Government Information

Access to Government Documents in an easy to retrieve and searchable way is in a constant state of flux. One Gov. department may offer superior searching capabilities where another might have TXT versions in a humongous list. Today’s complaint is the lack of RSS being provided by Thomas.gov. The handy web-site that allows you to follow current and previous US Government bills. Luckily, there are other options (govtrack.us and washingtonwatch.com) however govtrack.us has it’s technical difficulties and washingtonwatch.com isn’t inuitive.  Thomas.gov needs to provide RSS status to bills.

Govtrack.us also offers web-code to embed tracking, but it doesn’t play well with wordpress:

.GovTrackEmbed { font-size: 85%; color: black; border: 1px solid black; background-color: white; padding: 5px; width: 350px }
.GovTrackEmbedTable { font-size: 85%; color: black }
.GovTrackEmbedTitle { font-weight: bold; color: blue; text-align: center }
.GovTrackEmbedHighlight { background-color: AntiqueWhite }
.GovTrackEmbedFooter { font-size: 90% }
.GovTrackEmbedDate { font-size: 90%; }
.GovTrackEmbed a { text-decoration: none }

Zotero

Some good news for Opensource software, in which a suit was dismissed, filed by Thomson Reuters  against George Mason University and an injunction against Zotero ( “a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources”). Thomson puts out  EndNote (search online bibliographic databases, organize their references, images and PDFs in any language, and create bibliographies and figure lists instantly) and complained that Zotero’s ability to access EndNote code and files, thus allowing one to copy/access their EndNote citations, breached a reverse-engineering clause with George Mason University, as they produce Zotero.

Way to go Thomson, go after the research/educational institutions and tie them up in courts. That’s what we need more of, wasting education time and dollars on legal fees. I’m glad the judge saw this case clearly and didn’t side with the giant information behemoth.

And if you haven’t used, Zotero is great and free product.

 

[via LLB]

Library update

The law library firm for which I work is relocating. From one side of Capitol Mall in Sacramento, to the other side of the street. Our new building is brighter, bigger, and new! The library space is fantastic and should prove less cumbersome. Our old building was built in the 70s and shows it. I never understood designing a building to look and feel like a WWII bunker:

 

Our new space looks to the future. And by future I mean that it resembles a sand-crawler of Tatooine fame:

     

 

It’s important to work in a place that feels comfortable and values your worth. Moving out of the “dungeon-esque” library space, after 30+ years, will revitalize the firm and position for a better tomorrow.

World Digital Library

The World Digital Library has launched and I’ve only been able to take a small moment exploring it. They offer fantastic primary resources from around the globe with high quality images, brilliant descriptions, and more. It’s an easy to use website with search and browse capabilities, giving it an interactive feel that makes one feel like they are navigating their way around the world. The timeline feauture below the world map is an amazing way to narrow or expand the number of items in a given time-frame.

Japanese Battle Standards

As their resources grow I imagine that this will be a great go to place for writing research papers, educational opportunities, and for many a source for learning and expanding cultural knowledge.

Get It While You Can!

National Library Week enjoys it’s last day for the year on April 18th 2009. If you haven’t taken advantage of possible amnesty for fines and/or late materials then I recommend visiting your local library and soon! Some districts offer better terms of forgiveness, I for one will turn in Battlestar Galactica season 3 DVD a few days late and at no expense. Plus there are probably a ton of other rad things going on at your library that you don’t even know about/ couldn’t even imagine. Head over to their website, check out the library week offerings and upcoming events- you shouldn’t be disappointed.

Cuil versus Google

I’ll be the first to admit that for fast and free searching I head to Google. I’ll punch in my search terms with limited Boolean logic and see what turns up. Usually, I’ll go over more than just the first 10 hits and  hope for success or leads. I may find a blurb or two that can put me on another path and direct my search into specific legal, academic, news, etc. databases. 

There are times when I head off Google and test out other search engines, perhaps their crawlers have captured something different. Cuil is something of an anti-google. Their site is in all black versus all white background, they aren’t a hulking billion dollar entity, and they proclaim:

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency. http /www.cuil.com/info/

However, like Google they want to stake their claim in web searching and have a goofy name.  Unfortunately their results aren’t as comprehensive or useful as Google’s results.  I really want Cuil to give me better results that it does. Comparison searches left Cuil in the dust. I do like their results display, single bar of results (adverts) above two column (actual) results. Additionally, they embed images and maps next to search results when possible.  Unfortunately, the results just aren’t there- look at the difference between Cuil and Google when searching: san diego statistics.  Cuil gives us a list of sports and athletic websites while Google displays crime and US Census Bureau links as first hits. If I wanted sports stats I would have just added “sports” in the search box. This is one search where “superficial popularity metrics” wins out. I’ll continue to test out Cuil as my research needs change; but at this point it’ll only serve as a comparison to Google and other search engines.

Want to read more, check-out this CNET /Webware article: http://news.cnet.com/new-search-engine-cuil-takes-aim-at-google/

World Digital Library

My graduate school professor, Jill Hurst-Wahl of all things digital librarianship, posted this via Twitter and it looks a fantastic project. [WDL]

“The World Digital Library will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research.”

It’s an exciting use of libraries and collections on the Internet. I imagine that it will have many uses in and outside of the class-room too. I didn’t have much to look forward to on April 21, 2009 but now I do!

Forever Got Shorter

Digital files are tragic and temporary. Their short life span is only beaten by goldfish. It doesn’t take much to make data on a hard drive, floppy disk, CD/DVD, thumb drive, etc. unusable, inaccessible, or corrupted. David Pogue in the NY Times does a nice little interview with Dag Spicer, curator of the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. I highly recommend the article to the layperson and tech-savvy alike.

Libraries that offer CDs and DVDs face this problem day in and day out. I don’t know how often a library has to reorder scratched CDs and DVDs but in my public library experience damaged media flowed into the library like the Red Sea over the Egyptian soldiers. Would it be cost effective to make archival backups and what legal/copyright implications would a public library face if they had a damaged CD and began to check out a copy? My law library wants to save their historical memories that are currently stored on VHS, audio tapes, CDs, DVDs, book ledgers, photos, etc. In our case cost and practically will be the determining factors for creating backups and data conversion to other physical and digital formats.

There are more problems than solutions at this point but we can all benefit from simple things like having multiple back-up mediums, be it: external and internal hard drives, CD/DVD copies, online storage, tape drives, etc. However, the process is cumbersome, expensive, and time consuming. It may boil down to how important those family photos and movies really are or that DVD copy of Fletch. In short, is it worth trying to save and pass down? What about blogs- the record of our lives? If we care about them, do we print them to acid-free paper and store them in multiple digital document formats? Or do we take our chances with the test of time? I guess, if I come up with something really witty and/or insightful I’ll first twitter it then etch it into stone.

The Death of a Book

Peter Jackson, not the movie director, but the chief scientist and vice president at Thomson Reuters calls  out the physical medium known as the book [via Westblog]. He touts Amazon.com, the Kindle, the drop in reading percentages and book sales, and of course professional online databases. While I understand his point of view and the direction Thomson Reuters wishes the market to move, I see this as an enlargement of the digital divide. From my experience, Thomson Reuters wants their customers to drop their print publications and encourage online access. This is done by raising the costs of print subscriptions, offering unbeatable and temporary discounts for online products, and phasing out print editions. Obviously, a better business choice as it cuts down overhead costs and locks customers into contracts where they are paying for the same content year after year, never owning it, and only leasing it.

If you want the best online experience it costs. Public libraries pay large sums for databases that are comparably handicapped in comparison to their private market counterparts. For example, a Westlaw database at the public library may disallow saving files to a hard drive, thumb-drive, CD-ROM, etc., forcing you to read it there or pay for prints. This is on top of an online product that doesn’t have all the search capabilities, resources, or friendly graphical user interface that is offered to the private market. Westlaw ensures that these limitations are contractually in place. They offer a lower price to the public library, and the product is being made available to the public for free, so it is necessary to weaken the product. It’s an interesting concept, imagine if the book or encyclopedia set that one purchases at the bookstore proves different than the public library copy; for example, their copy has no index or color pictures. It would be an outrage. The purpose of the public library is to level the playing field and provide equal access and information to all. How can they honestly do this when vendors cripple their products because they aren’t getting as much money and it’s use is a public service?

Peter Jackson finds the sheer convenience of digital books, Amazon, and the Kindle as proof that, “In the future, the book is no longer a product; it’s a service.”. That’s a big generalization based upon one company and it certainly can’t apply to ALL book businesses. That statement has to overcome the fact that many are not comfortable or able with technology and the platform isn’t massively affordable. What does jump out of this blog post like a monkey with it’s tail on fire is the Thomson Reuters game plan.

You’re Ruining My Life!

Poor library cataloguing is never good no matter the situation. Today I went to the library with the giddiness of a boy picking up a muchly anticipated Thor comic volume, written by one of his favorite authors- J. Michael Straczynski. Only to find, once I get back to the comforts of my office, that the title is Thor, but it’s a different storyline and a different author all together!

Whoever barcoded and catalogued this must have thought, “another Thor comic, tag it and bag it”. For Jimmy Crickets-sake the cover isn’t even the same! Now I have to go back to the library blather to the circulation staff, prove how nerdy I am, and wait in hopes that the right title arrives next time. Mishaps like this can make a soul head to Amazon.