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.

Category Archives: Research

Library Automation Perceptions 2008

November 2nd, 2008

It’s that time of year again. Marshall Breeding has posted information on how to participate in his Perceptions 2008 International Library Automation Survey:

We live in interesting times when it comes to automation strategies in libraries. Competition intensifies between traditional companies licensing their products and a new wave of open source challengers. I think that it is important to pursue research that gauges the effectiveness of the various approaches to help other libraries make decisions regarding their automation strategy.

Last year, I conducted the inaugural version of this survey, which resulted in the report titled “Perceptions 2007: an international survey of Library Automation.” The 2007 survey included responses from 1,779 libraries.

This survey is well known and highly regarded – so make sure your opinion is heard!! Read Marshall’s instructions and participate ASAP.

Newspaper Research

September 15th, 2008

I spent my weekend researching family history using newspaper databases from my local library. I wanted to go into the library to play with Ancestry.com (which is available onsite for free), but my pup decided he was going to catch a stomach bug :( Anyway, I was very disappointed in the tools I used. They weren’t able to follow simple search syntax like phrases and booleans. That’s why I’m happy to see this news from Google & ProQuest.

Hoping to do for newspapers what Google Book Search has done for monographs, ProQuest and search giant Google have reached an agreement to digitize millions of pages of content from ProQuest’s vast newspaper microfilm archives. While ProQuest has vowed to continue improving and expanding its Historical Newspapers collection independently, the Google deal aims to create searchable electronic versions of smaller newspapers otherwise unlikely to be digitized, making them available on the open web via Google’s News archive search. “The problem is that, until now, finding a workable economic model for libraries and publishers has been challenging,” said Rod Gauvin, ProQuest senior VP of publishing. “This model overcomes that hurdle, unlocking a wealth of content for libraries and Internet users with unique research needs.”

I’m not sure that this search will be any better – but I at least know that Google can handle my phrase searches.

Learn more about this new partnership.

Encyclopaedia Britannica Goes — Gasp! — Wiki

June 7th, 2008

After the back and forth in the Wikipedia/Britannica debate, Britannica caves:

Long a standard reference source for scholarship, largely because of its tightly controlled editing, the Encyclopaedia Britannica announced this week it was throwing open its elegantly-bound covers to the masses. It will allow the “user community” (in the words of the encyclopedia’s blog) to contribute their own articles, which will be clearly marked and run alongside the edited reference pieces.

This seems to be a response to the runaway success of the user-edited online reference tool Wikipedia. (See for yourself. Do a Web search on a topic and note whether Wikipedia or Britannica shows up first.) Scholars have been adamantly opposed to Wikipedia citations in academic papers because the authors and sources are always changing. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s co-founder, agrees with this, but in next week’s issue of The Chronicle (click back to our home page on Monday for more) he also points to some changes in the reference tool that may make it more palatable to scholars.

It will be interested to see what happens with this new tool. Read more from The Chronicle.

More reliable?

December 3rd, 2007

Judith Seiss points us to Veropedia.

Veropedia "is a collaborative effort by a group of Wikipedians to collect the best of Wikipedia's content, clean it up, vet it, and save it for all time. These articles are stable and cannot be edited." It is not competing with Wikipedia"”they "prefer to think of [themselves] as a meta-layer, highlighting the best that Wikipedia has to offer." There are two types of links, green (already verified) and blue (not verified, directing you back to Wikipedia). It contains over 4500 articles there now. Very interesting.

Would you use this over Wikipedia? I know that a lot of librarians are skeptical about articles on Wikipedia and that author David Weinberger thinks it’s an amazing example of how the third order of order has been successful – does this mean that Veropedia is something that could keep both audiences happy?

My guess – probably not. Why? Because Veropedia are still not “experts” in the traditional sense. For me? I think it’s great and shows that the people out there creating and editing content care about what they’re doing and that’s awesome!

Technorati Tags: ,

Here they go again

March 19th, 2007

I am watching my morning news and they have just informed me that people who play racing video games are more likely to drive aggressively. Once again – I haven’t read the study yet – but isn’t it possible that aggressive drivers are more likely to play games that allow them to drive aggressively? I personally hate those car games – I can never keep the car on the road going in the right direction :) So maybe there’s a link.

The more I head these news reports the more I want to find a way to conduct my own study on all of these things (video games, movies, social networking). Maybe one day I’ll have more time. Today, however, I have a digital libraries exam.

MySpace Makes Kids Grades Drop

March 15th, 2007

I haven’t found the text of the study yet (no time to do research for anything but school) but I did find this interview from FresnoStateNews.com with Dr. Tamyra Pierce. Apparently Dr. Price has found that MySpace effects students grades negatively – which is why I want to read the study. Based on what I heard on the news this morning and read in this interview – it’s the fact that students are goofing off on the Internet instead of doing homework that is effecting grades – which is not MySpace’s fault – it’s the parents fault.

I get so annoyed when the news only gives you enough info to make you panic about the bad effects of these popular social networking sites.

Zotero – Only for Firefox 2.0

October 6th, 2006

Well – as you can tell I never finished listening to the podcast – in which I’m sure they mentioned the tiny important fact that Zotero is only for Firefox 2.0 :( I went to the site first thing this morning to download it – but I don’t want to upgrade until I’m sure my extensions will work with the new Firefox – so I guess I’ll have to wait – maybe I’ll give it a whirl on my work computer (not as many extensions installed there). I’ll keep you posted.

On a related side note – my husband was reading my blog last night and turned around and said “What’s Zotero?” Ooops – I forgot to mention that part. This is from their site:

Zotero is a free, easy-to-use research tool that helps you gather and organize resources (whether bibliography or the full text of articles), and then lets you to annotate, organize, and share the results of your research. It includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote)-the ability to store full reference information in author, title, and publication fields and to export that as formatted references-and the best parts of modern software such as del.icio.us or iTunes, like the ability to sort, tag, and search in advanced ways. Using its unique ability to sense when you are viewing a book, article, or other resource on the web, Zotero will-on many major research sites-find and automatically save the full reference information for you in the correct fields.