Brett

“Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work — in the web browser itself.” On October 31, it made the great leap from Beta to 1.0 (and, it seems, to 1.0.1—that’s the version Firefox just loaded for me). Here’s what Team Zotero has to say about it: “We are pleased to announce that the 1.0 release of Zotero is now available. Our dedicated developers have refined and streamlined the Zotero experience, and Zotero is now officially out of its beta testing phase. If you were waiting for that seal of approval, you should now download Zotero immediately!”

“Those upgrading to Zotero 1.0 from earlier betas will notice significant improvements in functionality and stability, and our even more ambitious next phase of major development is already underway as our team focuses on Zotero’s upcoming collaborative features.”

On the one hand, I’m delighted and grateful that W. Boyd Rayward’s 1975 biography of Paul Otlet, The Universe of Information: The Work of Paul Otlet for Documentation and International Organization, was recently added to Ghent University’s Institutional Archive. Along with Archive.org’s Alle Kennis van de Wereld (Biography of Paul Otlet) (1998), we now have free, online access to information about Otlet, one of the founders of our profession. On the other hand, isn’t it ironic that The Universe of Information is only available as a series of static images strung together in a PDF document? Any OCR superstars want to turn this document into text so that it can be searched? Maybe even create links from within the document? After all, it’s what he would have wanted.

I don’t know if it was my library school, the professional associations I joined, or the conferences I attended, but since making the great leap into librarianship my mailbox has been filled with an incomprehensible number of catalogs. No more! “Catalog Choice is a sponsored project of the Ecology Center. It is endorsed by the National Wildlife Federation and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and funded by the Overbrook Foundation, the Merck Family Fund, and the Kendeda Fund.” Their mission “is to reduce the number of repeat and unsolicited catalog mailings… Consumers can indicate which catalogs they no longer wish to receive, and businesses can receive a list of consumers no longer wanting to receive their catalogs.”

Popular blogger Steve Yegge talked about his former employer, Amazon.com, in a recent keynote at O’Reilly’s OSCON: “What word comes to mind when you think of Amazon.com? Books. I worked at Amazon for seven years and it pains me to hear that but, yes, books. Books. And it’s because Bezos said, ‘Well, I’m going to make the Earth’s biggest bookstore.’ So that’s what we think of. Now Jeff is a brilliant, brilliant man and he did an amazing job of branding it as ‘books,’ and then one day a couple of years later, he told us in an all hands—and this wasn’t secret, but it’s important for us to know—he said, ‘We can’t ride on books and music and video forever.’ Why? Because they’re all digitizable. Who buys a CD in China right now? They have to move into hard lines. They have to move into clothes and auctions and all this other stuff. They have to move into services. They have to, right? Because in the fullness of time—and Bezos is quite the visionary—he thinks no one is going to buy books anymore. And if your brand is tied to something that’s dying then the brand is no good anymore.” Watch a video of the keynote, and get some more background on its circumstances in Yegge’s blog entry, “How To Make a Funny Talk Title Without Using The Word ‘Weasel.’“

From Tim O’Reilly: “Carl Malamud has this funny idea that public domain information ought to be… well, public. He has a history of creating public access databases on the net when the provider of the data has failed to do so or has licensed its data only to a private company that provides it only for pay. His technique is to build a high-profile demonstration project with the intent of getting the actual holder of the public domain information (usually a government agency) to take over the job.” Read about Malamud’s latest project, “creating unencumbered public repository of all federal and state case law and codes,” in O’Reilly’s blog entry, “Carl Malamud Takes on WestLaw,” or John Markoff’s New York Times article, “A Quest to Get More Court Rulings Online, and Free.”

What are you supposed to feel about Aaron Swartz? He co-authored RSS, served on the W3C’s RDF Core Working Group, helped the wonderful John Gruber design the amazing Markdown, and developed and gave away software like rss2email that many of us use every day… and then he graduated high school. He went to Stanford, naturally, at which point his already fascinating blog, Raw Thought, began alternating even more maddeningly between precocious, annoying, honest to the point of painfulness, and legitimately brilliant. A year into Stanford he dropped out, created Infogami for Paul Graham‘s YCombinator, then teamed up with Reddit‘s founders, developed web.py, became a millionaire after Conde Nast bought Reddit, and then managed to get himself fired within a few weeks. He’ll turn 21 in November, and in early celebration it seems he and Brewster Kahle are turning the library on its ear. Announcing the Open Library….

So, what are you supposed to feel about Aaron Swartz? For me, personally, it seems to be a mix of jealousy, admiration, and gratitude. But mostly gratitude. Aaron, welcome to the library. How can I help you?

Per Roy Tennant’s Digital Libraries blog at LibraryJournal.com: “Code4lib is many things. It is an ad hoc group of library coders. It is a chatroom. It is an email list. It is a conference. And now, thanks to the grassroots efforts of the code4lib community, it is now also a journal… being produced by a loose coalition of volunteers. If you want to help, then do… This is the hallmark of everything code4lib does. If you want to participate, just do it. If you want to lead, just do it. Don’t expect anyone to appoint you to anything, because we won’t.” However, they do have a Call for Submissions webpage on which they offer more information, including notice that the “Journal will be electronic only, and at least initially, edited rather than refereed.” Should be a good read.

Mike Rylander just announced the first release candidate of Evergreen 1.20 on the open-ils blog (“It’s the newwwwwww style“): “The 1.0 series was pretty heavily skinned for PINES, with the images, rules, and default configuration, and new backend features were slow to be incorporated due to the pain of updating the database schema. The shiny new 1.2 series removes almost all traces of PINES-specific images and default rules, and contains many new backend improvements. It is also the first non-experimental release to include a significant amount of code not created directly by GPLS and PINES.”. It’s a big step when an open source project begins incorporating code from people other than its original developers: this release of Evergreen includes code not only from non-PINES/Georgia Public Library folks, it even includes code from folks with no current connection to the library world. Kudos to the Evergreen team for taking this project to the next level.

Good Copy Bad Copy (Denmark, 2007) is “a documentary about the current state of copyright and culture” by directors Andreas Johnsen, Ralf Christensen, and Henrik Moltke. It was originally made for Danish television, but the filmmakers recently posted a free XviD .torrent file (with English subtitles) on The Pirate Bay (Warning: The Pirate Bay features some iffy-for-work advertisements, though it also makes sense as a distributor for this film because Pirate Bayers Anakata, Tiamo, and Rick Falkvinge are featured in “Good Copy Bad Copy”). For those Firefox users who have yet to install FoxTorrent, here’s a great excuse to give it a shot.

“We have the writers whose archives we’re trying to get—the A level,” (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Director Thomas) Staley says. “Then there’s the B level—these would be writers where we would get their published material, first editions and so on. And then there’s the C level, where we would try to get first editions of their major work.” The C’s include Martin Amis, Jonathan Franzen, and Dave Eggers. Some B’s: David Foster Wallace, J. D. Salinger, and J. M. Coetzee. Staley was reluctant to divulge the A’s, but he said that Ian McEwan was among them.

Though there may be no accounting for taste, it seems one can insure it: in the June 11 & 18, 2007 edition of the New Yorker, in a story entitled “Letter from Austin: Final Destination,” writer D.T. Max reports that the center’s holdings are insured for $1 billion.