Library Voice

Gary Price has a post about the New Look and Features of Ask.com. In his post he writes:

One problem, from a marketing standpoint, is that many people, including librarians, educators, and the general public, have spent little time paying attention to what has been going on at Ask.com.

Why?

Old habits and beliefs die hard and, as I said earlier, many people still believe that Ask.com is the inferior product that it once was. That is no longer the case. In fact, it’s a goal to directly involve our profession in making Ask.com even better. That’s why your feedback/suggestions/comments are important.

I for one have not used Ask.com or its previous incarnation of Ask Jeeves very much. After reading Gary’s post, I spent a few minutes tinkering with the search engine. I didn’t spend enough time to give it a thorough review, but I’ll be sure to try using it a bit more in the future.  If you primarily use Google, Gary offer convincing reasons to use other services:

In many cases the more choices the better. Google, Yahoo, MSN, Clusty and others are high quality, first rate products that we all use regularly. However, that doesn’t mean that Ask.com can’t also be one and isn’t worthy of your attention and knowledge. A great reference collection is filled with many choices and options. A great reference librarian knows about many of them.

This post from Jason at Pattern Recognition had me on the floor laughing. He’s in Vegas at a hotel that wants to charge for wifi. An excerpt is below, but you’ll need to take a look at his complete post for the full picture. He writes:

As you can see, there are two top choices: 24 hours for $9.95, or 1 day for $9.95. This left me pondering what possible difference there might be between the two that necessitated both choices. Do they not mean consecutive hours? 24 random hours? 24 hours of my choosing? You’d think that question might have come up a few times, and been answered….but no. Not anywhere in the terms of service, not anywhere I can find on the page at all. Just two choices that seem identical, but can’t possibly be since they are both there.

If you’re a blogging librarian, Scott Pfitizinger encourages you to visit the group that he’s created on Frappr. He’s created a group called blogging librarians, where you can go and put yourself on the map.

NBC News will become the first newscast to be offered free on the web. Each evening’s broadcast can be viewed after the televison version airs. The web broadcasts will begin November 7 at 10 p.m. ET and can be seen at Nightly.MSNBC.com The past broadcasts will be archived on the site. Wouldn’t it be really sweet if those past broadcasts were indexed and searchable?

Link via Marketing Vox.

It seems like these days everybody has got a wiki, so I thought I should have one as well. I have begun experimenting with using a wiki to replace the typical library research guide, subject guide, or pathfinder (or whatever you call your list of links and resources organized by subject).

In my area, I currently have three different research guides: one for general business, one for international business, and one for marketing, and I also have a blog to compliment these as well. Three research guides can be difficult to maintain, and because a lot of information is redundant between the three, one change often leads to two additional changes.

The usefulness of these research guides can be questioned as well. While I can measure through web stats that the guides are being clicked on, I honestly cannot believe that students or patrons are reading the information all the way through. I can attest that they are not the most interesting things to read. And, while they are organized in an outline fashion, they are not the easiest things to use either. They are not really searchable by themselves(unless you count using Ctrl-F as searching), and you certainly cannot “search” all three at once. The traditional solution might be to lump all three into one research guide, but then that might be considered cruel and unusual punishment for the patrons who are actually using them to find business information sources. Individually, they are quite length, and combining them would make the sheer quantity of information unbearable.

Therefore, I decided that as I update my research guides this summer, I am not going to rehash the same tried-and-true format that I (and countless librarians before me) have been using. As I go through the list of links, databases, websites, and reference books, I am adding what is worth keeping to what I am currently calling The Biz Wiki. The Biz Wiki will contain the content of all three of my research guides and will be organized by category. Currently there are broad categories of business information such as Company, Industry, International Business, and Marketing, and each of these contain subcategories with topics such as company histories, brands, advertising, etc. This organization will basically be a more narrowly categorized breakdown of what is listed in my three research guides. I have also included a new category that I am calling “Research How-To’s”. This category will contain guides such as How to Find Country Economic Analysis Information or Finding Industry Financial Ratios. While there is not a huge amount of content in this category right now, the flexibility of the wiki software will allow me to add How-To’s as the need arises. Previously, I had used my Business Blog for such on-the-fly how-to’s, but I am finding that I like the wiki’s organizational abilities better than a blog.

The Biz Wiki has only been running for less than a week, so currently it is a little rough around the edges. Overall, I am quite satisfied with how quickly I am able to create new entries and edit them to my liking. The Media Wiki software that runs the wiki was very easy to install, and it only took me about a day or so to get comfortable with the software. The Wiki Media help pages are very helpful, and are a necessary tool when trying to figure out how to format the pages.

In showing this to my colleagues in the Reference department, many of them seem very supportive of this new research guide format. Some seem to think that this will make their time at the desk a little easier when they are approached by business researchers. I hope to use the wiki to compliment classroom instruction, thereby making it easier for me to teach business research both in and out of the classroom. At the same time, I hope the wiki will make research easier for those researchers who never make it to one of my instructional sessions or to the reference desk. Only time will tell how (or if) The Biz Wiki is used, and what impact it will make for our library patrons.

Scott Douglas’ latest writing is sure to grab some attention, especially since the post was highlighted on Library Stuff. I am sure many will raise issues about the stereotypes of librarians. However, I was more interested in Scott’s exploration of a social software called Myspace. Scott describes his first experience with MySpace:

I saw many other disturbing things, but I honestly can’t say I saw anything very interesting, and yet I stayed for a full hour reading profiles of people that I, for the most part, had never met. I discovered in myself a voyeuristic fetish I never knew I had.

Scott explains why he joined MySpace.com:

I started a Myspace account recently in an effort to cure my boredom while sitting at the reference desk waiting for someone to ask me where a book was. I figured if high-school kids had so much fun on it, then why couldn’t I? Plus, it’s my duty as a librarian to be informed about what people are doing at the library(emphasis added).

What is interesting about this is that Scott has gotten a little radical, perhaps without even knowing it. In his curiosity, he has gone to where his patrons are and he has been hanging out in their virtual world. While some may call this voyeurism, others will see this simply as behavioral observation. In order to know what makes folks tick (in this case, high-school kids), it is important to go where they are. Perhaps as a lurker in these social software environments, we can learn more about what interests the kids. If we know what they like, perhaps then we can buy books that they will actually read or learn other things that will help us to understand how to make the library work for them.

In the academic library world, TheFacebook is a similar social software environment. Thefacebook is an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges. For more detailed information about TheFacebook, take a look at the FAQ page. Very recently, several of my colleagues and I have joined TheFacebook for similar reasons to Scott. We simply want to know what all the hype is about. In looking at how students are using the site, I imagine we’ll be educated a little more about how our students communicate, what their interests are, and what makes them tick in general. That’s more than enough to keep me from being bored.

PC world has named Firefox the 2005 Product of the Year.

A related story talks about Firefox’s gains in browser market share. Apparently this week marks the first time that more than 20% of the visitors to the PC World website were using Firefox.

There is no better way to describe this than to give a play by play. This is sort of how it happened as I have ad-libbed a little here and there to make it a little more intersting. And the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Jim, Bill, and I are having a conversation over our cubicle walls about blogs.
Jim observes that the word “blog” is a very ugly word.
Bill says, “Yeah, it sounds like that monster in Lord of the Rings.”
“Which one?” asks Jim.
“The one that Gandalf fought at the end of the first book. Where we were left hanging about what happened to him,” Bill explained. “I think the dwarves called it ‘Darrien’ or something.”
“Wasn’t that thing a dragon of some sort?” I ask.
Laura, Jim’s student assistant, chimes in, “Just Google It and find the answer.”

I start to type something in the Firefox search box for Google, but can’t quite think of what to type. How do I phrase monster thingy that defeated Gandalf in the first book/movie of the Lord of the Rings whose name, according to Jim, is just as ugly as the word ‘blog’? Instead, I turn to Wikipedia, which is a first for me. I had looked it over a couple of times before, but never to look for actual information.

Once there, I type ‘Lord of the Rings’, and then click ‘Go’. I look at the Search button as well, but ignore it for the time being. I still haven’t quite figured out what the difference is, but I’ll look into that later. ‘Go’ results reveal an article about the Lord of the Rings. I scroll down a bit, and in the Contents I click on a link to the storyline. Then I follow a link to The Fellowship of the Ring. At the end of the short synopsis, I discover the name of the monster whose name sounds like ‘blog’. It’s Balrag. And following the link for Balrag results in a page containing more information that I ever cared to know about the monster.

After my first use of Wikipedia, here are my thoughts. Would I put my English paper on the line and only use Wikipedia articles for my sources? Absoulutely not. There have been plenty conversations around the net and on listservs about the authority (or lack there-of) of the Wikipedia. However, I believe this is one particular case (and I am sure there are many more) that knowing about the Wikipedia and using it sure proved useful. I saved a little time as the actual time it took to find the information was much less than it has taken to read this post. I also learned a little bit more about this collaborative, free, web resource. Also, Bill, Jim, Laura, and I will all sleep better knowing that the monster thingy that defeated Gandalf in the first book/movie of the Lord of the Rings whose name, according to Jim, is just as ugly as the word ‘blog’ is Balrag.

The big three, Google, Yahoo!, and MSN (I bet you thought I was talking about cars) have implemented rules for NOFOLLOW. A good explanation can be found in this article from ResearchBuzz!. The article gives a pretty nice explanation of how comment spam works, as well as this current method to address the problem. Links to plugins for some common blogging programs are also included, as well as links to NOFOLLOW announcements from the big three.

Unfortunately, the article does not paint a pretty picture for the future. This method of controlling comment spam may work for now, but we may be beginning an “arms race” against those spammers. The blogging community may implement a new measure, and then the spammers may strike back. I imagine this will be a never-ending battle as two opposing forces square off. One positive may come from this battle, though. At least the programmers (on both sides of the war) will have job security.