Science Library Pad

literacy goal for Canada

The Globe has an editorial today "Here's to a new goal: most literate nation".  Unfortunately they lock their content up, so there's no point in linking to it.

Anyway the gist was that children with lots of books at home do well in school.  Presumably this might extend to children with good access to a library, but this was never explicitly stated.  They said Canada can't aspire to be a great manufacturing power, but we could aspire to be a great reading power.

searchblog predictions for 2005

John Battelle's Searchblog A Look Ahead.

Via Lorcan Dempsey.

Serials Ecosystem presentations

The Serials Ecosystem: Perspectives on the Transition from Print to Electronic Journals was presented by UNB (University of New Brunswick) libraries September 25-25, 2004.

There were two presentations by CISTI, as well as other CISTI staff members attending.

Impacts of Electronic Publishing (.zipped PowerPoint) Cameron Macdonald, Director, Publishing, NRC Research Press

Canada's scientific infostructure (.zipped PowerPoint) Bernard Dumouchel, Director General, Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI)

Thanks to Lorcan Dempsey for pointing out that the presentations are up.

options for free site search

- Google

- Atomz is what I usually use, however it is limited in that
"The Atomz Express Search can only be used on sites with 750 total pages or less."

- GigaBlast is a new one on me discovered via Christina's LIS Rant, it is also limited but to "100,000 pages per site"

UPDATE 2005-01-17:
- Feedster as long as your site has an RSS feed

UPDATE 2005-01-26:
- Technorati Searchlet (requires that you register with Technorati for free to enable this tool)

UPDATE 2005-03-01:
Yahoo.  "Note: Yahoo! reserves the right to place advertisements on all Yahoo! Search result pages."
FreeFind.com

automated Creative Commons - Internet Archive publishing

ccPublisher 1.0 is now available for Mac OS X and Windows. Both Windows (.msi) and Mac OS X (.dmg) files are available for download.

ccPublisher is a tool which allows users to select a Creative Commons license and upload their work to the Internet Archive for free hosting and cataloging. It also supports Internet Archive keywords and description information for resource discovery.

from Catalogablog

size your book readage

Jessamy reports on her reading

number of books read in 2004: 103
number of books read in 2003: 75
number of books read in 2002: 91
number of books read in 2001: 78

103 books?  I suck. 

UPDATE 2005-01-03: I have never actually kept a detailed book list with dates.  The closest is the books page from my main personal site, which has reviews and some books listed, but I very rarely update it.  You can also check out a bookshelf of mine.

Herewith, an appropriate excerpt from the Gilmore Girls, "The Road Trip to Harvard".

RORY:  Oh my.

LORELAI:  What's this?

RORY:  It's the library.

LORELAI:  Oh.

RORY:  The biggest library I've ever seen.

LORELAI:  Uh oh.  Brace yourself.

RORY:  What?

LORELAI:  This is just one of the libraries.

RORY:  One of the libraries?

LORELAI: This building is one component of a thirteen million volume collection housed in more than ninety different libraries. It's the oldest library in the United States and the largest academic library in the world. Breathe, breathe.

RORY:  I'm a failure.

LORELAI:  What?

RORY:  I am stupid. 

LORELAI:  Oh stop.

RORY:  I am uniformed and ignorant and. . .I can't even think of a second synonym for uninformed.  I suck.

LORELAI:  Honey.

RORY: Thirteen million volumes? I've read like, what, three hundred books in my entire life and I'm already sixteen? Do you know how long it would take me to read thirteen million books?

LORELAI: But honey, you don't have to read every one of them. "Tuesday's with Morrie?" Skip that. "Who Moved My Cheese?" Just stuff you already know.

RORY: Okay, but every kid coming to Harvard is inevitably reading books, and different books, and I want to be able to converse intelligently with each of them and I can't do that unless I read books, at least a few from every genre and sub-genre.

LORELAI:  Okay, come on.  I'm getting you out of here.

RORY:  I sleep too much.

LORELAI:  No you don't.

RORY:  I've been frittering away my whole life.

LORELAI:  You don't fritter.

RORY:  Did I mention I suck?

LORELAI:  Yes.

RORY:  Well I do. 

Lessig to rebuild Code using Wiki

Open Access News reports a blog posting by Lessig tis the season: II.  Lessig writes

Beginning in February, we'll be posting Version 1 of Code to a Wiki. "Chapter Captains" will then supervise updates and corrections. Depending upon the progress, sometime near June, I will take the product and edit and rewrite it to produce Code, v2. The Wiki will stay live forever (under a Creative Commons license). The edited book will be published in the fall. I have donated my advance for Code, v2 to Creative Commons. All royalties beyond the advance will be donated as well.

At this point, we're collecting "Chapter Captain" (CCs, of course) volunteers. CCs should be expert in the subject of the chapter, and willing to work through the Wiki to produce an updated chapter.

The site for the current version of Code is www.code-is-law.org

UPDATE 2005-03-25: The wiki has been activated.

a sort of librarian celebration

Book Television presents...

Naughty Librarian Month, January 2005

This January, BookTelevision throws open the doors to the forbidden with Naughty Librarian Month. Treat yourself to a month of smart, sexy and provocative programs that will heat up those cold winter nights.

Note: In a bit of unfortunate design, the BookTelevision site appears to require Flash.

For Canadians with digital decoders or satellite, 40 digital channels will be free in January.
See Canadian Digital Channels give it away in January 2005.

Ingenta providing ToC via RSS

Lorcan Dempsey reports in RSS and journal TOCs that Ingenta will be providing in excess of 20,000 new RSS feeds containing the latest table of contents data for the academic journals that are still being actively loaded into our databases.

In case you're wondering about my organization in terms of journal RSS, we're working on it.  We had a meeting about RSS in December.  We are already providing some feeds in other areas.

I don't know that there's a single place you can go to see all the NRC RSS feeds, anyway, here's one set of feeds from IIT (Institute for Information Technology).

possible Montreal social software conference

There is an attempt underway to organize a social software / blog / wiki conference in Montreal.

There is interest in organizing a conference on weblogs and the read/write Web in general in Montreal. We're using this wiki to brainstorm, and the companion blog channel to collect links to relevant posts on our weblogs. / On parle d'organiser une conférence sur les carnets Web et le web à deux sens à Montréal. Ce wiki nous sert à coordonner nos efforts, et le canal amasse les billets pertinents sur nos carnets personnels.

a Canadian blogging conference

NorthernVoice is a one-day, non-profit community blogging conference that's being held at the UBC [University of British Columbia] downtown campus [in Vancouver] on February 19, 2005.

even more on Google Library

Open Access News links up Google’s Library Project: Questions, Questions, Questions from Information Today December 27, 2004. Interesting info and thoughts about this project.

(Side note: This blog is now at a total of 999 hits.)

Plone: enterprise-class content management

InformationWeek reports An Open-Source Solution For Content Management Dec. 22, 2004.

But what about a full-featured CMS from the open-source world? Most early attempts were not well received, but today that has changed. The open-source arena now has its own world-class CMS, called Plone, which is built on Zope; its content-management framework provides a full-featured CMS for open-source-friendly customers. In fact, Plone is more than a CMS -- it is a complete development platform that supports advanced templates and objects, and has a full rendering engine.

future of libraries in digital world

LibrarianInBlack with a great find The Future of Libraries in the Digital Age on NPR All Things Considered, December 14, 2004.

intro to open access for librarians

librarian.net with a posting on An Introduction to Open Access for Librarians

library tech 2004

librarian.net provides some nice linkage to Library Technology 2004: The Current State of Library Automation And Future Trends by Marshall Breeding, Library Technology Officer at Vanderbilt University.

Survivor's Guide to info tech 2005

Network Computing publishes an annual "Survivor's Guide" issue.
I linked previously to just the Business Applications part.

The full issue is Network Computing December 16, 2004. Topics include Security, Storage and Servers and many others.

commentary on Service-Oriented Architecture

Brain.Save() with some nice linkage and commentary on SOA.
He reports that Benjamin Mitchell in a talk at the VBUG 10th Annual Conference makes two big points that I think sometimes get lost in the hype:

· Service-orientation is more about the design of the overall system than a particular communication mechanism.

· The motivation behind service-orientation is to reduce the coupling between applications.

The talk notes are VBUG Service Orientation Presentation Notes.

I assume the related talk was Writing service-orientated applications with VB.NET today (.zipped file)

various LIS sites

There are a bunch of sites starting with LIS* that provide groovy stuff.

LIShost.org provides web hosting for librarians.

LISfeeds.com lists (currently) 128 excellent library-related blogs.
I speak completely impartially of course (since there is a link to SLP there:)

LISnews.com

You can entertain yourself with some Google searches on

lis*.com
lis*.org

library access to scholarship

I'm not sure how useful "reblogging" things is for those of you reading, but anyway, it's useful for me.

The January 2005 issue of Walt Crawford's Cites & Insights [PDF] is now online. This issue contains short pieces on conference blogging and the Google library project and a long section on Library Access to Scholarship in which Walt discusses the NIH plan, the rejected UK recommendations, and some recent articles about OA.

from Open Access News

the future of Google

What’s Next for Google in Technology Review, January 2005.

As seen on Slashdot /.

Includes interesting table of how much data is where:

tivo that net radio

BlogMatrix Sparks (NOTE: Windows only.)

Use BlogMatrix Sparks! to record streaming Internet radio programs and download podcasts and store them in your media player (iTunes or Windows Media Player).

Via Slashdot Realtime Audio Conversion And Serving /.

(Incidentally this is my 100th post.)

the state of software development

The Economist had a nice article Managing complexity in the November 27, 2004 issue.

As software has become more and more pervasive in business and government, and more complicated, the impact of poor software design has been steadily growing. A study earlier this year by the Standish Group, a technology consultancy, estimated that 30% of all software projects are cancelled, nearly half come in over budget, 60% are considered failures by the organisations that initiated them, and nine out of ten come in late.

...

Three main trends are shaping the future of software development and giving hope to those who oversee big software projects. The first is awareness of the need to pay greater attention to the lifecycle of a piece of software, from the initial setting of requirements to ongoing implementation. The second trend is towards automating the testing of software. ... The third trend is the emergence of open-source code, something embraced even by Microsoft, which is often seen by its many critics as the would-be nemesis of the open-source movement.

There are five steps involved in creating a piece of software: enumerating the requirements; designing the program; actually writing the code; testing it; and then deploying it. Traditionally and naturally enough, this was seen as a sequential process. However, ... by the time an organisation gets around to deploying a piece of software, its requirements have often already changed. This... means that an “iterative” model, in which an organisation continually cycles through the five phases, makes more sense than the traditional “waterfall” which puts them in sequence.

You can read some sample research from the Standish Group.

a URL tracking tool

You know what I would like? A tool that treats a URL as a first-class object, as the core of information exchange. What I would like to know is what I have done with a given URL, specifically:

- where did it come from (referring page, received in email, etc.)
- where did it go (read it, printed it, sent in email, posted to blogs A and Q, posted to wikis R and X)

Because any time I have a URL that's more than a few days old, I have no idea. Did I post it already? Where did I post it? Where did it come from? etc.

understanding Web Services and the new business app environment

Some linkage covering Web Services concepts.

The Web Services Kernel from the cleverly-named Brain.Save() blog.

Survivor's Guide to 2005: Business Applications

Integration is still an issue, but Web services are slowly but surely circumventing the need for specialized EAI (enterprise application integration) tools. Four in 10 Web services developers say Web services "absolutely" or "probably" diminish the need for EAI tools, according to a recent survey by Evans Data Corp. And EAI platform providers such as IBM, Tibco and WebMethods appear to agree, as their platforms last year added support for Web services as a method of integration.

Most enterprises have multiple disconnected islands of Web services, partly because of the SOAP interfaces in enterprise-class applications such as PeopleSoft, SAP and Siebel. These easily accessible data sources have raised security concerns. Security will be an even bigger challenge in 2005 as organizations try to get a handle on these services as well as those that support other initiatives, such as integration with trading partners and distributors.

Web services are catching on at midsize companies. A recent Yankee Group study found that among surveyed companies with 1,000 to 1,999 employees, 59 percent plan to deploy Web services in 12 months ....

Standards for security and reliability, meanwhile, are popping up faster than lawsuits over business process patents. Standards such as OASIS' WSDM (Web Services Distributed Management), WS-Policy, WS-ReliableMessaging and WS-Trust are all poised to solve the business problem of cross-domain communication over Web services--with interoperability among platforms. These service silos will converge in the next year, though, as tools enabling SOBA (service-oriented business applications) emerge. These tools will provide a cut-and-paste mechanism for developers to build business applications from disparate services.