Tag Archives: Jay Datema

New functionality from Zotero

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Zotero – The Next-Generation Research Tool » Blog Archive » Zotero and Google Tools Screencast

Oh, my. Thanks to Jay Datema for pointing out the above-mentioned blog posting from the Zotero wizards. Love it, love it, love it.

Ok, so back to reality, though. Fact #1: At my place of work, 99.9% of people are not allowed to have admin privileges on their PCs. (Fortunately I am, for now anyway, one of those lucky 0.1% who does have this ability.) Fact #2: The workplace standard browser is Internet Explorer.

Combine these two facts and what do you get? No way to benefit from this amazing tool, which is entirely based on Firefox.

How frustrating this is for me, because it is precisely this kind of tool that my library’s users would greatly benefit from.

The IT Nazis deeply frown on this (can we say, security hazard ten times in rapid succession with increasing volume?). I am so tired of — even though I do, I truly do understand why this attitude and caution are present — narrow-minded IT policies and practices that inhibit cost savings in so many ways. I’d better stop now before I say something I’ll really regret.

[tags]zotero, jay datema, firefox, internet explorer[/tags]

A reaction to notes from the third Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control

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Jay Datema posted a good writeup of his notes from the third meeting of the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control yesterday. I read it with interest because I wasn’t able to connect to the live webcast the day before. This morning, I read Mark Lindner’s (Off the Mark) reaction to the meeting (he was able to “attend” via webcast). Next time, Mark, tell us how you really feel ;-)

I don’t feel quite as passionate about some of this as Mark and others do. Maybe I should and because I don’t, that reflects poorly on me. I don’t know.

Yet I do have a reaction to the meeting to share, and it is based solely on Jay’s writeup (i.e. second hand at best). My reaction to the whole deal is, why oh why are we still debating and tossing around the same observations and identifying the same issues over and over again, and presenting them as if they are something new and revelatory?! For instance, Rick Lugg of R2 Consulting (whom I know from his days at YBP) gave a presentation that outlined challenges facing those who work in or management bibliographic control (i.e. cataloging) operations. Jay wrote that Rick’s presentation ended with him making the following summary:

 

  1. How do we reduce our efforts and redirect our focus?
  2. How can we redirect our expertise to new metadata schemes?
  3. How can we open our systems and cultures to external support from authors, publishers, abstract and indexing (A&I) services, etc?

No offense meant to Rick, but none of this is new at all! This is something we’ve been talking about for well over 10 years.

Part of Jay’s writeup also included a summary of a presentation by Mechael Charbonneau of Indiana University in which (in Jay’s words) she “sees the need to optimize the allocation of staff in large research libraries and to free up catalogers to do new things, starting with user needs.” Hello? Why on earth are we not yet way past this stage?

Mark says he is mad; I’m just irked and discouraged by the lack of progress I see.

[tags]working group on the future of bibliographic control, rick lugg, l2 consulting, mark lindner, jay datema[/tags]

coComment, a nifty new service

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Thanks to a comment from Jay Datema (newly appointed Technology Editor for Library Journal who oversees the LJ Techblog) on my post regarding the marginalization of comments in the blogosphere, I found a nifty new service (well, new to me, anyway) called coComment. coComment provides the ability for you to track and view your comments on any other person’s blog in a single place. Registration is free. I’ve already added a new section in my sidebar that shows or tracks comments I’ve made elsewhere.

This service addresses a couple of my complaints about the marginalization of comments in general. I’ve already mentioned that it enables you to keep track of your own comments. It also allows you to insert tags into all of your comments. Pretty cool! And coComment’s development team is working on addressing a third complaint of mine, by developing a way to crawl comments in the blogosphere so that they can be readily indexed and searchable.

I’ll play around with it some more and see about making changes but for now, I think this is a worthwhile service and I recommend it to others to try.