Metalibrarian

Thoughts about Google

2006-10-15T16:20:00.000-05:00

When reviewing my blog stats, I've been surprised at how many people find this blog by searching for some combination of Google and libraries (see previous post). There is certainly a wide-spread interest in how Google and libraries are going to interact in the current and emerging information environments. During my (brief) career in field of librarianship the projects I've worked on have had very different interactions with Google.

2004: I was working at Harvard College Library when Harvard announced that Google would be scanning select materials from its libraries. As a member of the Imaging Services department, I was very interested in how this would influence future directions of the department. Imaging Services had already been scanning books for several years and was aware of many of the problems encountered during the digitization process. Would Google digitize to the same standards? And how would the department stay relevant if Google's output was so much greater?

Regarding standards, it seems that libraries are still holding themselves to higher standards than Google. Reports of missing pages, thumbs in images, and lack of accompanying metadata for Google Books show that librarians' attention to detail still differentiates us from Google. However, it is possible that Google will find innovative solutions to these problems. When and if they do, I hope that we will be ready and able to learn from them.

Regarding relevance in the age of Google Books, the librarians I worked with were confident that we would stay relevant. One of our most important roles as librarians is bringing collections together and providing quality information for our patrons. At Harvard this is realized through collections like Women Working and Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930. Pulling together related resources is a defining characteristic of librarianship, and one that Google will probably not be attempting.

2005: My next experience with Google was with a small digital library project. Most of our users found our website by querying Google. The benefits that Google and other search engines bring to these types of projects is tremendous. Most of the visitors to our website were not regular patrons of the library, were searching for specific items, and wouldn't have found the website without Google. This does, however, raise the significant point that Google is not yet comprehensively indexing the invisible web. When I submitted our OAI-PMH url to Google site maps, our site was crawled more thoroughly, but still not in full. I believe that as Google refines its indexing, this will become less of a problem.

2006: I currently work on a registry of digital projects that includes an item-level metadata repository of metadata from some of the projects. Included is the ability to search with more refinement than one can search with Google. Future directions the project hopes to take include offering added-value services. Another influence of Google is in the design of the website. Users arrive at a new site with habits learned from experience with other sites, and Google is a major presence on the web. Many of the conventions created by Google directly influence the website design and layout.

This past week I attended a lecture by Siva Vaidhyanathan titled "What's an Author to Do? Google, Digitization, and the Future of Books." He proposed that there are four main players in the information environment that directly interact with Google: Publishers, Readers, Authors, and Librarians. These four entities are not separate; everyone participates in all of the roles, but all of the roles interact differently with Google. My varied experiences in libraries certainly support this point--my thoughts about Google are influenced by each project's interaction with Google.

The topic of Google and libraries has also been addressed in a recently published book: Libraries and Google.

New job!

2006-08-29T09:35:00.000-05:00

I've recently accepted a position with the University of Illinois Digital Library Program. I'll be Project Coordinator for this project. After spending the past year working in a small department in a medium sized library, I'm excited to move to a larger research environment. I've also been commuting 180 miles each day and crossing a time zone from Urbana, Illinois, to Terre Haute, Indiana, and I'm very excited to work in the same town that I live in. I'll start my new position in the middle of September.

This week I've also been playing piccolo with the Philharmonia A Vent, and will be recording a CD at the end of the week.

Hiring

2006-06-03T16:53:00.000-05:00

I recently had my first experience on the other side of the hiring table, and I thought I'd share what I learned from the experience.

If you are asked to fill out a form, be sure to answer all of the questions. If you don't have time to fill out the form, I don't have time to sort through your application.

A personalized cover letter gives a good impression! If you've at least taken the time to put the job name on your cover letter, I'll take more time to read through your application.

It's possible to be over qualified. I hadn't realized this before, but if I have a simple task that needs to be performed, and you have many additional skills, I might worry that you won't be happy performing the simple task. As a job applicant, this is something that is entirely out of your control, but don't take it personally if you aren't hired.

One of the most important considerations when hiring a new employee is how that person will interact with the rest of the department. New skills can always be taught and learned, but in order to maintain a good working environment, personalities must be able to exist together. When interviewing for a new position, be sure to demonstrate that you are able to work well with others.

Most importantly, don't be discouraged if you aren't offered the position. Many factors influence the final decision, and the people doing the hiring may feel that the position isn't a good fit for you. Keep looking and good luck!

Copyright conference

2006-04-13T12:16:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I attended a copyright conference at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. The speakers presented topics relevant to libraries and the copyright law, specifically sections 107 (fair use), 108 (libraries and archives), 109 (transfer of copies), and 110 (performance and displays, relevant for distance education).

Jule Sigall from the U.S. Copyright Office gave an update on the Report on Orphan Works. The report recommends that if a user has "performed a good faith, reasonably diligent search to locate the owner," and is unable to locate that owner, then they are free to use a copyright protected work without permission. If the copyright owner finds and objects to the use, the infringer will not be held to a monetary compensation, as long as "the infringement is performed without any purpose of direct of indirect commercial advantage." If this legislation passes, libraries will feel more comfortable distributing their vast collections of orphan works.

Kenny Crews discussed Google and Fair Use. He expressed the personal opinion that Google Print should be considered fair use, but acknowledged the fact that legally it can be argued either way. I think that providing access to books through any means can only help the publishers and authors. I've bought books from Amazon because of a hit on a keyword search. How many people would want to read an entire book online anyways? I also won Crews' Copyright Law for Librarians and Educators in a raffle, and he even signed it for me!

In the final open discussion of the day, one of the moderators stressed how important it is for librarians to keep on top of digital developments. He said that Google is changing everything, and if we're not all ready to drop our job descriptions and learn new skills as necessary, we're not going to be able to keep up. I'm excited about the challenge, and welcome new developments!

The changing role of libraries

2006-03-10T10:25:00.000-06:00

This week I've been attending the Visual Resource Association's annual conference. The VRA professionals see themselves as closely aligned to librarians, but a separate profession. Today I attended an interesting discussion on the changing role of visual resource professionals and was able to observe how a closely aligned profession views the library community.

Visual resource curators have spent the last several years connecting to their institution's libraries for support and resources, and now they are beginning to question the wisdom of this alignment. They see that libraries are having an identity crisis and don't want to go through the same issues. Librarians are seen as being disconnected from their patrons, and the VR curators take pride in the close relationships they've developed with their patrons. Libraries are no longer seen as the place to turn for information, and librarians are trying to face fundamental changes with superficial fixes.

Visual resource curators and librarians have many things in common, including collection development, cataloging, and reference work. The fact that these professionals are questioning the role of librarians as a collaborative partners should be something that the library community takes very seriously.

What directions should the future take? The panelists and audience had many constructive thoughts. VR curators see collaborative initiatives across campus departments as key to future development. The library needs to be one participant in these discussions, but can't expect to lead everyone. Another panelist suggested that digital library collection with well-developed metadata will dramatically change the role of the library. Although the content needs to be relevant to patrons, the use of the metadata will be how we disseminate this information. Another obvious change is that librarians need to find and understand our patrons. We have to educate them about the services we offer and not expect them to find us when we're needed.

The final consensus of the discussion seemed to be that collaborative models are the future, and expertise from many different fields is necessary. If libraries want to remain relevant in the digital future, we need to be willing to participate in these discussions and not try to do everything by ourselves.

Four things

2006-03-06T16:29:00.000-06:00

I just recently saw that Jenn at Inquiring Librarian tagged me for four things. Since I'm busy procrastinating my deadlines today, I thought I'd answer.

4 jobs I've had:
Metadata and Digital Initiatives Librarian, Indiana State University Library
Metadata technician, Imaging Services Department, Harvard College Library
Preservation Assistant, Preservation and Imaging Services Department, Harvard College Library
Interlibrary Loan Assistant, Peabody Conservatory Music Library

4 places I've lived:
Danville, Illinois
Boston, Massachusetts
Baltimore, Maryland
Albuquerque, New Mexico

4 TV shows:
Sex and the City
Scrubs
CSI
Nova

4 recent novels:
Chronicles of Narnia
Short Stories of Nabokov
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
Love in the Time of Cholera

4 Places I've been on vacation:
Yorkshire Dales, England
Lucerne, Switzerland
Mt. Desert Island, Maine
Aspen, Colorado

4 favorite foods:
Hatch (New Mexico) green chile
Fresh fruit
Bubble tea
Crying Tiger (from my favorite Thai restaurant in Boston)

4 websites I visit daily:
Google news
Gmail
Wabash Valley Visions & Voices
BBC News

4 places I'd rather be:
With my husband
On vacation
New Mexico
Aspen, Colorado

4 Bloggers I'm tagging
The only blogger I'd tag is Jenn, but tagged me so I guess I'll leave this blank. Anyone else should feel free to answer.

New links

2006-02-12T16:19:00.000-06:00

While exploring a little corner of the internet this week I found some new places to visit:
digitizationblog: News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions
Digitize everything: helping dig the grave of all things analog
Library weblogs

I also found a journal that I hadn't known about before:
Libraries & the Cultural Record, "exploring the history of the institutions, professions, and disciplines that are finding common ground in their stewardship of the cultural record."

The library versus Googling

2006-01-23T19:51:00.000-06:00

Over the weekend I received my copy of Library Resources & Technical Services. The first article, “The Future of Cataloging” by Deanna B. Marcum, caught my eye because it simultaneously deals with both aspect of my job: digital content and descriptive cataloging. There’s a lot to digest in this article, and right now I just want to comment on the first section, “using the library versus Googling.”

In this section, Marcum discusses the fact that students prefer searching Google to searching the library homepage/OPAC. Google gives students information with a simple click, while the library webpage requires navigation through many layers to find the needed information. According to a study, students even prefer the clutter of irrelevant and non-authoritative sites to the library webpage, and are able to approach this clutter “in an enthusiastic and proactive manner.” I think this last statement is underestimated in the library community. Librarians often don’t give students credit for being able to weed through web results. As a recent student (and still socially connected with students), I know that many are capable of finding the correct information on the web using Google. As the generation that grew up with the internet begins to enter college, we should see better developed searching skills.

My other reaction to this section of the article deals with the entire underlying assumption of the “library versus Google.” Why? Google and other search engines are tools that index words. They do not provide content (yet). The library provides content and access points (words). Why is it one versus the other? It sounds like they should be working together. Why are our search engines so much more complicated? A student should be able to enter their search words in the front page of the library site and be directed to resources that may be useful, whether they are databases, books, or electronic resources. Google is learning to provide content by digitizing books. Maybe libraries should learn from Google and create search engines that are easier to use, and trusting that the students will be able to weed out irrelevant results themselves.

Happy new year

2006-01-16T15:18:00.000-06:00

I’ve been out of touch with my blog for a while! I spent the holidays travelling, and then moved into another apartment during the first week of the year. Life is finally getting back to normal now, thanks to the three day weekend.

One of the challenges of this job is keeping up with all of the information available, doing my job, and still finding time to have a life outside of work. I’m still struggling to find the balance. Blogs, listservs, professional journals, etc. and wonderful resources, but the amount of information can be overwhelming. I really admire the people that are able to do find a balance between work and life and still be well informed.

Work projects in the past month have including creating new portal pages to our database and digitizing audio. I had a nice surprise just before I left for the holidays when I found out that the Visual Resources Association awarded me a travel grant to attend the annual conference in Baltimore. I’ve found this group to be very supportive, and I’m excited to attend the annual conference and meet more members.

A hot topics I’ve noticed recently is oral history interviews. Right now I’m working on digitizing some old cassette tapes with oral history interviews and will eventually add them to the site. However, when I think about our digital content management systems, it seems like most of them have been designed to manage visual content rather than audio/visual content. Is it appropriate to add audio/visual content to these systems, or would it be better to keep them in a systems designed specifically for searching and displaying audio/visual material?

User contributions

2005-12-11T09:28:00.000-06:00

Several unrelated discussions this week involved the subject of user contributions for digital collections.

The contentdm listserv discussed web 2.0 applications and how we could integrate them into digital content management systems. Interestingly, most librarians were in favor of allowing users to comment on digital objects in appropriate collections. Another comment was that our collections don’t have a critical mass of exposure to be self moderating, and the consensus seemed to be that librarians would need to moderate the user contributions.

The Internet Librarian article by Joseph Janes in the December issue of American Libraries discusses the role librarians can play in helping preserve genealogical information. Janes suggests that we can play a bigger role in helping people document their information, and he mentioned flickr.com as an example of a grassroots movement to document photographs. This led me to explore flickr and open an account. It’s interesting to explore a site that’s been created without authority control. Users are struggling with singular vs. plural forms of words, and how to enter tags with two words. At the same time, authority control and rules for tags would make this site more technical and less appealing to novice users (and not as much fun). An interesting observation--Flickr is experimenting with creating clusters of similar subjects.

Finally, the Wikipedia story brings up accountability for anonymous contributions. There’s also the deeper issue of correct information for signed contributions. How can this be resolved? We assume that someone supplying missing information knows what they’re talking about. But if we let users supply missing information about digital objects, how do we know that it’s the correct information? To tie this into the contentdm listserv thread, what’s the critical mass needed to properly regulate user contributions? We assume that most people want to help supply missing information, but how can we weed out the few exceptions to the rule? Personally, I think that users should participate in our collection, but I’m not sure how this should be implemented.

____________________________________________________

Other explorations for the week took me down the path of cascading style sheets. (When I was in school I didn’t think I’d be designing web sites, but one of the exciting things about this career is that I’ll always be learning new stuff.)

Weekly projects

2005-12-04T15:27:00.000-06:00

Last week's projects:

Troubleshooting streaming video for the project (final result here). I’m not happy with the display of the metadata for the individual items. The user must click on the part that they want information for, and then choose page description from the dropdown list. Why would a normal user associate “page description” with a description of a video clip? I think most users will just view the item without seeing the metadata we’ve created.

Learning how to creating structural metadata for books with chapters (example). This was one of my jobs at Harvard, and we used a program by CCS called docWORKS. It performed OCR, automatically created structural metadata (with human assistance), and exported a METS file. This was much quicker and easier than determining how to create the directory structure for ContentDM, and renaming all of the files to coincide with how we want them displayed.

Working on my first-year tenure review documentation (due tomorrow!!!).

Other thoughts:

A new wiki for digitization issues was released. This has the potential to be of great use to me as I’m learning all about digitization of various formats.

On a more personal level, I met with the flute professor at ISU this week to discuss how to become more involved with the flute community in the area. With so much invested in my flute background, I’m really hoping to be able to continue performing. Of course, this is even more difficult than learning how to do a new job, and doing both at the same time is overwhelming.

The online edition of the Terre Haute Tribune-Star mentioned my blog several weeks ago. Unfortunately I didn’t find it until they had removed the page (I found it in the Google cache). Following is the review:

“How I metalibrarian ...

Blogging to "help with her own professional development and to organize helpful information" is Amy Jackson, the new Metadata and Digitial Initiatives Librarian (or metalibrarian, as she calls her blog) at Indiana State University.

She is involved with a project the Tribune-Star and tribstar.com recently featured on its unveiling -- the Wabash Valley Visions and Voices digital memory project, a collaborative effort by many groups in the Valley to preserve the region's history and heritage in print, pictures and sound.

She has but a few entries in her metalibrarian blog to date, but data and history buffs could gain some interesting insights into the WV3 project as it continues to develop.”

Full resolution and digital content management systems

2005-11-19T14:12:00.000-06:00

My attempt at briefly and concisely explaining full resolution images and digital content management systems (specifically ContentDM and MDID):

Best practices recommend that digitized images be stored as large tiff files. Tiff files are lossless compressed files that are considered archival masters. Generally, tiff files are not intended to be stored on a web server.

Most digitization standards and best practices consider full resolution images to be between 1000 and 3000 pixels on the long side, with 3000 pixels most common. Exceptions are for printed materials and original images that can not support the high level of detail. The term full resolution does not imply file type. On most current monitors, images of 1000 pixels in width fill the screen. Therefore, larger images (1000-3000 pixels) can be “zoomed in” to show greater detail. The needs of the project will determine what resolution (pixel size) of image is appropriate.

Digital content management systems (like ContentDM and MDID) were originally intended as a means of discovery for the original full resolution tiff file being stored off line. MDID users can download the largest image stored on the server, and ContentDM users can zoom in to the level of detail supported by the size of the image stored on the server. The images stored on these servers should be jpegs. Tiffs require too much storage space and, due to the large file size, have slow download times. MDID will not allow uploads larger than 16 MB, which most tiff images surpass.

In the digitization workflow, after images are scanned as full resolution tiffs, the next step is to create derivative jpeg images to upload to the server. The resolution (pixel size) of these derivative files depends on the needs of the project. ContentDM users can incorporate this step into the image upload by using image optimization in full resolution archiving. MDID users need to do this before uploading the files.

Full resolution archiving in ContentDM provides a means of organization for large tiff images that are used to create the derivative images stored on the server. ContentDM populates one of the metadata fields with information on where the full resolution tiff file is stored. MDID metadata creators need to provide this information by hand. Without full resolution archiving in ContentDM, the original tiff file is uploaded, and the location of the original file in not noted in the metadata. Because ContentDM will only show 600-1000 pixels of any image, it is important to be able to find the full resolution image being stored off line.

Draft digitization standards from the Indiana Digital Library Summit

Conference impressions

2005-11-13T15:37:00.000-06:00

I was lucky enough to attend two conferences this week.

The first conference was held at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, and dealt with digital library projects -- more specifically with ContentDM. The presentations I found the most helpful were those that demonstrated specific projects and solutions to problems. It’s helpful for me to see the thought processes of others dealing with similar projects and problems. And since so many of us are using the same software it’s helpful to see the capabilities others have found.

The second conference was the Midwest chapter meeting of the Visual Resources Association, held at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and at Indiana University. There were two presentations, both of which were extremely helpful.
Kenneth Crews presented “Copyright and education: trends, developments, and future directions.” After hearing his name several times over the past few years, it was nice to see him in person. I learned that the case of Bridgeman vs. Corel determined that there is no copyright protection on reproductions of two dimensional public domain works. This is why visual resource librarians can digitize their slides of public domain works. But it also means that the libraries don’t own copyright on our digital reproductions of those photographs. Photographs that include a public domain work and additional elements chosen by the photography are copyright protected. Also, photographs of three dimensional works have copyright protection. He also spoke about Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp. (search engines can provide thumbnails of copyrighted works), and cases involving Texaco and Kinkos. Finally, he provided us with his Checklist for Fair Use.
Eileen Fry at Indiana University presented a workshop on the CCO metadata scheme. It’s too bad that we can't input XML metadata into ContentDM. It was good to see how the VRA pros handle certain metadata challenges, and maybe I can incorporate certain elements of this into our metadata definitions and fields.

Some thoughts

2005-11-05T16:11:00.000-06:00

I was at a meeting this week and heard two interesting opinions:
1. Feeds are the new way to discover content, and people don't enter web sites from the front page anymore.
2. Dynamically generated web pages (and related databases) are the wave of the future.

My thoughts about these opinions:
1. True, especially with regards to newspapers. This means that it's even more important for content to be discoverable through other sources than the home page of the website. My impression of librarians so far is that we expect people to discover our sites, but don't really know how to attract our users other than through individual contact.
2. Seems like old news to me, but I was surprised at how many people were creating static web pages by hand to deliver content. It seems like such an inflexible approach. It's so much easier to use a database to make global changes and keep information updated.

My self-imposed project of the week was to explore digitization standards from various institutions. However, our database decided that a certain field only needed to be 950 characters, and that br tags didn't really need the <>, so I didn't get to explore digitization until Friday afternoon, and my Friday afternoons are useless for projects like this.

I did put together some links for more exploration next week:
The first three I read before I started my job, but now that I'm aware of certain issues I will probably pick up more:
A framework of guidance for building good digital collections -- a good resource, and I need to spend time thinking about each point and how it relates to our project.
Handbook for Digital Projects: a management tool for preservation and access. VI: Technical primer -- a good introduction to digitization -- and from Chapter VII:
Working with photographs -- an introduction to digitizing photographs

University of Tennessee's digitization standards -- I need to find more specific documentation like this
Harvard's digitization services bibliography -- some of these are outdated, but a good place to start

And I have to include this because it's a nice set of suggestions for creating descriptive metadata about photographs from the University of Washington for a similar project. Maybe I should hand it out to our project metadata creators.

Digital libraries and the public

2005-10-23T13:21:00.000-05:00

On Monday we had a formal "unveiling" of our digital project, which documents local history. We invited the media and anyone interested from the community. The mayor of Terre Haute spoke about the project, as did the president of the university, the dean of the library, and a guest from the Indiana Humanities Council. One of the advantages of being in a smaller town is that the mayor actually has the time to support projects like ours. We had a good turnout (85 people), and two local news stations and local newspapers covered the event. We were featured in the 6:00 news and the morning news for both news stations, and the local paper wrote and article on the project here. This article was the featured article on the front page of the paper the next morning.

Following the announcement of the project, it will be interesting to see how much interest our project draws. The website had many more hits than normal the day of the newspaper article, but by Friday levels had dropped off. However, if we were able to capture the interest of people who can truly benefit from the project, the effort will be worthwhile.

Training sessions

2005-10-16T14:47:00.000-05:00

This week I taught my first training session. I was training our project partners on our metadata fields (based on Dublin Core), and on features of the new version of ContentDM. I had lots of levels of experience in the class, from librarians to volunteers, people familiar with the previous version of ContentDM and people who had never used it, and people unfamiliar with PCs all the way to tech-savy web designers. Even with all of these levels, there were only about 10 people in the class. I think the session went well. At least no one fell asleep. I’m looking forward to getting more experience with this type of training and becoming more comfortable explaining concepts to a class. Until this class, I had never talked in front of a group of people for more than 20 minutes. And previously my presentations had all been prepared presentations, while a training session needs to be more spontaneous. In my “previous life,” as a musician, I performed many recitals, and I think that the skills I developed doing this translate nicely into my new profession. Even though I’m not used to talking to a group for very long, I am used to standing in front of an audience and keeping their attention for an entire recital. However, I was always intimidated by the thought of speaking to my audience.

For one of my job interviews this year, I had to give a presentation on what makes a great trainer. Unfortunately at that time I didn’t have any experience with training, and the presentation I put together was purely academic. However, it was a good reason to spend time thinking about this subject. I feel that library school didn’t prepare me for this area. I never had to give a presentation longer than 10 minutes in library school, while in the “real world” librarians must give presentations and present training sessions on a regular basis. I’m looking forward to developing this skill and becoming more comfortable with public speaking.

Digital divide

2005-10-09T16:18:00.000-05:00

When I was working at Harvard, the focus of the digital programs was broad subjects, like Latin American pamphlets, women working, and immigration. When I moved to ISU, I was glad to see that their focus was on local history, and they were happy to let the larger institutions handle the big subjects. One of the benefits of my job is traveling to small local libraries, historical societies, and museums, introducing them to our project, and asking them to join. Since I started in this position (not quite 3 months), I've visited four small public libraries, a small academic library, two historical societies, a museum, and an archive. What I've noticed most is that these institutions are struggling to get their daily tasks done, and many times a digital project isn't even in the scope of their budget and resources. However, these institutions have been around as long as ours (if not longer), and they have many historical documents and treasures that would benefit from inclusion in a digital program. Although we've been able to offer the local cultural institutions a place in our project, there are lots and lots of other small cultural institutions that will never be able to initiate a digital program. As digital programs become more complex, is it possible to help our neighbors so that they don't fall behind? As small towns in America slowly fade away, it is important to preserve and document their history.

Streaming media

2005-10-02T17:21:00.000-05:00

I've spent hours and hours this week creating a multi media presentation. I thought it should be easy to syncronize a powerpoint presentation to an audio track, but it was more difficult than I thought. The most difficult part was creating and editing an audio file appropriate to import into the presentation. My institution uses Macromedia Breeze which allowed me to syncronize the audio track with the slides, and convert the presentation into flash.

Here's the final result. It's a history of the Indiana State University Libary.

I noticed a LITA blog entry about the same topic (streaming media). Google and Yahoo have started to index streaming media (video) and Truveo has already spent some time on it. Our project at work includes some streaming video, and I hope that we can include more.

Amazon

2005-09-24T15:57:00.000-05:00

It seems that while Google Print manages to get themselves into hot water with the publishers, and librarians try to prove why we are better than Google, Amazon is trying to stay out of the spotlight. I just discovered a new feature on Amazon that was released in April! Maybe it passed by without me noticing it (it was a busy summer), but it looks like the Washington Post just noticed it last month. Amazon has enhanced their Search Inside features to include a list of SIPs (Statistically Improbably Phrases) and CAPs (Capitalized Phrases). According to Amazon:

"Amazon.com's Statistically Improbable Phrases, or "SIPs", are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!™ program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.

SIPs are not necessarily improbable within a particular book, but they are improbable relative to all books in Search Inside!. For example, most SIPs for a book on taxes are tax related. But because we display SIPs in order of their improbability score, the first SIPs will be on tax topics that this book mentions more often than other tax books. For works of fiction, SIPs tend to be distinctive word combinations that often hint at important plot elements.

Click on a SIP to view a list of books in which the phrase occurs."

"Capitalized Phrases, or "CAPs", are people, places, events, or important topics mentioned frequently in a book. Along with our Statistically Improbable Phrases, Capitalized Phrases give you a quick glimpse into a book's contents.

Click on a Capitalized Phrase to view a list of books in which the phrase occurs. You can also view a list of references to the Capitalized Phrase in each book.

For example, if you're looking at a Sherlock Holmes mystery, you can click on "Professor Moriarty" to see a list of books that feature or mention Holmes's nemesis."

The SIPs basically create subject headings for the book, and the CAPs include every person named in the book (which is more than librarians do when creating MARC records). Both of these fields link to the same words in other books. It kind of reminds me of our catalogs, only created by a computer. Although the SIPs aren't using controlled vocabulary, it would only take some mapping to link it to other books with the same subject.

I was surprised when I found this feature, and hadn't heard about it before. While it seems that I hear about another cool Google feature every day, Amazon is quietly releasing their new features.

OAI

2005-09-17T21:23:00.000-05:00

This week's exploration took me into the world of OAI-PMH (Open Archive Initiative-Protocol for Metadata Harvesting). What a powerful tool for librarians! I was exploring this topic because I am facilitating the transfer of our metadata to a service provider on Monday. I found a great tutorial that explained the entire concept from the beginning to how to use it. My only question is why didn't any of my teachers in library school mention it? Actually, I think someone mentioned it once, but didn't go into any detail. Maybe they didn't teach it because it's hard to understand theoretically (as with most of technology). It's much easier for me to understand this type of thing if I have hands on practice. Maybe library schools should provide computer-based services for their students to play with, so that we can see how concepts relate to each other, and how they are used, like MARC records, METS, integrated library systems, webpages, databases, OAI files. . . .

The week's effort paid off when I learned about Google Site Maps. They accept OAI files. I can submit the URL to our oai file so that Google can learn about the structure of our website. They say it won't increase the ranking of our site, but it will let them know more about it.

Metalibrarian

2005-09-10T15:47:00.000-05:00

When I created this blog, I decided on the spur of the moment to call it Metalibrarian, short for Metadata Librarian. However, the more I’ve thought about it, the title makes sense. This blog is a librarian writing about librarians or librarianship. A Google search on metalibrarian turns up a few hits (although this blog isn’t there yet), but it seems that no one has used this word often. I did find an interesting article by Stephen Abram from Information Outlook (June 2004): “What About Us? The Meta Librarian: Information for Information Pros.” In it, he discusses librarians’ need for information about our profession. He makes a nice point by saying, “Every article, book, list posting, discussion thread, and blog entry is a gift to the profession.” Librarians need to share information about our projects with each other so that we can benefit from other’s experiences. As a new librarian, I agree completely with this statement. Every little piece of information I can gather helps me learn about my profession and makes me think about what I’m doing, and the long-range consequences of my decisions.

I also spent the week thinking about the prefix “meta.” Where did it come from, and why do we use it the way we do? According to Wikipedia, “The current English usage is accidental, deriving from the classification of Aristotle's works to include the category of metaphysics, which could more or less be described as the study of the physics of physics itself. This was initially merely the extras left over from the physics category.” According to this entry, the Greek prefix meta has several meanings including a prepositional use meaning with, or the verb use connoting change.

So where did the word metadata come from? The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t give metadata its own entry, but lists the word in the definition for the prefix meta. According to their article, “metadata” was first used in 1987 in the Philos Trans Royal Soc. (OED abbreviation) with the sentence, “The challenge is to accumulate data..from diverse sources, convert it to machine-readable form with a harmonized array of metadata descriptors and present the resulting database(s) to the user.”

I also learned from answers.com that the word Metadata is a trademarked name a company. They trademarked the name in 1986, before the word had a common usage.

The more time I’ve spent learning about metadata, the more I realize how little other people know about it. Even more surprising is the fact that few librarians even understand what metadata is. Maybe the metadata librarians’ gift to the field should be educating other librarians as to what our job is really about. After all, shouldn’t all librarians understand what other librarians do?

To blog or not to blog...

2005-08-27T11:09:00.000-05:00

I have to admit that only last month I didn't see the point of blogs. Why should I care about someone else's life, and why should they care about mine? It's amazing how quickly things can change. I was put in charge of the project blog at my new job, so I decided that I should figure out what this whole blogging thing is about. Also, the RSS feed on the project blog wasn't working, so I started to investigate blog feeds. (It's still not working, by the way. Any ideas on how to fix WordPress feeds?)

At the same time, in my new job I was feeling isolated from other professionals in my field. I work in a small to medium sized academic library that is just beginning to show interest in digital projects, and my department now has 2 professionals, 1 support staff, and 1 student who are also new to the field. How could I keep in contact with the rest of the field and keep on top of new developments? When I started to look into blogging, I found all sorts of librarian and digital librarian bogs. What a great way to see what others are thinking! Some of the blogs that I have found so far include: The Inquiring Librarian by Jenn Riley, a metadata librarian at Indiana University's Digital Library Program; Outgoing: Library metadata techniques and trends by Thom Hickey; and The Ten Thousand Year Blog, "Archivist-historian David Mattison’s musings and Web tracks on digital culture preservation issues." I also found a great article by Walt Crawford, Investigating the Biblioblogosphere, which lists and analyzes popular librarian blogs. I'm sure that there are many more relevant blogs out there. I just need to find them. . . .

Hello world!

2005-08-20T16:20:00.000-05:00

The first post to my blog. I'm a new metadata and digital initiatives librarian, and thought it would be interesting to track my professional development. There are so many things I need to learn about in this field, and so many places to turn for information. How should I keep it all straight? This week's exploration found me in the world of blogging, hence my new blog.