Archive for the ‘PicsYes’ Category

Google Books Integrated into Google Search Results

Friday, October 30th, 2009

The recent controversy about the Google Book Search Settlement seems to have taken up peoples' Google-watching attention so much that advances in the way GBS actually works have been getting overlooked. Several notable improvements were made during the summer, for example, that got very little recognition. Another change that seems ...

Google Book Search a Hot Topic? NOT!

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

Searching for talk on Google Books and the Settlement since Judge Denny Chin delayed the decision on October 7, I've been finding very little -- What had been a stream of chatter in Twitter searches has turned into a trickle. I found a little example reflecting this today that I ...

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 ...

MedlinePlus Needs a New Name

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

Google Health OneBox is a boost for NLM's MedlinePlus -- As discussed previously, though, a few tweaks could make it an even bigger boost. A problem not discussed in the previous article is the "MedlinePlus" name -- It has little user recognition, and therefore gets considerably less traffic than it ...

MedlinePlus & Google Health OneBox

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

In August, Google launched Google Health OneBox (left). This puts the National Library of Medicine's Medline Plus right at the top of the search results, and is potentially a valuable new source of traffic for NLM. There are factors, however, that work against MLP -- The three prominent links on the ...

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), ...

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 ...

Metaphorical Marginalia as Metadata

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

Marginalia -- writing notes in the margins of books -- is not an exact fit for digital books. But the concept has been getting bantered about in a metaphorical sense to denote any kind of user annotation in digital texts. In my June article on Cathy Marshall's studies of user ...