Monthly Archives: June 2006

My unofficial principles of licensing

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Tonight’s class session focused in large measure on the topic of licensing and the role it plays in selecting and acquiring electronic resources for libraries. As part of that discussion, and as a result also of the assigned readings, I came up with four unofficial principles or truths for licensing in libraries:

  • Licenses represent a restriction of copyright law.
  • Licenses intrinsically favor publishers/vendors over libraries.
  • Just about everything in a license is negotiable.
  • (I can’t remember, frankly, if this was the fourth one or not.) Licenses are ubiquitous.

Thinking about this a bit further, I suppose there could also be a fifth principle about licensing and libraries: librarians as a whole do not pay close enough attention to licenses.

Nothing startlingly brilliant or new about these observations, of course, but I thought it worthwhile to note them here.

Storm in the night

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Early this morning a thunderstorm came through our area. As is his habit, Tristan had already made his way from his bed to the floor next to our bed. The lightning flashed across the sky and when that happened, he woke up and got pretty scared. I reached out a hand to comfort him and he eventually fell back asleep. I describe this incident because it made me think back to long distant memories I have of doing exactly the same thing when I was Tristan’s age. I remember as far back as when I was three and four years old, waking up in the middle of the night and going to my parents’ room and laying down on the floor beside their bed or else getting into bed with them, seeking comfort and reassurance. As is often said, history repeats itself, sometimes even in the little events of life.

…and these people expect to be taken seriously?! [Updated]

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This afternoon I read a report of some kind of panel discussion at the American Library Association between three well known and highly visible librarians on the issue of “who controls the future of search.” Things were fairly ok up until I read the following statements:

“stephen: in the battle of the river and the rock, the river wins

joe: that’s deep”

These people expect to be taken seriously? Puhlease. I’m so glad I wasn’t present because otherwise I think I wouldn’t have been able to suppress a loud guffawed at this point in the conversation. Mind you, I realize that the quote above is taken out of context and that if I had been there I might have taken it differently. Go read the whole report on this conference session if interested. I am becoming increasingly intolerant of talking heads who spout their own particular brand of evangelism to an increasingly dimwitted and befuddled flock of sheep, er, librarians.

[Updated June 25, 2006: I found two other writeups of this same session for comparison. Check them out here and here.]

Enabling blog updates via email

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Of course this blog has an RSS feed that enables updates to get automatically transmitted to subscribers. But most people are still unfamiliar with RSS feeds, aggregators, and all that stuff. These people continue to feel more comfortable with using email as a way of notifying them when something they want to read has been published. The following news is directed at this group of FML fans.

I know there are some people who used to receive updates via email via the Bloglet service whenever I posted something here. That service has always been uneven at best and recently I read somewhere that it is no longer actively supported. Today I set up what I think is a better alternative, and something over which I have direct control. If you want to be notified via email whenever I add or update content on FML, please go here or just click on the “Subscribe via Email” link in the lefthand sidebar, fill out your name and email address, and I’ll gladly add you to my list of subscribers.

Finally getting to investigate some much-hyped services

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I’ve finally dipped my toes into a couple of much-hyped social web services: MySpace, and Skype. Actually I’ve had a MySpace account for several months but haven’t really used it because, frankly, I have little use for what seems like a service that recreates the high school cliques experience in an online format. Now that I have managed to configure my account in a way that’s more to my liking, plus now that I’ve found that not everyone using this service is a party-animal-obsessed teenager or college student, I may make more use of it. We’ll see.

I’m much more impressed with Skype. I know, I know, that’s been around for forever. I just hadn’t investigated it before. Even I can get techno-overload, you know ;-) Anyway, after a student in my class mentioned that he uses it, I decided to give it a try. As I already stated, it is impressive. I’ve managed to call land line phones with little problem and have also used it to talk with my brother, Dan. It’s far from perfect in terms of sound quality and clarity but hey, it’s free! I am particularly thinking of using it to talk with my sister and her family in New Zealand. Using Skype, that phone conversation would only cost $.02 per minute, which is incredible. When we move to our new house (hopefully next week some time — we were supposed to have moved already by now but that’s a long story for another time…) we may not request land line phone service. Instead we may rely on our cell phones plus Skype.

If you read this blog and use either or both of these services, contact me and I’d be happy to add you into my list of contacts!

Flock beta version released

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Last week (or maybe the week before, I forget), the first public beta release of my favorite web browser, Flock, was released. Naturally I was eager to put it through its paces. I’m glad to say that this is an even better browser than before, with one or two exceptions. In my view Flock has made the social web experience even easier and better because of big improvements in photo website integration (Photobucket and Flickr), blogging capabilities, and RSS.

This isn’t going to be a full blown or scientific review but instead a list of observations, likes and dislikes, etc.:

  • The photo integration is really nice. Now I have the option in the topbar to browse my photos or anyone else’s on a particular topic (tag) if those photos are on Photobucket or Flickr. More than that, I now have the ability to browse these photos in small OR large sizes, and I have easy drag and drop capability to add photos into other applications or a blog entry. For example, just this morning I decided to see what photos folks have posted on Flickr from the American Library Assoication annual conference being held right now in New Orleans. I simply input the tag ‘ala2006′ and was able to quickly call up new and recent photos taken by librarian colleagues. Pretty nice!
  • The blog integration is handled in a better way. Before, I was able to post to my blog from a topbar element. Now, with a simple keystroke (Ctrl+B) I can call up a separate, smaller window and immediately begin blogging. After clicking on the Publish button I am then presented with further choices such as what categories I want to assign and what Technorati tags I want to use. While this whole process took a little getting used to at first (because in the previous iteration, choices for tags and categories were on the main blog posting window) I like this new way of doing things much better.
  • The RSS feed capabilities are nice but they are the weakest feature at this point. I keep getting script errors and/or funky results whenever I try to use the RSS aggregator sidebar. Hopefully this will work itself out soon. When it works, though, the sidebar arrangement and functionality are nice.
  • A big drawback for me for Flock was that there weren’t many native extensions available for it. (You couldn’t just use Firefox extensions, for example, of which there seem to be hundreds.) This is no longer a problem because with this beta release there is now a whole host of extensions available that can be readily used with Flock. I’ve had no problems with the ones I like to use except for FasterFox. It is great now to be able to use the ones I like the most in Firefox.
  • There is a new Conversations topbar plugin available that works much better than the previous Technorati topbar ever did. It’s basically the same as the old Technorati topbar but seemingly reengineered and renamed. I find this a very useful feature when I want to have some sense of what others might be saying about a particular website I’m interested in. When used in combination with the Google Web Comments plugin, I feel like I am able to get a pretty comprehensive sense of the “conversations” that are going on about that website.
  • The del.icio.us integration is also much smoother than before.
  • A really big, important new feature in this beta release is the Quick Search functionality, which integrates several areas into one truly quick search, such as your favorites, your web history, the top five hits from Yahoo!, and a quick way to pick other search engines to search in as well as whatever default search engine you’ve chosen. Again it takes a little getting used to but I am quite impressed with how it works thus far.

I am still surprised that there doesn’t seem to be that much use of or experimentation with this browser among librarian colleagues. Maybe there is stuff going on and I don’t realize it. I’ve used Flock (even the alpha releases) as my default browser for many months now and I have no problem recommending it to anyone. When the students in my course this summer saw me using it and talking about it, some of them decided to try it out, too. One of them found a thorough review on ExtremeTech and posted about it to the class blog.

I also should point out that I use different flavors of Flock. On my Windows laptop from work, I installed Flock on my portable USB drive and it works great. On my PowerBook at home, it also works great.

So…bottom line: If you blog, use photo sharing sites, or just appreciate a functional web browser, try Flock. I think you’ll like it.