Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can’t Index
Believe it . . . or not.
Archives for August 2005
NYAM Co-Sponsoring GL7 Conference
The New York Academy of Medicine, former host in the GL Conference Series, has signed on as co-sponsor in the Seventh International Conference on Grey Literature.
Here is the Text Release from the GL7 Program and Conference Bureau.
SLAPPed Libraries?
Molly Ivins has a piece in today’s Alternet.org on the issue of free speech (as in guaranteed by the 1st Amendment of the U.S. Constitution) and the growing use of the Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (aka "SLAPP"). The idea behind the SLAPP is that a large (or merely well-funded) corporate entity can bring these suits against people who publicly disagree with them, with the intention of the SLAPPed party shutting up due to lackof money to successfully defend against the suit. Trouble is that it works more often than not especially in major David vs. Goliath situations.
So I wonder if these suits have ever been used against a library or librarian. It wouldn’t take much, and it it’s not that different from folks merely stealing the books they don’t like out of libraries or resorting to political pressure to have books banned in libraries, schools, etc. Just wondering on this.
Meanwhile, Lara is on her way to the offices of the Queens Chronicle to talk about her book.
Guerilla Videos Library-Style
I think Gary North is a bit of a kook. I don’t agree with his politics or his religious view more than rarely, but having said that I read his Reality Check newsletter twice a week, because he sees things I don’t see, and that’s a big deal to me. You can never have too many ideas come your way.
So here’s the question: with library budgets getting smaller almost by the hour, has anyone seriously investigated using video technology to produce small -scale videos of the workings of libraries? I can imagine a bunch of applications for this: 5-minute technology demonstrations, sample reference interviews, tours of library service areas, etc., any one (or more) of which could be marketed online for almost no cost but with the potential to bring in additional funds. Who in libraryland has tried to do this in the past? Anyone? Did they succeed, and if so why? Did they fail? Granted, I don’t see any librarians dropping everything to become videographers any time soon, but is this not something to think about? Or am I merely crazy?
Anyway the article (including a few links) is below the cut; I’d really like to hear what people think of this.
Roy Tennant in Library Journal
"Google, the Naked Emperor," by Roy Tennant, from this week’s Library Journal.
The upshot: Google relies on search algorithms that do some things very well and other things (say, finding brand new web pages or even finding the last entry in the web index) very poorly. Google is just not in the business of providing information the same way Dialog is, so we need to keep these limitations in mind when searching to fill patron requests. Now let’s say it all together: "Hmmm . . . something to think about."
NYAM Blog ALert
The reference staff of the New York Academy of Medicine has its own blog, now, which I was just informed of. (Actually, I knew about this a couple of weeks ago but between spending most of last week in California, and being swamped with testing/implementing LinkFinder Plus, I just got around to posting it now.
It’s mostly for internal use which means that you have to be invited to post to the blog, but anybody is free to read it. It’s got tons of info about items and projects that go on here, so I’d suggest you take a look through it if medical libraries are your thing. Even if it’s not your thing specifically, blogging seems to becoming more popular in libraryland by the hour, so why not us? I’m also kind of happy to see it since it means I’m free to not necessarily make every other post about NYAM, although I’ll still post links to features on our website from time to time.
The blog is here and I’ve also made it a permanent link in the typelist sidebar.
For those of you really into RSS feeds instead (or as well), Bloglines, which is a decent RSS reader can be found here. Also, a list of related feeds and explanations of what they are can be found at the University of Manitoba. Good stuff, yo. Enjoy!