License-free bibliographic data [Updated]

Posted on December 11, 2007 by Steve

Thanks to a discussion on the oss4lib list, I was made aware of this post by Karl Fogel about the importance of insisting “that bibliographic data be license-free.” His comment is in the context of the recently released draft report of the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control. Karl recommends that the open comment phase to the general public for this report be an opportunity for as many people as possible to support the principle of license-free bibliographic data. A finger is pointed at OCLC here. Sounds like a worthy cause.

[Updated 12/12/2007: This a.m. I read the most recent Thingology blog post from Tim Spalding and lo and behold, it was more about the topic of license-free bibliographic data. He points to an online petition started by Aaron Swartz of Open Library fame. I'm going to add my name to it and I encourage anyone else who supports this view to do so as well.]

LibraryThing for Libraries: a great idea

Posted on April 9, 2007 by Steve

Here is a link to a post by Tim Spalding of LibraryThing that describes his latest adventure: LibraryThing for libraries. What can I say? Just, WOW. If I had control over a library catalog that would be suitable for this, I’d jump on it right away and implement his free widget. Too bad my library catalog represents a collection that is highly specialized…

Link to Thingology (LibraryThing’s ideas blog): Sneak peek: LibraryThing for Libraries

Great article on LibraryThing

Posted on March 3, 2007 by Steve

Great article (found via Steven Cohen’s Library Stuff blog) on LibraryThing. While some competitors have recently entered the same type of niche (such as Shelfari), noone does it better than Tim Spalding, Abby Blachly, and others at LibraryThing.

Link to A Cozy Book Club, in a Virtual Reading Room – New York Times

A virtual visit with LibraryThingers

Posted on August 9, 2006 by Steve

This past Saturday I logged into iChat and saw that Tim Spalding was online as well, so I sent him a request to do a video chat. (For those of you unlucky enough to not be Mac owners, well, this kind of interaction is a piece of cake!) Tim accepted my invitation and he and I were able to have a brief conversation. Abby Blachly was there too, in the background, so I got to say hi to her as well. It was nice because none of us has ever met in person. One of the things I asked them was why on earth they appeared to be hard at work on a Saturday?! Turns out they were just minutes away from hosting the first official LibraryThing barbeque/picnic. Wish I could have been there!

Not sure where to even begin

Posted on June 10, 2006 by Steve

I’m not sure where to even begin with this blog post…By that I mean that so much is happening and there is so much that I’ve wanted to comment on here but haven’t done so, such that my brain is scrambled (well, more so than usual).

For example, I continue to be incredibly impressed with Tim Spalding and his introduction of LibraryThing Mobile, something I plan to make use of on a regular basis. I cannot say enough good things about the ongoing excellence and customer focus shown by Tim and his growing team. Congratulations and kudos to LibraryThing! Here’s to your ongoing success.

Then there is the hectic time at work during the past few weeks, as I have been trying to come up to speed with all of the aspects of my job. We are really focused as a group on how to best manage journal information, particularly for e-journals. There is a lot of detail I could go into but this issue gets to the heart of how our various systems interact.

I have been working very hard to prepare for the class that I will be teaching this summer (LIS578LE: Technical Services Functions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Graduate School of Library and Information Science). Class starts next week and I will be on campus at UIUC Monday through Wednesday. Tuesday and Wednesday we will meet together as a class all day. Some highlights of this preparation include the fact that this time around, I will be integrating blogs and a wiki into the class. Also for the first time I am offering students the option of purchasing a course packet. Twenty three students are currently enrolled in the class and one of the neat things about the class this year is that the thought are broken… blogmeister, Mark Lindner, will be my assigned GA from GSLIS, helping me conduct each live class session by setting up the RealAudio feed, initiating and recording my phone connection, and doing other technical support.

A lot more stuff remains to be commented on here but that’s all for now.

Questioning the usefulness of tagging [Updated]

Posted on March 11, 2006 by Steve

It was interesting to read this report from CNET on a meeting to discuss how to improve tagging. Underlying the meeting was a common understanding that tagging as it currently stands is not as useful as it could or should be. The main reason for this lack of usefulness, according to the participants, is the lack of context for a particular tag. The concluding sentence of the report states:

“…it is easy to imagine that a year or two from now, everyone will know what tagging is because it will just work.”

I found this report interesting for two reasons. First, it acknowledges that tagging has problems. I find that encouraging. Second, it is interesting because the discussion was unable to reach any recognizable solution to the lack of usefulness of tagging. The concluding statement above is really simplistic, in my view, and points once again to the intellectual vacuum in which the discussions are taking place (see Tim Spalding’s excellent commentary on this in response to one of my previous posts on this topic). Why oh why does noone mention or think of library cataloging? Maybe it’s because we have historically been anything but transparent in explaining and making sense of why libraries arrange information the way they do to our users. Also libraries continue to be pigeonholed as repositories and maintainers of a certain kind of information only and therefore aren’t even on the radar of people’s minds when it comes to the task of organizing or making sense of digital information.

[Updated 3/12/2006: Just found a link on the You're It! blog to notes on the session mentioned in the CNET article, including a link to a Flickr photo set. Good stuff!]

LibraryThing and cataloging nirvana, er, FRBR

Posted on March 2, 2006 by Steve

I’ve mentioned LibraryThing several times already, but I have to write about it again, this time, because of its groundbreaking and chaotic foray into cataloging nirvana, er, FRBR. Basically Tim Spalding has set LibraryThingers (LibraryThingamabobbers?) loose on figuring out what a “work” is and combining multiple versions of a work together into a “work” view in a way similar to what FRBR describes. David Bigwood of Catalogablog has already discussed this here as have Sarah Houghton of The Librarian in Black and William Denton of The FRBR Blog (see list of links here).

After working with this capability for a while, I think it is definitely a huge, big deal. As Tim writes, the intent of providing this capability in LibraryThing is social and socio-statistical (see the link to the comment from him for more explanation). And it is user controlled. Those aspects may seem like no big deal but in reality, they represent something completely different from what catalogers have attempted to do for decades in a largely self-contained, controlled environment. Just take a look at the discussions among LibraryThingers via the LibraryThing blog or the Google Group devoted to discussing LibraryThing to get some idea of how this capability is playing out. Like I stated earlier, it is not just cool and useful, it is chaotic by its very nature.

I’ve spent several hours lately, trying to pull together disparate bibliographic entries in LibraryThing using this new capability. I’ve only done some authors and left others alone. I’ve made a few mistakes but by and large, I think I’ve managed to contribute some useful work. Authors I’ve worked on include Herge (author of the Tintin series), P.D. James, and Frank Peretti.

It is a bit strange, as a former cataloging manager and serials cataloger in a large academic library, to be doing this. But it’s gratifying, too, and in many ways, that’s the point.
I think we are only just beginning to understand the ramifications of this kind of user-level, user-controlled interaction with bibliographic data (and data that is not necessarily or purely MARC-based). Some of the issues that have already arisen include whether or not to combine all language editions of a work together, authority control, how to handle editors vs. authors, and so on. All of these things have solutions or at least have been discussed for forever among professional catalogers and it is quite interesting to see how the discussion is going among a group that is largely made up of “self-proclaimed” catalogers. As Tim calls it, “Everyone’s a librarian.” Interesting stuff.

LibraryThing and RSS/HTML feeds

Posted on January 4, 2006 by Steve

I was happy to see an announcement today from Tim Spalding, creator/maintainer of LibraryThing, about the availability of RSS/HTML feeds. Tim’s work in developing a library community centered around a shared online catalog of user’s books is one of the standout ideas/creations of the past year. He is very responsive to user input and more than that, is able to grasp and see bigger uses for this new kind of service. He is constantly upgrading and adding in new features. I use this service and think that “regular” libraries can learn a lot from LibraryThing’s development. The only negative I can see at this point to his work is a small, nitpicky dislike of the inability to normalize or remove initial articles from book titles for searching purposes, so that, for example, “A celebration of London: Walks around the capital” sorts alphabetically with As rather than Cs.

Interview with LibraryThing creator and thoughts on techie backgrounds

Posted on November 5, 2005 by Steve

I saw a link to an interview with Tim Spalding, creator of LibraryThing, via Library Stuff. The interview itself is available at Emily Chang’s eHub. LibraryThing continues to be one of my all time favorite sites, even though I haven’t had time lately to devote to it. Upon first look, I quickly bought a lifetime membership because I liked what I saw and wanted to support and use it regularly.

In the interview, Tim mentions that his hardcore support comes from book lovers, academics, librarians — those sorts of people. That means I’m in good company as a librarian and technogeek

One of the things that most stood out to me in the interview was the fact that although Tim is obviously very tech savvy and works with computers for a living, he does not have an academic background in computer science. Instead, he apparently studied Classics. I find this very interesting. My observation over the years is that there a lot of people in the computer world who have gone through computer science curricula or who have extensive, formal training in computer stuff. Then there is a huge group of others who tend to have a humanities background that does not include much, if any, formal computer science education. This latter group has largely learned the techie stuff on its own. Some of the brightest and best people I’ve known in terms of their computer knowledge have no formal compute education. I happen to fall into this category, too (not of the best and brightest, just the fact that I have no educational background in computer science, yet I work with designing software for libraries). My background is in history and German, with a graduate degree in library and information science. The latter degree had certain technological requirements and I had one programming class as part of completing the degree, however, the emphasis back when I was in library school was most certainly on libraries, still, not so much on the information science aspect like it is today. And frankly that was the way I wanted it (and still do).

So…if you’re interested in working with computers, should you pursue the formal computer science type of education, or should you just learn it on your own or by experience? I don’t know which is better; I just find it interesting (and beneficial) that there is a diversity of backgrounds in the techie world.

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