Subjects Matter!

Stony Stratford Library -photo credit Karen Parker

This is BRILLIANT!

People in a Buckinghamshire town have borrowed every single book from their local library to block plans to close it down.

Even here across the pond the New Yorker reports how ” more than a thousand Stony Stratford residents made their way to the red-brick building, scoured the shelves for their allotment of fifteen titles, swiped their library cards, and left the building completely bare of books.”

They’ve named their effort the “WOT NO BOOKS CAMPAIGN TO SAVE OUR LIBRARY”

The library calculated that books had been checked out at a rate of around 378 per hour.

“A local resident mentioned the idea, maybe as a bit of a joke, but we thought it was a great idea so we put it to FOSSL[The Friends of Stony Stratford Library],” siad Emily Malleson.

“I put it on Facebook and emailed everyone I could think of and it’s just gone absolutely mad.”

Photo Credit Karen Parker

And the best news of all? The Library’s got a year’s reprieve and other local libraries are learning from their example how to keep their libraries open.

Save, Saving, Saved! Photo Credit Karen Parker

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It’s no secret that I am a goodreads addict. I can’t get enough of the site.

But, the goodreads iphone app is becoming so useful that it rivals the typical desktop pc experience of the gr web app.

With the release of a barcode scanning feature, the gr app allows the user to stand in a bookstore, scan a book’s barcode and see the gr ratings, reviews, and even put the title on their own “to-read” shelf.

On the flip side of the coin users in their own personal libraries can scan in their own books, making it really easy to list the books you’ve read for other goodreads users to see and ask you about.

The app follows a book full circle from retail, to home library, and back out into a community of fellow readers who are all interested in what people have to say about books!

In Beyond the flat world Alan McCluskey – writes about how:

Goodreads has an App for the iPhone that enables you to read the barcode of a book with your iPhone without any additional equipment and in so doing, immediately provides the information available about the book. No more need to even type in the name of the book to find it in the extensive database and add it to your reading list. The first time I tried it, it was like magic. In that moment my iPhone created a tangible link between the mass of books on the shelf in front of me and the reading community of which I am a part. In comparison, the Internet as a web seemed flat and exterior, like the screen it is displayed on. Somewhere in there, behind the joy of my gut reaction to the Goodread’s App, is the explanation why there is so much excitement about using apps to go beyond a flat online world to one that interacts more fully with the offline world. And in that relationship between the online and offline worlds mediated by simple-to-use technologies and our skill at combining and using them lies an exciting future.

TVC Alert reported on an interesting thought about further indexing the web. TVC Alert writes “Can Tagging Improve Free Web Search? (31 Mar) Citing a conference paper on the topic, Phil Bradley asserts that social tagging could go a long way toward improving traditional Web search. I think it’s a potential worth exploring. I’ve been impressed with the use of tags in search results in smaller experiments such as LibraryThing.
Phil also shares a tip for finding tagged information at del.icio.us. I’d like to add that the following format automatically generates an RSS feed: http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/[insert your tag here].”

Yahoo tried to do something like this in the early days with their human indexers. Their idea was good and their implementation was great, because they considered consistency to be important. So, I don’t think the reemergence of this idea is crazy at all, but I worry about the taxonomy piece. What about the variations in terms e.g.”social networking sites” vs. “SNS”? Is anyone going to link them? If they aren’t linked, you will have to do additional searches in order to be convinced that you have done your search work thoroughly. I think the message is to tag pages if you have the opportunity and we’ll have to see how the search piece shakes out.

Susan Mernit was laid off from Yahoo! yesterday, no doubt the result of Yahoo’s current woes. The interesting thing about her blog post is the effect of social networking and how she analyzes the effect of her actions on FaceBook, Twitter and her blog. It will be interesting to see how this develops.

If you have your own blog, you have probably seen the little ad after you have published a post suggesting that you try out Google docs and spreadsheets. Google has now introduced presentation software, an alternative to Powerpoint. Jill Hurst-Wahl mentioned it in the article we posted yesterday and Tara Calishan, from ResearchBuzz also talks about it in her post from September 18.

One of the good things that both have mentioned is that you don’t have to e-mail a doc back and forth when you are collaborating. You will also not need to be on the correct computer (laptop vs. desktop) or have it available to you on your flash drive.

Remember, as with most Google offerings, you have to have Google account. Your content may end up searchable, so don’t put any sensitive or trouble causing docs up there and password protect all of your docs.

Blogs and wikis and twitter, oh my!

Are you confused about the exploding world of social networking tools? There are a lot of them out there and they are not just for fun and games any more. Jill Hurst-Wahl has written a very comprehensive article in the recent SLA IT Division’s newsletter, b/yte.

Jill Hurst-Wahl is a digitization consultant based in New York.