LISNews Librarian And Information Science News

The Librarian is Dead...Long Live the Librarian "What libraries need to do now is make it easier for librarians to share their work on the wider web and not just hide them behind a library login. Instead of publishing bookmarks with “cool reading lists for this month” or putting big signs on their shelves indicating good reads, libraries should instead feature librarian online resource lists as their primary offering."

BART has teamed up with the Contra Costa County Public Library system to set up a novel automated book-lending system that will launch Thursday at the Pittsburg/Bay Point station.

A vending-like machine located at the station will hold some 400 books that can be checked out for free by anyone with a valid Contra Costa County library card. A patron will insert the card, get access to the available titles and check out up to three books. A robotic arm will retrieve the books.

DailyLit, which offers up chunks of books on a daily basis, is now offering information from Wikipedia on various topics and bits of information.

Spam e-mail turned 30 just a few days ago and this article tells us the history of spam. It's an interesting read and well worth the time just to see who the 1st spammer was. Also check out this cool site of spam poetry, that's right poems created from spam.

An interesting post from Webware on the use of tags with the Flickr/Library of Congress project. The post is on a presentation given at the Web 2.0 expo.

Are you tired of reading banal BS on Twitter?

Or maybe, just maybe, does it scare you that so many people Twitter the most personal things?

Well it scares Tycho too. And today's Penny Arcade tackles the topic of Twittering when it goes a little too far.

Warning: Language is not for the easily offended. Regardless, it's still hilarious.

Quiet revolution: Simon Midgley says By embracing the interactive, user-generated world of web 2.0, libraries can ensure they keep pace with bold new ways of learning, the days when libaries could sit back and wait for students to arrive are long gone. They are having to take a far more active, professional approach to marketing their services.

From the abstract of Can Social Bookmarking Improve Web Search?:

Social bookmarking is a recent phenomenon which has the potential to give us a great deal of data about pages on the web. One major question is whether that data can be used to augment systems like web search. To answer this question, over the past year we have gathered what we believe to be the largest dataset from a social bookmarking site yet analyzed by academic researchers. Our dataset represents about forty million bookmarks from the social bookmarking site del.icio.us. We contribute a characterization of posts to del.icio.us: how many bookmarks exist (about 115 million), how fast is it growing, and how active are the URLs being posted about (quite active). We also contribute a characterization of tags used by bookmarkers. We found that certain tags tend to gravitate towards certain domains, and vice versa. We also found that tags occur in over 50 percent of the pages that they annotate, and in only 20 percent of cases do they not occur in the page text, backlink page text, or forward link page text of the pages they annotate. We conclude that social bookmarking can provide search data not currently provided by other sources, though it may currently lack the size and distribution of tags necessary to make a significant impact.

Link stolen from Lorcan Dempsey's weblog.

BookLamp offers an interesting and (ahem) novel idea when it comes to finding books.

Those familiar with Pandora know that it works by analyzing a musician or song that you like and making choices for new songs based on the artist, style, beat, and other musical elements. BookLamp seeks to do that, but with books. Through the analysis of things like writing style, word use, and the like, BookLamp tries to make recommendations for further based on similarities between the book you selected and other books within its database.

A video on their site explains everything in greater detail.

They've only got a few items in the database, but they're looking to grow... and hopefully have their idea purchased by Google.

Yes I "borrowed" the title of the post from Meredith Farkas, but I thought I'd post her post here to get a broader response. How is your library assessing social technologies in the library? The comments have some good thoughts, but what are others doing?