Monthly Archives: July 2007

Rethinking the Catalogue

Rethinking the Catalogue (pdf) is a paper that was delivered to the Innovative Ideas Forum in Australia by Alison Dellit and Kent Fitch.  It presents another perspective on the state of library catalogues, and how we can go about improving them. from Resource Shelf … Continue reading

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Google Code for Educators

Interested in quick and straightforward tutorials for making dynamic websites and such?  Check out Google Code for Educators to get a few ideas and examples that you can use to enhance your projects. found on the Official Google Blog

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Healthy Meetings

Eight Tips for Healthy Meetings is a post by Karen, a.k.a. Free Range Librarian. Having spent a fair amount of time in meetings both good and bad, these are excellent guidelines for increasing one’s chances for running a productive and useful … Continue reading

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American Sign Language Video Dictionary

The ASL Video Dictionary is exactly that:  a dictionary of sign language that covers words, common phrases, and even religious signs. found on MetaFilter

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Photosynth demonstration

This demonstration of Photosynth, software from Microsoft that creates links among pictures based on elements within the picture, is fascinating to watch. The most fascinating thing about this demo is you can start to sense the potential for this technology, … Continue reading

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Diary of Saad Eskander

The Diary of Saad Eskander, Director of the Iraqi National Library and Archive is available via the British Library website.  In the diary, Dr. Eskander details the day-to-day challenges faced by the library staff as they attempt to do their … Continue reading

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WebRunner

WebRunner is a project derived from Mozilla’s Firefox web browser that lets you install a site-specific browser on a computer.  The browser would be lacking the usual menus and toolbars, and would open everything within one browser window. This is designed for … Continue reading

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Gliffy

Gliffy is an interesting flash-based online application that lets you create organizational charts, flowcharts, entity-relationship diagrams, and floorplans, and other projects  Registration is required, but Gliffy is free with some limitations (you have a limited number of projects that you can … Continue reading

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Britain Rejects Copyright Extension

The British Government has rejected an extension of copyright beyond the current 50 year term.  This is interesting for a few reasons, including the impending rush of British Invasion music becoming royalty-free, but mostly because it may signal a sea change … Continue reading

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Optimal Copyright Term Length

Forever Minus a Day?  Some Theory and Empirics of Optimal Copyright (Pdf), a presentation by Rufus Pollock, examines the history of copyright terms and determines that the optimal term length is about 14 years (half of what the original copyright term was in both … Continue reading

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VuFind released

VuFind, touting itself as “The Library OPAC meets Web 2.0”, has been released.  It is an open-source OPAC replacement that works for Voyager integrated library system (ILS) for now — they are planning to expand to other ILSs soon. This … Continue reading

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Harry Potter and the Copyrighted Material

When TechCrunch posted about images of the pages of the upcoming Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows being available via a torrent site called The Pirate Bay, they were reporting about a newsworthy event within their blog’s scope (technology and … Continue reading

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Something to think about

A post on the Freakonomics blog titled “If Public Libraries Didn’t Exist, Could You Start One Today?” contains some interesting parallels to some of today’s copyright/publishing concerns. from Librarian.net

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Buddy is Real

In what has to be one of the most interesting comments without clarification in an interview, “Gene Ambaum”, co-creator of the Unshelved comic, states that Buddy the Book Beaver is real. How much of him is real?  His checkered past?  … Continue reading

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The Open Library

The Open Library is a project I have been hoping for years that someone would start – an open source universal book catalog.   Think WorldCat meets Wikipedia meets Amazon and you won’t be far off. So go to their demo … Continue reading

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Footnote

Footnote describes itself as “History for the People”, and it’s collection of online historical resources is very good.  The free section of the site makes it worth the visit (and this blog focuses on resources that are free and relatively … Continue reading

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PLoS ONE goes 2.0

PLoS ONE, an open access publishing site created by the Public Library of Science (PLoS), has instituted a ratings system for articles published through them. By asking readers to rate every article they read for insight, reliability, and style, they … Continue reading

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Free Science Search Tools

A Quick Look of a Few Free Science Search Tools is a post on ResourceShelf (if you only have time to follow two blogs, they should be the other one!) that provides a good starting point for finding free and/or … Continue reading

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Translations and Translators

Foreign Languages : Translations and Translators is a collection of links from Academic-Geneology.com to help with many of your translation needs. from a posting to Web4Lib

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Open Access better for Journal Survival?

An interesting, but non-conclusive, study has found that open access journals are ten times less likely to cease publication than their traditional counterparts.  Might this become a reason for journals to adopt open access – namely to broaden readership and … Continue reading

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