LISNews: Librarian News

Librarian Bill Drew just reported on receiving an email from Google about a new feature they wanted him to try out called A Google a Day. Here's the gist of it:

What is a Google a Day?
A Google a Day is a daily trivia question where searching isn't just allowed, it's encouraged. Through daily questions on a diverse array of topics, we delight the curious with exciting new facts. Questions are featured daily on www.agoogleaday.com and above the New York Times crossword puzzle.

Why is it cool?
A Google a Day is a great new way to discover fascinating information about the world around all while learning how to use the wealth of the web to satisfy one's curiosity. Moreover, it's a great way for students and library patrons to build search skills that allow them to better put the power of Google's search engine to work for them in researching for assignments and discovering untapped avenues for further exploration.

Even more exciting, the Google a Day widget can be embedded right on a library's home page. With minimal effort and no programming experience required, each day the widget will automatically update so users have instant access to exciting and educational content on the landing page.

Why is it useful for libraries? -- Read More

Privacy experts praise Google+ rollout so far
Ultimately, the key issue may not come down so much to pure privacy features but to whether Google+ lets users share online in a more natural, intuitive manner, like they do in real life, than is possible with Facebook today, F-Secure's Sullivan said. Whether it succeeds and beats Facebook in that respect remains to be seen, he said.

Google News! In the coming months, we’re going to retire two products that didn’t catch on the way we would have hoped, but did serve as influential models: Google Health (retiring January 1, 2012; data available for download through January 1, 2013) and Google PowerMeter (retiring September 16, 2011). Both were based on the idea that with more and better information, people can make smarter choices, whether in regard to managing personal health and wellness, or saving money and conserving energy at home. While they didn't scale as we had hoped, we believe they did highlight the importance of access to information in areas where it’s traditionally been difficult.

Panizzi, Lubetzky, and Google: How the Modern Web Environment is Reinventing the Theory of Cataloguing: This paper uses cataloguing theory to interpret the partial results of an exploratory study of university students using Web search engines and Web-based OPACs. The participants expressed frustration with the OPAC; while they sensed that it was "organized," they were unable to exploit that organization and attributed their failure to the inadequacy of their own skills. In the Google searches, on the other hand, students were getting the support traditionally advocated in catalogue design. Google gave them starting points: resources that broadly addressed their requirements, enabling them to get a greater sense of the knowledge structure that would help them to increase their precision in subsequent searches. While current OPACs apparently fail to provide these starting points, the effectiveness of Google is consistent with the aims of cataloguing as expressed in the theories of Anthony Panizzi and Seymour Lubetzky