LISNews: Librarian News

The NYTimes, they are a-changin'.

In this article in today's paper, the New York Times is ending payment for the 'Times Select' program. They found that readers were accessing those articles via search engines, and have chosen instead to give free online access to the work of its columnists and to the newspaper's archives, with a few minor exceptions.

Scott Boren has a great look at electronic searching of the full-text of books. He covers Several Book Search Web Sites, Text Archives for older materials, Proprietary Book Search sites, some Smaller Collections, Google Book Search, some Emerging Projects, and some sites for Further Reading.

Electronic searching of the full-text of books goes beyond the index and table of contents to search for any and all text in one book or in many. A phrase, number, word, or any string of characters can be searched. A9 same book database as Amazon, Google Book Search, and Live Search Books can all Search Inside The Book, or search inside many books at once. The book search sites listed in this paper are available free of charge, with the exception of "Two Proprietary Book Search Products below." As Greg Notess pointed out at the Computers in Libraries conference on April 18, 2007 (hereafter Notess 2007, April), another use of book search is to verify citations and to find mentions of passages as when a patron brings a photocopied chapter and asks "What book does this come from? I need to find the source" Or when was a particular word, number, or phrase mentioned? (For early mentions of words, the Oxford English Dictionary is also good.) -- Read More

The LA Times reports: "It's not often that a librarian is warned to stay away from the bookshelves because of high voltage and that students aren't allowed to roam freely through the stacks - but it's becoming more common.

At Chicago State University only robots are allowed to browse most books and archives. Books are supplied with RFID chips, and to get a particular book, students and faculty must log onto the library's website from home or school and place an order for a title.

Once the order is received, the library's computer system directs a robotic crane - dubbed "Rover" by the librarians - to retrieve one of more than 6,300 bins. Each bin holds the equivalent of four bookshelves.

The crane then brings the bin to a workstation at the front of the warehouse, where a HUMAN BEING--a librarian--picks up the book.

Paul Lewis writes "Articles discusses video site Blinkx.com blinkx.com which employs speech recognition technology to posted videos to enhance keyword searching capabilities for video content. They Say Blinkx's speech-recognition technology employs neural networks and machine learning using "hidden Markov models," a method of statistical analysis in which the hidden characteristics of a thing are guessed from what is known."