambivalent.

In this month's Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, author Sawne D. Miksa breaks down the Googlization of the world (or at least how it impacts libraries) in her article "Them! Google’s Ambivalence toward Library and Information Science." She states that, "It is a bit extreme to paint librarians and Google locked in the same battle." When Google set out to create their Book Search, they were not seeking to put libraries and their caretakers out of business. In fact, Google does not even consider libraries their competition. Google states, "We consider our primary competitors to be Microsoft and Yahoo."

So why the disconnect? If Google is not trying to swallow up the job of libraries, why are librarians so afraid?

It looks like another case of popularity versus relevance when it comes to cataloging material. Librarians have typically relied on human judgment to create a top down hierarchy of classification for their materials. Google, on the other hand, churns everything through an algorithm that spits out which pages are most popular. Google's theory is that "a page is important if it is pointed to by other important pages."

Librarians fear that such a popularity contest is not the best method of information organization. Just because a page is popular does not mean that it is the best resource available.

So we've found the disconnect, now what are we going to do about it?

Google is not going to disappear anytime soon. Libraries are not going to disappear anytime soon. Instead of butting heads, the two groups should work together. Cooperation would be beneficial to both parties.

Google writes: "Much of the highest quality information in the world may be found in tens of millions of books tucked away in libraries and on publisher's shelves. These books can be tremendous assets - but only if people know that they exist."

As an example, I've been looking to get my hands on Paul Watson's Where War Lives. The university library does not have a copy, the WRLC consortium does not have a copy, my local library system does not have copy. But, I know where to find a book (at a library!) thanks to Google books. Google has worked with OCLC WorldCat to offer a "Find this Book in a Library" feature. Now I know that I just have to go through the Prince Georges' County Library system to get my greedy little hands on Watson's book.

Google is not "out to get us." Libraries should work with Google to make their materials more widely and easily accessible. And maybe, find a way to incorporate some good ole classification rules to the material while their at it.