August 2012

As reported a few weeks ago, OCLC has recommended that its member libraries adopt the Open Data Commons Attribution license (ODC-BY) when they share their library catalog data online. The recommendation to use an open license like ODC-BY is a positive step forward for OCLC because it helps communicate in advance the rights and responsibilities available to potential users of bibliographic metadata from library catalogs. But the decision by OCLC to recommend the licensing route — as opposed to releasing bibliographic metadata into the public domain — raises concerns that warrants more discussion.
[Thanks Sarah!]

TechCrunch: Mendeley’s ecosystem has now produced over 240 research apps drawing on open data from its database under a Creative Commons license. Those generate more than 100 million API calls to Mendeley’s database per month. While Elsevier now has around 100 third-party apps using its platform, it’s clear Mendeley is winning in the apps stakes.

The information fueling this ecosystem is being produced by the scientific community itself, putting a social layer over each document and producing anonymised real-time information about the academic status, field of research, current interests, location of, and keywords generated by its readers. The applications can cover research collaboration, measurement, visualisation, semantic markup, and discovery.

Local librarians are on alert after bedbugs were found recently in books at two Connecticut libraries.

While none of the parasitic insects were found locally, library employees are taking measures to make sure they don’t end up there.

“We’ve been following it closely,” said Wallingford Public Library Director Leslie Scherer. “We have a procedure in place but we haven’t had any problems.”

Blog More, says Scott Hanselman.

Own your space on the Web, and pay for it. Extra effort, but otherwise you’re a sharecropper. – Tim Bray

“You are not blogging enough. You are pouring your words into increasingly closed and often walled gardens. You are giving control – and sometimes ownership – of your content to social media companies that will SURELY fail. These companies are profoundly overvalued, don’t care about permalinks, don’t make your content portable, and have terms of service that are so complex and obtuse that there are entire websites dedicate to explaining them.”

Kickstarter’s most successful projects suggest the creativity we value is interactive, rather than aesthetic, says Patrick Hussey

“For me though, crowdfunding represents something amazing – the gamification of progress. The internet is pointing us in the right direction and crowdfunding, with that digital hallmark of mashing capitalism, communism and cats into one, is certainly getting to places other funding forms are too slow to reach.”

Mary Poppins, Harry Potter and Peter Pan were centre stage at the Olympic stadium – let’s keep them there, says Judith Elkin
“It is vital that authors, publishers and other literary organisations encourage this two way relationship between writers and readers – libraries have always made it a priority. New developments at the Hive, the revolutionary Idea Stores in several London boroughs and ventures such as the Ministry of Stories are building on this strong heritage.”

Harry Hay screenplay missing, library suspects theft
The San Francisco Public Library appears to have been the victim of a screenplay heist.

On July 30, main library staff discovered that the 1938 screenplay “Largo: A Story Out of the Life of George Friederich Handel” was missing from a locked plexiglass case in the Jewett Gallery. The screenplay was on display as part of the “Radically Gay: The Life of Harry Hay” exhibit, which ran from April 21 to July 29.

Nifty: http://www.amazon.com/gp/election-heatmap Amazon’s Heat Map
Our 2012 Election Heat Map colors each state according to the percentage of red and blue book purchases, based on shipping address, that have been made on Amazon.com during the past 30 days. We take the top-selling political books on Amazon.com and categorize them as “red,” “blue,” or neutral. We classify books as red or blue if they have a political leaning made evident in book promotion material and/or customer classification, such as tags. We compute percentages, updated daily, for each state and the US by comparing the 250 best-selling blue books during the time period against the 250 best-selling red books during the same time period, including new book launches. If the same book title has multiple formats (paperback, Kindle books and Audible Audio), each format has a separate sales calculation. The list only includes paid, not free Kindle books. All orders during the period are given equal weighting in the calculation. States with higher percentages of red or blue purchases are colored more darkly, and states with an even 50-50 split are colored neutral.

The indispensible Lifehacker on one aspect of what makes a leader great.

“Note how many business titans are or have been avid readers. According to The New York Times, Steve Jobs had an “inexhaustible interest” in William Blake; Nike founder Phil Knight so reveres his library that in it you have to take off your shoes and bow; and Harman Industries founder Sidney Harman called poets “the original systems thinkers,” quoting freely from Shakespeare and Tennyson. In Passion & Purpose, David Gergen notes that Carlyle Group founder David Rubenstein reads dozens of books each week.”

If good ideas transcend boundaries, this one does it by bicycle. That is, by Bicicloteca [ http://biciclotecas.wordpress.com/ ], a bicycle that carries a small library through the city of São Paulo, Brazil.

The project is a creative and dynamic way to encourage reading, especially among people who live on the streets, because libraries typically require identification and proof of residence to loan books; documents which homeless people don’t have.