Archive for September, 2009

More Metadata Problems in Google Books?: Word Clouds

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

A month ago Geoff Nunberg wrote two articles that got much attention on Google Book Search's "metadata trainwreck," relating to incorrect dating of books. I discovered another metadata-ish sort of problem, as I read Lorcan Dempsey's recent article on GBS word clouds, and the value of their "glancability" for getting ...

Tagging in Hardin MD

Friday, September 25th, 2009

All Hardin MD (HMD) pages have tags at the bottom, to make them more visible for search engines i.e. Google. We have been doing tagging in HMD since 2000, and it works very well. As shown in the example to the left, the tags are for variant spellings (measels), ...

Evidence Based Medicine? or Medicine Without Numbers?

Friday, September 18th, 2009

In his interesting book The Great Influenza (2004) on the 1918 Flu epidemic, John M. Barry begins by giving the background and context of 19th century medicine. He says that medicine during this time lagged behind other sciences, especially because doctors were slow to embrace the quantitative methods and tools ...

Marybeth Peters, Google & the Copyright Mess

Friday, September 11th, 2009

Marybeth Peters, head of the US Copyright Office (part of the Library of Congress), said this in her testimony before Congress yesterday: The Copyright Office has been following the Google Library Project since 2003 with great interest. We first learned about it when Google approached the Library of Congress, seeking to ...

Secret’s Out: Library Catalogs have some Crappy Metadata

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

Just as I was about to compose two articles this morning on metadata problems in Google Book Search and in library catalogs ... lo and behold ... I came across science-publishing-library blogger Eric Hellman's article White Dielectric Substance in Library Metadata on much the same theme -- It has some ...

Metadata About Metadata: Library Catalog Fail

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

David Weinberger's book Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder is fascinating -- I'm especially enjoying his many original comments on metadata. So, trying out Weinberger's ideas, I search in local library catalogs for david weinberger metadata -- I get: NO ENTRIES FOUND ... Hmmm ... How ...

“Metadata Train Wreck”: Librarians Should Tread Lightly

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

There's been much buzz among librarians, and others, on recent articles by Geoff Nunberg (UC Berkeley School of Information) on the "Train Wreck" state of Metadata in Google Book Search (See article references below). Nunberg certainly makes some good points. But we librarians are far from perfection in the metadata ...