What I Learned Today…

Web 2.0 and programming tips from a library technology enthusiast, What I Learned Today… covers blogs, rss, wikis and more as they relate to libraries.

Monthly Archives: June 2009

My delicious bookmarks for 2009-06-01

June 3rd, 2009
  • Wubi – Ubuntu Installer for Windows
    Wubi is an officially supported Ubuntu installer for Windows users that can bring you to the Linux world with a single click. Wubi allows you to install and uninstall Ubuntu as any other Windows application, in a simple and safe way. Are you curious about Linux and Ubuntu? Trying them out has never been easier!
  • AmpliFeeder
    Open source lifestream platform
  • AppUseful
    Web Application directory for Business, Travel, Blog, Music, Web 2.0, Social Network, Startup

More of my links

MARC not living up to the times

June 2nd, 2009

Stuart Yeates is awesome :) Okay – so I don’t know him – but this post makes me think he’s awesome:

Card catalogs have a long tradition in librarianship, dating back, I’m told, to the book stock-take in the French revolution. Librarians understand card catalogs in a deep way that comes from generations of librarians having used them as a core professional tool all their professional lives.

…

It is natural, when faced with something new, to understand it in terms of what we already know and already understand. Unfortunately, understanding the new by analogy to the old can lead to form of the old being assumed in the new. It was true that when libraries digitized their card catalogs in the 1970s and 1980s, they were more or less exactly digital versions of the card catalog predecessors, because their content was limited to old data from the cards and new data from cataloging processes (which were unchanged from the card catalog era) and because librarians and users had come to equate a library catalog with a card catalog—it was what they expected.

MARC is a perfect example of this kind of thing. As a data format to directly replace a card catalog of printed books, it can hardly be faulted.

Unfortunately, digital metadata has capabilities undreamt of at the time of the French revolution, and card catalogs and MARC do a poor job of handling these capabilities.

…

The real question is why we’re still expecting an approach that didn’t solve the problems two hundred years ago to solve our problems now? Computers are not magic in this area they just seem to be helping us do the wrong things faster, more reliably and for larger collections.

Read the entire post at Open Source Exile.

An Open Source Government

June 1st, 2009

There was an interesting article on internetnews.com about open sourcing government. At first I read the title as getting government to use open source software – but what it really talks about is opening up government so that they can harness the power of crowdsourcing and the wisdom of crowds!! How awesome is that?

As an example in place well before Obama came to office, [Beth Noveck] cited the Patent and Trademark Office’s Peer-to-Patent project, where members of the scientific community are invited to assist in a patent examiner’s review of an application.

Patent examiners are famously overworked. The backlog of applications is believed to be around 1 million, and examiners have less than 24 hours to determine if an innovation is, in fact, new. Tapping into the community of scientists, engineers and inventors who are experts in the field has proven a practical way of crowd-sourcing patent reviews, with the ultimate goal of improving the quality of patents and speeding up the process, Noveck said.

“Within one institution within one firm we don’t always have all the skills necessary to actually do the tasks at hand,” she said. “This is the phenomenon that I like to think of as collaborative governance.”

If the wisdom of the crowds can improve the Patent Office, why not other areas of government?

This will an interesting process to keep an eye on. For now, you can read up on the project at the patent office by reading my summary of a talk at NFAIS earlier this year.