Thanks to Joanna for bringing this to our attention. Holdings of Australian libraries who are contributors to the Australian National Bibliographic database are now appearing in Worldat search results. I have been waiting for this for quite some time now. It’s time to start thinking about possibiliites for using this data in the WorldCat context [...]
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Library Labs - NLA wiki
The National Library of Australia has launched "Library Labs", a wiki to share news with colleagues about what the NLA is doing in the redevelopment of digital library services using service-oriented architecture and open source software solutions. Comments, suggestions and feedback is welcome via the wiki.
Four different prototypes are described including the NBD prototype, Beta [...]
Educational publishing in Australia
The Australian Society of Authors has published a report on Educational Publishing in Australia. The report is based on a survey of educational writers carried out in 2007 and early 2008 and states that since 2000, writers’ conditions have deteriorated due to onerous contractual conditions from a smaller pool of publishers. The impact of digital [...]
Using Google Books for cover art
Last Saturday Tim Spalding, from LibraryThing, posted about how you can use Google Book Search as a source of cover images. You can read all about it at the Thingology blog. Tim says that the code is a little rough, but it does provide a working example.
With this technique for getting book covers from Google [...]
New report on children and Internet safety
A new article, Online Predators and their victims in the journal of the American Psychological Association, examined fears of internet predators and concluded that they are myths. Based on three US surveys conducted by the authors, from the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, they found that internet-related sex [...]
Updated Aussie Library Blogs page
Today I’ve released an updated version of our popular Aussie Library Blogs page. The page is now built dynamically created using a WordPress plugin that I’ve created with the assistance of the other THALI members. This new way of managing the list of Aussie Library Blogs is exciting in a number of ways including:
It is [...]
Patterns of searching
Peter Morville who blogs at Findability.org is writing a new book on search patterns. He has uploaded screenshots illustrating different types of search patterns to Flickr. These are worth taking a look at, and he invites you to add comments, suggestions and tags to the images and to suggest other patterns of searching.
Read Morville’s post [...]
Google to host open source research datasets
Alexis Madrigal at Wired Science reports that Google will start hosting terabytes of open source research data at http://research.google.com. The storage will be free to scientists and freely accessible to all. The project is called Palimpsest and one of the planned datasets is the Hubble Space telescope data - all 120 terabytes.
Google to Host Terabytes [...]
Online photosharing in Plain English
Commoncraft have released Online photosharing in Plain English . Enjoy.
More on the future of cataloguing
I have just listened to Karen Calhoun’s presentation to the OCLC Members’ Council October meeting. At the same time I clicked through her presentation.
Her presentation, WorldCat and the future of bibliographic control (Karen Calhoun, Vice President, WorldCat and Metadata Services, OCLC), included audience participation. They were given electronic devices to record their answers to some questions [...]