September 2009

“Talk of the Nation” on NPR
Wikipedia has been hailed as revolutionary, attacked as inaccurate, and held up as a model for Web 2.0 collaboration. The site hosts more than 3 million articles in English, it’s written and edited by hundreds of thousands of volunteers, and it’s the poster child of crowdsourcing.

But Wikipedia’s growth, once exponential, has flattened. In an article for TIME magazine, Farhad Manjoo writes about how volunteer editors are slower to create new entries and correct errors on existing articles.

“[Wikipedia] remains a precious resource,” Manjoo writes. “Still, Wikipedia’s troubles suggest the limits of Web 2.0 — that when an idealized community gets too big, it starts becoming dysfunctional. Just like every other human organization.”

Listen to full piece here.

Next Friday, October 2, at 2:00PM Central Time, The Law Librarian on BlogTalkRadio will take up a discussion about “How (and Why) Law Libraries are using Social Media.”

Our expert panel, so far, will include Sarah Glassmeyer, Connie Crosby and Pam Brannon, but we invite everyone with expertise and interest in the topic to join in the conversation. You can call in and/or join the chat room to participate. (Follow the link below for phone numbers and log in information.)

Marcia Dority Baker will be hosting the chat room, where she will be conducting a poll of which tools libraries are using, and, for what purposes. The transcript of the chat room will be posted online after the show. The audio can be downloaded from iTunes or from the show’s website: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/thelawlibrarian

Steve Jordan, a self-published science fiction novelist, has to make lots of decisions. Although most of them involve plot points, narrative arcs and character development, Mr. Jordan has the added burden of deciding how to deliver the stories he creates to his online audience.

Some of those readers own dedicated devices like Amazon.com’s Kindle, some plow through his books on smartphones, some use laptops and maybe a few even employ desktop PCs left over from the last century. (In true sci-fi fashion, Mr. Jordan doesn’t publish his novels on paper.)

The options are proliferating quickly for readers and the authors they love. While devices like the Kindle, the Apple iPhone and the Sony Reader get much of the attention, practically any electronic device capable of displaying a few lines of text can be adapted as a reader. The result has been a glut of hardware, software and e-book file formats for readers to sift through in searching for the right combination.

Full story in the NYT

According to the New York Times Bits (via Tech Crunch), it’s valued at around one billion dollars. Twitter’s last round of financing, raised in February, valued the firm at $250 million, meaning Twitter has quadrupled in value in less than a year.

Libraries of the Future: The university library of the future will be sparsely staffed, highly decentralized, and have a physical plant consisting of little more than special collections and study areas.

That’s what Daniel Greenstein, vice provost for academic planning and programs at the University of California System, told a room full of university librarians Wednesday at Baruch College of City University of New York, where the higher education technology group Ithaka held a meeting to discuss “sustainable scholarship.”

A Rock Hill, SC woman walking to the library earlier this week was solicited for prostitution, police say. The story is, well, interesting. She turned down $20.

Referring to a previous article in the Daily News Tribune, Mary Ellen McKenna, herself a parent volunteer, salutes parents who volunteered to man the school library in Ashland Massachusetts when the librarian position was eliminated. But she adds:

“The article sited budget cuts and the inability to hire professional librarians. The parents in town did not want their children spending another academic year with [sic] library services. They formed a unique volunteer team to support the lending of library resources to the children. While I am very impressed with the commitment of the volunteers, I am concerned the article serves to perpetuate the lack of appreciation for our professional school librarians.

As a volunteer library parent, I routinely check out books for the children. However, the librarian’s job goes much beyond checking out books. Who will teach these children the origins and ways of the Dewey decimal system? Who will teach them a true appreciation for the various genres of writing? who will teach them the research skills that become lifelong tools? Our school librarian is constantly thinking outside the box to meet the needs of the children.”

Community center, library, and school in one building.
Video is worth watching just to see the swivel bookshelves used to separate the school library from the regular library.

Google is rolling out a new service on Wednesday that will allow users to post notes alongside Web sites that can be read by other users. The service, called Sidewiki, will be a new feature of the Google Toolbar, a popular browser add-on.

Full post at NYT Bits Blog

By LORI STAHL / The Dallas Morning News reports that the judge who has presided over a high-profile lawsuit against Southern Methodist University for years, State District Judge Martin Hoffman, has suddenly withdrawn from the case, bringing a temporary halt to all proceedings. The reason was not clear from a motion he filed with the court (but if you read his bio, you might suppose that he decided he could not be impartial in this case).

But the implications for the case itself – which has indirect ramifications for the George W. Bush Presidential Library at SMU – were fairly obvious: It no longer seems to be on the verge of ending.

Two months ago, SMU and the two former condominium owners who filed the lawsuit in 2005 announced that they had settled the case. Although the terms were not made public, it was clear that the condo owners agreed to back off their claim to land in exchange for some kind of payment. But within weeks, the terms of the settlement agreement were in dispute. Hoffman was set to issue a ruling on the settlement agreement when he recused himself.