The day after I’m highlighting OCLC and Google getting closer together to make it easier to find books and their digitised versions, Microsoft announces they are getting out of that game.

The Microsoft Live Search team announces on their blog that they are winding down Book Search:

Today we informed our partners that we are ending the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects and that both sites will be taken down next week. Books and scholarly publications will continue to be integrated into our Search results, but not through separate indexes.

With Live Search Books and Live Search Academic, we digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles. Based on our experience, we foresee that the best way for a search engine to make book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries.

Not continuing the service they developed in partnership with the Internet Archive, CCS, and others, they are giving away what they have amassed:

… we intend to provide publishers with digital copies of their scanned books. We are also removing our contractual restrictions placed on the digitized library content and making the scanning equipment available to our digitization partners and libraries to continue digitization programs. We hope that our investments will help increase the discoverability of all the valuable content that resides in the world of books and scholarly publications.

It is interesting that they have come to the realisation that the best way for a search engine to make book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries.  - The question of course is who’s search engine.

Without doing much reading between the lines, it is clear that Microsoft have failed to see a business model in the worthy job of digitizing the world’s books.  I wonder if there is one, or does the answer lay with open data projects like the Open Library, the Million Book Project, and the sharing of libraries.

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You’ve got to hand it to those Google guys for coming up with out-of-the-box thinking.

Take Google Image Labeler for instance.  The worst thing about this latest Beta from the World Domination stable of ideas is the name.  As John Battelle points out.

As John also points out, what Google call labels the rest of the planet know as tags.

I just wish Google would use the terminology the rest of the web has already settled upon. It’s not a label. It’s a tag. “Tag” means something - an intentional attribute given to an object on the web. That’s what we are doing here. How about we help Google come up with a new name?

So what is it then?  It is two things:

• An addictive bit of simple fun.  You are randomly partnered with someone else then the two of you have 90 seconds to agree on at least one label for each of the images [from within Google Image Search] you are presented with.  If you both enter the same label, you gain 100 points and another image is presented.

  An ideal bit of fun to dip in to for a few minutes the next time you fill your coffee cup.  Be warned though, be prepared for you to be still playing it as you finally drain the cup!
  

• An innovative way of building up folksonomy around the images that Google reference.  By harnessing peoples natural addiction to this sort of game, [As of the moment someone named eGrunt has amassed the staggering total of 1,324,400 points - does this person sleep!]  they are rapidly building up a human-validated set of search tags for their images - all for free.  At the moment there does not seem to be any value, other than qudos, attached to the points gained.

Google, like many of us who have tried to find relevant images from their Image Search, have identified that just scouring the page [that contains an image] for relevant keywords is not as useful as you would expect in cataloguing the image its self.

One benefit unique advantage Google have in launching such an initiative is their global reach.  They launch a new Beta, within hours the Google watchers blog about it, within a day or so thousands are playing with it.

Would something like this work for cataloging tagging your dusty collection - probably not as most players would grow old waiting for a partner.  But how long before a Google Book Search version appears? In which case the question will be, will Google see this as more secret-source or would they provide an open api to it?

Technorati Tags:Google,Google Image Labeler, Tagging, folksonomy

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The Onion reports: Dewey Decimal System Helpless To Categorize New Jim Belushi Book

“With all due respect to the author, we remain unsure how to categorize this particular work,” said the chair of OCLC’s Editorial Policy Committee

I bet the social taggers, building up folksonomies, don’t have the same problems. To be fair though they are not trying to shoe-horn the book in to a rigid classification system - mind you isn’t that the point.

Anyway apart from being mildly amusing this gives me a good opportunity to recommend a listen to the Library 2.0 Gang podcast from a couple of weeks back on the subject of folksonomies and tagging - well worth a listen. On the Gang for this session were Casey Bisson, Ian Corns, Christina Pikas, Karen Schneider, and Tim Spalding.

Technorati Tags: Talis, Cataloging, Taliking with Talis, Folksonomy, Tagging

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The Wikimeadia Foundation the international non-profit organization behind some of the largest collaboratively-edited reference projects in the world including Wikipedia, have a project that has been running for the last few months named Wikicat.

Wikicat’s basic premise is to become the bibliographic catalog used by the Wikicite and WikiTextrose projects. The Wikicite project recognizes that “A fact is only as reliable as the ability to source that fact, and the ability to weigh carefully that source” and because of this the need to cite sources is recognized in the Wikipedia community standards. WikiTextrose is a project to analyze relationships between texts and is “inspired by long-established theories in the field of citation analysis”

In simple terms the Wikicat project is attempting to assemble a bibliographic database [yes another one] of all the bibliographic works cited in Wikimedia pages.

It is going to do this initially by harvesting records via Z39.50 from other catalogues such as the Library of Congress, the National Library of Medicine, and others as they are added to their List of Wikicat OPAC Targets. Then when a citation, that includes a recognizable identifier such as ISBN or LOC number, is included in a page the authoritative bibliographic record can then be used to create a ‘correct’ citation. Eventually the act of citing a previously unknown [to Wikicat] work should automatically help to populate the Wikicat catalogue. - Participative cataloguing without needing to use the word folksonomy!

Putting aside the tempting discussion about can a Z39.50 target be truly described as an OPAC, the thing that is different about this cataloguing project is not what they are attempting to achieve but how they are going about it. The Wikicat home page states:

It will be implemented as a Wikidata dataset using a datamodel design based upon Wikidata dataset using a datamodel design based upon IFLA’s Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) [1], the various ISBD standards, the Library of Congress’s MARC 21 specification, the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules‘ The Logical Structure of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, and the International Committee for Documentation (CIDOC)’s Conceptual Reference Model (CRM)[2].

So it isn’t just going to be a database of Marc records then!

Reading more it is clear that once the initial objective of creating an automatic lookup of bibliographic records to create citations has been achieved, this could become a far more general open participative cataloguing project, complete with its own cataloguing rules managed by the WikiProject Librarians.

Because they are starting with FRBR at the core of the project, the quality, authority and granularity of the relationships between bibliographic entities potentially could be of the highest quality. This could lead to many benefits for the bibliographic community, not least a wikiXisbn service [my name] that is ‘better’ than OCLC’s xISBN.

So does the world need yet another cooperative cataloguing initiative? - working for an organisation that has cooperative cataloguing in its DNA for over thirty-five years, I should be careful how I answer this!

Throwing care to the wind - Yes. When you consider that all the other cooperative cataloguing initiatives [including as of today the one traditionally supported by Talis] are bounded by project, geographical, institutional, political, subject area, commercial, exclusive licensing, or high financial barrier to entry issues. What is refreshing about Wikicat is that, like Wikipedia, the only barrier to entry, both for retrieving and adding data, is Internet connectivity.

Unlike Wikipedia where some concerns about data quality are overridden by the value of it’s totally participative nature, the Wikicat team are clearly aware that the value of a bibliographic database is directly connected to the quality, consistency and therefore authority of the data that it holds. For this reason, the establishing of cataloguing rules and training for potential editors overseen by the WikiProject Librarians is already well detailed in the project operational stages roadmap.

I will be watching Wikicat with interest to see how it develops.

Technorati Tags: Talis, Talis Platform, Wiki, Wikicat, Cataloging, FRBR, Library

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Tim Spalding over at LibraryThing provides a nice write-up of Richard Wallis’ LibraryThingThing extension to the Firefox web browser. A number of interesting points get raised in his post, and in the comments shared by members of LibraryThing’s community, and I thought it might be useful to offer a few thoughts in response.

Firstly, Tim writes;

“This is an exceedingly cool mashup, and a very good demonstration of all the components. To my mind, it would be more useful if it did less, telling you only if the book was in your library.”

With straightforward access to a raft of Platform APIs and a solid body of data on library holdings, it becomes feasible to slice and dice the results in whatever way makes most sense to the users themselves, rather than insisting upon any ‘one size fits all’ solution. I can, personally, think of a whole host of reasons why you might wish to view holdings from a user-selected set of libraries, and the real technology lying behind Richard’s simple browser extension is certainly capable of supporting these use cases.

I, for example, live in one place and work in another, 150 miles away. I’d like to see the library local to my home and the library local to my office. I have no interest (no offence intended!) in the libraries of North Lincolnshire, South Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, and wherever else lies along my route.

Or what about the university student who wishes to see their own university library, the public library of their university’s city, the public library in the town where their parents live, and the public and university libraries in the city where their boy/girlfriend is studying?

We are also seeing a welcome (and long overdue) growth in interest around the notion of collaborative access arrangements between neighbouring libraries, which is ultimately to the benefit of all library users. Rather than conducting painfully slow and eye-wateringly expensive procurements for yet another monolithic dinosaur of a system (believe me, I’ve read some of the procurement documents!), technologies such as those behind Richard’s tool might usefully and easily be aligned with existing library systems, in order that a borrower is able to see holdings data from all the institutions participating in a particular scheme. Indeed, if nothing fancier were required, Richard’s existing code could easily be modified for deployment on top of an existing OPAC. Imagine looking for a book in the library of the university at which you are studying, finding that the book is on loan, and having a browser extension very similar to LibraryThingThing let you know that there’s a copy in the local public library…?

LibraryThingThing is a rapidly produced (one afternoon, essentially) illustration of a number of possibilities. A tool deployed to best advantage in day to day use would doubtless concentrate upon fulfilling a smaller set of purposes with greater focus. Given the open nature of the APIs behind LibraryThingThing, there’s nothing to stop any of you experimenting and producing the tool that does what you want it to. If you like the idea of wrapping the tool up for delivery as a Greasemonkey plugin or Firefox browser extension as Richard did, the source of the Greasemonkey plugin is also available for you to modify.

Tim goes on to add;

“How should LibraryThing tie into libraries. As always, your thoughts are much appreciated.

We were, actually, planning on doing something like this, and even started the code. When we bring something live it will be a lot less technically elegant—good old server-side programming—but also not browser- and extension-dependent.”

Excellent! We’d (obviously) be keen to see LibraryThing extend in this way with the help of the underlying Platform technologies that made Richard’s browser extension so easy to produce. The Platform and its APIs are neither browser nor extension-dependent; Firefox and Greasemonkey simply provided an easy way for Richard to bring LibraryThing and some of our Platform components together without needing to get inside LibraryThing’s codeline. Tim would be able to use the same Platform components, but in a way that integrated them far more closely with LibraryThing without the need for particular browsers or extensions. That sounds like a win-win to me, and one we’d of course be happy to lend assistance to…

Now to the comments…

James Darlack writes;

“Perhaps rather than having LTThing look up only a specific library, it would be helpful if it could look libraries within a preset distance of a zip code, similar to the way Open WorldCat works.”

Absolutely. Behind the scenes, one of the places that LibraryThingThing looks for data is to the Talis Directory. This can hold various details about libraries, including their postal address and their latitude and longitude. The Directory is an open repository of information about a growing body of libraries, and if your local library isn’t listed you are free (indeed hereby encouraged!) to add it. The information you contribute is governed by a flexible and permissive licence, and a growing body of Platform APIs ensure that the data can be consumed by a range of third party applications to provide the sort of capability that you would like to see. The open nature of the APIs ensures that you actually have a far greater degree of flexibility than Open WorldCat achieves by drawing you back to an Open WorldCat-controlled web page every time you use it, meaning that you could do all sorts of quite clever things with the location data if you had the will and the ability. Libraries within a preset distance of a zip code, but on a bus route? Libraries within a preset distance of a zip code, but close to a Starbucks? Libraries within a preset distance of a zip code, with convenient parking and a copy of the book on the shelf? These applications aren’t necessarily for Talis to build. We simply provide the tools to enable the community to do so.

Jonathan Cohen adds;

“When I click on the LTThing link, the only libraries it finds are British ones. Is Talis a British-only service, or is there some other reason?”

The Talis Platform, and the open and inclusive model that it represents, is a relatively recent activity for Talis and it will take time to work with the community on increasing the (already large) number of libraries represented. The holdings data visible to the Talis Platform today are predominantly those contributed to the Platform as part of library participation in a UK service we also run, called Talis Source.

The Platform itself is not restricted to the UK, and nor are the tools and applications built on top of it. If your local library is interested in contributing holdings data to the Platform (free of charge) so that it can be visible in LibraryThingThing and a growing number of other contexts, you should certainly encourage them to get in touch.

In investing in the Talis Platform, we at Talis are demonstrating our commitment to the continued development of libraries. We are also showing, quite explicitly, that library data has a value far beyond the walls of the library. Sites such as LibraryThing, complete with their significant (53,940 when I checked) communities of passionate bibliophiles offer one obvious place in which it makes sense to bring as many library-sourced resources as possible. Why make it hard for LibraryThing’s members to take the logical step into a convenient library? Why require those libraries to join some expensive club, just to make their holdings (or their very existence) visible?

Free participation. Easy contribution. Open APIs and a permissive license. It really does make sense, and every day it becomes harder to justify the monolithic technologies, closed clubs and exorbitant charges of the past with which libraries and their users continue to grapple today. There really is a better way. Come and see, then help build it.

Technorati Tags: Audience, Blogging, Folksonomy, Libraries, Library 2.0, LibraryThing, mashup, MUTL06, Participation, Platforms, API, Talis, Talis Platform, TDN, Web 2.0, web services

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Tim Spalding and LibraryThing continue to impress.

In a post to LibraryThing’s Google Group this morning, Tim invites users to take a look at a new forum system that he’s building for LibraryThing’s members.

‘So what?’, I hear you cry.

The interesting thing, to me, isn’t the forum itself at all. It’s his implementation of ‘touchstones’ to make it ridiculously easy for anyone to talk about authors and their works, and to have this link through to the bibliographic data and community intelligence of LibraryThing’s user base of more than 45,000 members.

“’Touchstones’ are works and authors ”touched on“ by your message. To add a touchstone, put brackets around the works and authors in your message—single brackets for works, double brackets for authors.”

It’s that simple.

There are already examples of tools that pluck ISBNs and similar identifiers off web pages, and pass them to some third party service (such as Amazon). We do that ourselves. Tim’s touchstones, though, take this to a whole new level, appealing not only to those who can conceptualise, find and (correctly!) type an ISBN, but reaching out to anyone who can partially recall the title of a work or its creator.

Absolutely brilliant, and so simple to use.

Now - how do we go about extending this, so that the same power can be called in my blog posting, my word processing, or even my e-mailing?

Read on, below the fold, for some screenshots to illustrate Tim’s current implementation… or just try it yourself.

Technorati Tags: Library 2.0, LibraryThing, mashup, MUTL06, Participation, Platforms, Talis

(more…)

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David Berlind, ZDNet blogger and one half of the regular Dan & David Show podcast, has a piece on Sony’s latest move toward world domination.

He picks up on a piece from The Register, reporting that Sony are to sell their latest electronic book reader in US branches of Borders. UK stores may not be far behind.

When this device was unveiled earlier this year, we covered it in panlibus, and hoped that the Digital Rights Management (DRM) solution it implemented would be more flexible than that seen in Sony’s previous e-book reader.

From Berlind’s comments, it would appear that he believes this will not be the case.

“But, chances are, just as with music sales, book publishers will want their content locked down before it can be digitized and released on the Net. So, if Sony’s e-book reader is to Apple’s iPod. And Sony’s ebook C.R.A.P. [Content, Restriction, Annulment, and Protection, Berlind’s pejorative term for DRM] is to Apple’s music and video C.R.A.P. And Sony opens an online bookstore that’s akin to Apple’s [iTunes Music Store], well, you can see where this is heading (in addition to ”away“ from brick and mortar bookstores like Borders not to mention how proprietary C.R.A.P. will wreak havoc on the library system). Is this a deal with the devil?”

(my emphasis)

Personally, I’m not necessarily convinced that DRM is always a bad thing. The creators and distributors of content, after all, have a right to make a living from their endeavours, and are wholly within their rights to take reasonable steps to protect that living.

DRM that restricts my ability to do things I’ve previously been permitted to do is something else, of course.

I can actually see all sorts of potential for the library, assuming that we can work constructively with readers, libraries, vendors, e-book reader makers and publishers to come up with a sensible and workable solution.

Imagine being able to interact with some online library presence from the comfort of my own home, selecting a book I want to read, and having it downloaded as if by magic to my own e-book reader? All at 3am - or from some depressing hotel room on the other side of the world - when the library itself is shut or far away, and the physical books are beyond my reach.

This would be a powerful extension of current pilots which see libraries issuing e-books along with the library-owned e-book reader, and it should not be beyond the collective will and intelligence of our sector to make the DRM support such a perfectly legitimate use case.

So, Sony, how about it?

Technorati Tags: Internet Law, Libraries, DRM

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Dave Pattern at Huddersfield posts some initial usage figures for the various enhancements and enrichments he has added to his local catalogue, including alternate spellings, ‘also borrowed’ functionality, and more.

Although the figures may not be statistically robust, they provide some interesting pointers to the ways in which actual users are beginning to make use of the enhancements being made available to them.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, users would appear to value the added functionality delivered to them when we actually start working with the data we already hold, and I look forward to seeing more libraries following Dave’s example.

I also remain convinced that the biggest benefits will come when we do more to aggregate these data across libraries; ‘also borrowed’ across similar institutions to Huddersfield must surely be more relevant to a borrower than the data drawn from Huddersfield alone, where circulations are of a scale where odd edge effects (I borrow this and that, so when you borrow this you are also recommended that) must be more likely to surface?

Do you have any thoughts in this area? Feel free to share them in the TDN…

Technorati Tags: Folksonomy, Library 2.0, OCLC, Participation, TDN

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ZDNet carries a piece from Reuters, entitled “Bertelsmann looking to create ‘MySpace’ for older set”, which continues;

“German media group Bertelsmann plans a return to the Internet and is looking at transforming its Direct Group of book, CD and DVD clubs into an Internet networking scene for older people.

The company believes that Direct Group can turn its aging customer base of around 35 million to its advantage by changing its traditional clubs into Internet communities of like-minded people united by their similar cultural interests.”

In many ways, an interesting idea, but I can’t help wondering what role the library could play here were the community to demonstrate sufficient will?

“Book club” ?

“similar cultural interests” ?

Sound familiar? And would you rather have that with or without Bertelsmann’s “lucrative” proposition that is to be “driven by advertising” and [presumably with] an “intrusive brand”?

Technorati Tags: attention, Libraries, Participation

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