Category: Digital Libraries
March 20, 2006
Folksonomies in Museums
No, not as a historical arifact of “high Web 2.0 fashion”— as a tool for engaging museum visitors and helping to bridge the “semantic gap.” I mentioned an earlier paper on the steve.museum project. The new paper, Steve.Museum: Exploring social tagging and folksonomy in the museum [PDF], raises a number of interesting ideas and questions, such as: “The resulting folksonomy,… 
August 12, 2005
Project Ocean Ruffles Publishers’ Feathers
The New York Times, BBC News, Wired, and Boing Boing report that Google has put portions of its Google Print Library Project (formerly codenamed Project Ocean) on hold until November. A post on Google’s official blog explains that the company is trying to be consistent in their policies towards indexing web and print content. On the web it’s well established…
January 26, 2005
Google Video Search
This is brilliant — Google now lets you “search video.” You’re actually searching the closed captioning text of a variety of mostly network programming and CSPAN. (This might actually make CSPAN useful.) In theory you can set a preference to show results relevant to your geographic area based on zip code, but it didn’t really work for me. The search…
December 14, 2004
Google’s ‘Project Ocean’ Goes Public
The New York Times has an article on Google’s collaboration with major academic libraries to digitize their collections. This has previously been mentioned as “Project Ocean”. Google plans to digitize nearly all the eight million books in Stanford’s collection and the seven million at Michigan. The Harvard project will initially be limited to only about 40,000 volumes. The scanning at…
December 10, 2004
eBooks at the New York Public Library
The New York Times has a good overview of the state of eBooks in the New York Public Library, as well as other libraries. This sounds like an interesting project: The Richmond Public Library in British Columbia (www.yourlibrary.ca), for example, offers registered users ways to track books and personal favorites, or receive lists of suggested materials, much like the recommendation…
November 18, 2004
Google Scholar Beta
Google has launched Google Scholar - scholar.google.com. Read their FAQ here. It uses OCLC’s WorldCat (as previously reported) to locate books and check your local library for a copy. It also links articles by citation and appears to be grouping identical articles found on different sites under the same record. Really impressive….
October 18, 2004
New E-mail Archive at British Library
News.com.au reports that the British Library has begun creating an archive of the digital correspondence of Britain’s writers and scientists. Curators have become concerned that conventional letters are becoming increasingly rare as writers and scientists abandon paper for more perishable email. The library has appointed the world’s first digital manuscripts curator to collect important material that would otherwise end up…
October 6, 2004
Google Print
The future is near: Google Print enables publishers to promote their books on Google. Google scans the full text of participating publishers’ titles so that Google users can see books that match the topics that they are searching on. When a user clicks on a book search result, they’re taken to a Google-hosted web page displaying a scanned image…
August 19, 2004
Faceted Search in the New York Times
Article in the New York Times today (Making a Web Search Feel Like a Stroll in the Library) mentions Flamenco, and other technology for recreating the benefits of analog behaviors in digital collections. However convenient it may be to search the Web from home or a dorm room, the Internet cannot replace many of the built-in benefits of the library,…
July 28, 2004
Gizmodo on the Future of the eBook
Gizmodo today has a long article on the future of eBooks. Co-existence of paper and electronic books is a great point — think of all of the paper formats we have: books, magazines, newspapers, each evolved to server a specific purpose. If anything, eBook devices are ideal for reading newspaper and (non-pictoral) magazine content. I think at this point, the…
July 7, 2004
E-Ink and the Sony Libre
Read a review of the new Sony Libre, an e-book reader that makes use of the new e-ink “digital paper.” The technology is really brilliant, the kind of thing that could actually allow an “iPod for text” to be developed. J.D. Albert, one of E-Ink’s co-founders, gave a presentation to my Digital Libraries class last term. He passed around a…