I thought I’d share a final essay I wrote for a course on “Organizing Information”, connecting Walter Ong on the eras of information culture with Bruce Sterling on the eras of technoculture, via Suzanne Briet considering objects as documents.

That was a mouthful. It goes something like this: Ong talked about the shifts in culture that occurred in the move from oral (spoken) transmission of information to literate (written) society. Sterling talks about the shifts in culture that occurred due to the way that things (material objects) are produced and consumed, from handmade to mass-produced to “smart”.

Suzanne Briet was a librarian and documentalist in France in the early 20th century. Her work has come into the light in recent years largely thanks to Michael Buckland and an article in JASIST titled “What is a Document?”, in which Buckland explores a variety of perspectives on what constitutes a “document”. Briet (now, rather famously, in library circles at least) asserted that, although an antelope in the wild was not a document, an antelope that was captured, put in a zoo, cataloged, and considered an object of study could be considered a document just as much as text printed on paper.

So, using Briet’s ideas about objects as documents, Ong’s cultures and Sterling’s begin to converge into a conglomerate in which it is (or will be) no longer easy to distinguish between the two. This is especially the case in an “Internet of Things”, in which objects are increasingly retrievable and record information about themselves.

You can get a copy of my essay (pdf) if you’re interested.

If you don’t know him, Jay Datema is the technology editor at Library Journal, and he’s been blogging (since June, but I’ve been hunkered down for the last semester and hadn’t noticed until now). Check it out.

Too many of my neighbors with their air conditioners turned down to 62 degrees in the heat wave = power outage last night beginning while I was in the middle of revising a presentation for class today, also = web site down. Power restored, presentation over, website back. More details soon on my paper/presentation, about the conjuction of folksonomies and controlled vocabularies on LibraryThing.

Something I’ve occasionally wished for and just found out actually existed: proximity searching in Google (via a third-party using the Google API). Only up to three words away, but still, that’s useful.

• via Thing-ology

I’ve been pretty quiet lately, because there are three weeks left of library school (eep!) and I’ve been super-busy.

However, I’m briefly popping my head out of the burrow to engage in a little shameless self-promotion. I’d like to call the attention of the reader to two things I’ve been working on lately. First, you can check out my article in this month’s Library Journal, “Shoestring Digital Library”. It’s based on my experiences building a prototype digital library using Ruby on Rails (detailed in an earlier post) and provides some ideas for building digital libraries using software from outside the usual pool of suspects.

Second, I’ve been working this semester in an internship-for-credit with the wonderful folks at PINES who are developing Evergreen, an open-source ILS. It’s currently in public beta and it’s shaping up quite well! I’ve been making use of my technical writing skills by working on the documentation. (Be aware that it’s still in progress, one of many things I’ll be working fiendishly on in the next few weeks. But it’s also a wiki, so feel free to contribute if you have the inclination!)

The Newman Library at Virginia Tech released LibX, an easy-to-configure browser extension that brings together previously disparate toolbars, extensions, and scripts for searching library catalogs, embedding links to library materials in Amazon and other web pages, and various other goodies. In about half an hour, without any special inside information beyond a little detective work to suss out the URLs for various services, I was able to create a toolbar for the University Library System at the University of Pittsburgh, where I’m a student.

Cool.

You can install my Pitt library toolbar by clicking this link. (Support for the “Reload this page using SSL VPN” and “Follow this link using SSL VPN” features for off-campus access is limited, since our system isn’t exactly supported.) If you find any problems, please let me know.

Learn how to make your own LibX toobar on the LibX site.

LibraryThing is now showing relationships between LC subject headings and user-assigned tags and the results are really interesting. Lots of forward-thinking librarians and web-2.0-ologists have been claiming for a while that subject headings and tags can coexist without eating each other’s babies, but we haven’t had any place to see it in action until now. (PennTags, for example, incorporates tags in the catalog, but doesn’t show relationships between tags and subject headings.)

It’s really pretty cool how much information can be derived simply by observing the co-occurrence of tags and subject headings, without any directed human input matching them up.

I think RJO’s comment on this post (the second one) is pretty insightful. I’ve been noodling around with LibraryThing and listening in on the LibraryThing Google Group, and one of the things that occurred to me as well was that it might be useful to have private tags, for things like shelf location and read/unread status, in addition to public tags, which really make sense in the social-networking atmosphere connecting up tags and subject headings and everything.

The library world is going to be continuing to watch LibraryThing for interesting experiments in bibliography. It’s a perfect test-bed for these kinds of things, because its user-base is a dedicated one that cares about adding tags, etc., because they are their books. I don’t know how easily any of this translates to the catalog for a particular library, because the average dedication level for users is lower, but there are potentially lots more users as well. As we see more experiments like this, time will tell.

I’m continuing to think about this and what might work for “book queues”. A few tidbits:

• Apparently some library systems allow “active” and “inactive” holds, which might kinda help the problem (i.e., place an “inactive” hold on things you don’t want to read yet).
• An argument for the processing happening inside the library: people on long holds lists. See the comments on this post at Seattlist. This isn’t generally my situation, but I see the problem.

I have Netflix, and one of the things I really love about it is the queue. Every time someone tells me about an interesting movie, I just add it to the queue. Eventually it comes up to the top, or sometimes I’ll bump something up that I’m really interested in seeing.

I really wish library holds worked this way, but they don’t. I can’t just place a hold on an interesting book that someone mentioned, because I don’t want it right now, I want it after I’m finished with the current book or two I’m reading.

And I’m not exactly sure the library is the right place for the queue to live, anyway, at least for me. I buy a lot of books (something of a book junkie), plus I often read things I already have or that have been lent to me by a friend. I want to keep track of all of those books in my queue, but I don’t need or want to get them all from the library. This kind of queue integrated with something like LibraryThing would be perfect.

Well, my Netflix queue has about 200 DVDs on it (many are multidisc TV series, so it’s not really quite as bad as it sounds). I’m convinced there’s probably about that much in my mental queue of books as well, but there’s no way I can remember that many. The pain has gotten to the point that I decided to stop whining and do something about it.

I’ve built a prototype system in Ruby on Rails, because it rocks my world for getting web applications up and running in a hurry. (Rails also gives you all kinds of AJAX-y goodness without much work.) It’s heavily modeled after the queue in Netflix, with basically four sections: the queue, the current reading, saved books (not in the queue because they’re not released yet), and a history (which I haven’t implemented yet). It pulls information from Amazon’s awesome web services using a Ruby library. Right now that’s pretty rough, but it’s clear how it would work. (Even better would be an API for LibraryThing or something like that.) I also envision that eventually it would incorporate ideas from Jon Udell’s Library Lookup to check for availability in your favorite libraries (and of course it could give you a current price on Amazon or other booksellers as well). Unfortunately there are no automated ways (as far as I know) to place holds in OPACs, so you’d still have to do that manually, but at least it could point you directly to the hold page for the work.

You can see the live demo. It’s still quite rough around the edges, but I think it gives a fairly good idea of what I’m aiming at. It’s also totally unsecured, so I’ll trust you not to go crazy with it and tie up my machine. (If you click the link and don’t get anything, you can probably assume something bad happened. If it does, I’ll bring it back up later with a password and you can email me to check it out.)

If you recently upgraded Mac OS X to 10.4 and MySQL didn’t play nice anymore with PHP applications like WordPress, this is why. I don’t want you to have to spend 2 hours figuring that out like I did.