The Biblio File

A couple of interesting articles on the future of libraries are making the rounds. The first is an article by Robert Darnton, University Librarian at Harvard, which appears in the New York Review of Books. Basically, he thinks there’s still a big future for research libraries:

. . . .Google Book Search, the largest undertaking of them all, will make research libraries obsolete. On the contrary, Google will make them more important than ever. To support this view, I would like to organize my argument around eight points.

You need to read the rest of the article for his eight points, as well as his take on the (in)stability of information.

Harrison Scott Key at World on the Web has a bit of a counter argument, saying librarians need to do more to make their services necessary:

Here’s an idea: it’s never very effective to tell a younger generation that something old is important. They won’t believe you. You have to show them it’s important. So librarians need to do something to make their buildings important. Make them places where students must go. Make the information there more valuable than information somewhere else. Make them places where scholars must go, where they have to go. Make them places where knowledge is found. And if the internet won’t allow it, then we’ll simply be having far fewer libraries.

And, in Metafilter’s roundup of all this, another, alternative theory of librarianship is presented. Who told them about the Secret Society?????

For this exercise, we were to explore web-based productivity applications. I had already used Google Docs before, so I experimentd with Zoho. Zoho is more robust thatn Google Docs, incorporating not only a spreadsheet and word processing element, but also presentation and project planing apps. The word processing app also has more of the features that you would find in desktop apps like Word or OpenOffice Writer.

While I liked that Zoho was trying to do more, I ended up not liking it as well as Google Docs. There were cool features in Zoho, (such as the ability to post a document to your blog) but I couldnt’ get it to work with my Wordpress blog. Likewise, I imported a PowerPoint file into the presentation app, and it had trouble with character rendering and slide styles. The collaboration tools are also not as advanced as they are in Google Docs –no simultaneous chat, no instant refresh on spreadsheets. One major advantage of Zoho, however, is the ability to work on documents offline. For now, though, when I need to do collaborative document creation, I think I’ll stick with Google Docs.

When I first started using a feed aggregator a couple of years ago, I started out with Bloglines. But, I have since migrated to the Google version of Bloglines: Google Reader.  I like the interface better, and I like how it’s integrated with other Google products. Matt Cutts has a nice comparisson of Bloglines and Google Reader on his blog, if you want to know more about what the differences are.   You can also take a look at my feeds here, or grab the feed here.

I find that, when I find a blog that I really like, I usually put it in Google Reader, but I also put it in my Firefox feeds. Most of the time,  I actually access my feeds via Firefox, because I quickly skim the headlines from the browser window I already have open, without having to stop what I’m doing. (The disadvantage to this is that you can only skim headlines in Firefox–if you want the whole article, you have to go to the page.) But I also add the blogs I read all the time to Google Reader, so I can have them on the go.

The LibrarianInBlack points to a report (download word doc  on bottom right hand corner of page) from the metasearch engine Dogpile, which states that “88.3% of total results”  are “unique to one engine.”  This means that, if we’re only using Google, we are missing quite a bit.

In their continuing bid for world domination, ars technica reports that Google has “slipped” facial recognition software into their image search.

Google upped its stalker factor this week by adding face recognition abilities to its image search. While currently unofficial and unannounced, users can now search for images that only contain faces by appending a query string onto the end of a search URL. For example, a general image search for “Ars Technica” produces a variety of image results, but when appending “&imgtype=face” to the end of the URL, all new results contain photos of people.

For all of you GMail people, Lifehacker is reporting on a new applet that will allow  you to keep track of your bookmarks through your Gmail account:

         At first glance, the bookmarklet doesn’t work any differently from the original. If you click the bookmarklet, it’ll open up a  compose window in Gmail with the page’s title in the subject, along with the link and any highlighted text quoted in the body. But it gets more fun from there. Once set up as a keyword bookmarklet, you can use this bookmarklet to add tags to the subject, re-write the subject altogether, add text to the body of the email, and add a recipient to your email all from your  address bar.

As per LibraryStuff ALA has used Google Co-Op to create a new search tool that searches over 150 “information rich” web sites of interest to librarians. It uses Google’s customizeable search engine.