Author Archives: Rick Mason

The Common Sense of the Fair-Use Doctrine

Copyright can be a challenging maze for library folk and educators, and no area causes more stress than the Fair-Use Doctrine.  This is mainly because it deals with gray areas of use, presenting guidelines rather than rules. The Common Sense … Continue reading

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Schema.org

Google, Bing and Yahoo have joined their efforts and have created schema.org, a site that offers “a one stop resource” for metadata structure for web pages. There are two schema that stand out as excellent additions to library web sites: … Continue reading

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Google Books Unsettled

The Google Books Settlement was tossed out by U.S. District Judge Denny Chin, arguing that it gave too much power to Google in allowing the company “significant rights to exploit entire books.” The major problem appears to be the issue … Continue reading

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Librarians are Awesome

Wil Wheaton is remembered mostly for either his acting role in Stand By Me, or for his acting role as Wesley Crusher in the first four seasons of Star Trek : The Next Generation. He is, however, involved in many other … Continue reading

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How to Create and Run Your Website

The San Jose Public Library has launched their new website. It has a clean design, with clear indications of how to find the information being sought.  But what really got my attention was the relationship of the library staff to … Continue reading

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Not so Hot Off the Presses

The Guardian newspaper has an interesting story about what can happen when a book from a small publisher wins a prestigious literary award. This is apparently happening more often, as ec0nomic pressures are causing larger publishers to skip innovative/riskier books … Continue reading

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Google Election Maps

The mid-term elections are shaping up to be quite dramatic (although not quite the roller-coaster ride that we had with the 2008 election season). And Google has come up with a new way to visualize the flood of data that … Continue reading

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IMSLP Petrucci Music Library

I’ve been on a project at work that involves tracking down information on some music scores, and have encountered a fantastic resource, the IMSLP/Petrucci Music Library. On this mediawiki-based site resides more than 72,000 scores representing over 29,000 works by … Continue reading

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The Skinny on Sheepskin

Wired is running a story that links the size of e-readers to sheep.  I think it is a stretch (and they admit it, as well), but the story does have a terrific guide to why books have traditionally been their … Continue reading

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Five Laws of Library Science (Ebook edition)

Andy Woodworth has printed an update of Ranganathan’s Five Laws, only how they relate to Ebooks: Five Laws of Library Science (Ebook edition) Ebooks are for use. Every reader his or her ebook. Every book, any ereader. Save the time … Continue reading

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Wikipedia : Lamest Edit Wars

From the folks at Open Source Living comes a link to a Wikipedia page about… Wikipedia pages.  Specifically the Lamest Edit Wars on Wikipedia pages.  The list contains some thought-provoking debates, and some truly trivial arguments. Some highlights of debates … Continue reading

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New Hybrid ILS Front End

A regional group of public libraries in Antwerp, Belgium have announced a new hybrid OPAC for their library software. They have merged WordPress with AquaBrowser to create a web presence with the capabilities they felt were most important for their … Continue reading

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Library Staff Using Online Tools

WebJunction has posted the survey results for online tool usage by library staff, and a few of the results might surprise: The online tool that has had at least some use by the highest percentage of staff is Online Courses, … Continue reading

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OCLC Questions

Jonathan Rochkind at Bibliographic Wilderness weighs in on the OCLC issue, and ultimately asks a lot of significant questions that don’t have easy answers. We all need to be asking significant questions, not only of OCLC, SkyRiver, and III, but … Continue reading

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Chickens in the Library

So, what would you do if live chickens were released in your library?  Is this covered in your organization’s disaster plan? If you need to examine another library’s response, review this Shelf Check comic for the following procedure: Alert the … Continue reading

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OCLC’s Response to Lawsuit

Just received via OCLC Member Update e-mail: The following statement is from Larry Alford, Chair, OCLC Board of Trustees, and Jay Jordan, OCLC President and CEO: “On July 29, SkyRiver Technology Solutions and Innovative Interfaces, Inc. filed suit against OCLC, … Continue reading

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Unicorn Validator

Unicorn, W3C’s unified validation service, is live. As someone who has found the W3C html, css and feed validators to be valuable tools in web design, the merging of the three tools into one interface is a terrific step.  With … Continue reading

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Non Words

What would you call a collection of non words? That question occurs to me with the news that Oxford University Press has a vault containing millions of “non words” notated on 4″ x 6″ cards.  These are the words that … Continue reading

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The Positive No

No One Nos : Learning to Say No to Bad Ideas is an article on A List Apart that discusses when and how to address those situations where, for a variety of reasons, your best option is to tell someone … Continue reading

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