Archive for the ‘Library Catalog’ Category

Why Apple & Google Win – And Libraries Don’t

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Many possible takes on this picture. What comes to my mind first is the idea of the Attention Economy --The idea that in the days of the traditional library, before the Internet, information was a limited resource. Libraries could afford to work under the assumption that "we've got the good ...

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), ...

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 ...

Digitization at NYPL

Friday, July 18th, 2008

New York Public Library is a rich source of digital resources, both text and images. This is especially interesting because they have done an excellent job in making connections from the library catalog (CATNYP) to digitized resources. Because NYPL is an active participant in Google Books, their recent text digitization efforts ...