Libraryola

I am not one who is completely obsessed with mobile phone. I rarely walk while texting, for example, and I usually ignore phone calls that come in at inopportune moments (attending conference sessions, purchasing movie tickets or groceries, and so forth). Moreover, while I pay the extra dollars to have mobile web access, I don’t obsessively check scores of Premiership matches every five minutes unless Chelsea’s playing someone really good, or West Ham.

Okay, maybe I’m just a little bit obsessed with my mobile phone. Especially after spending an hour on Phonezoo perfecting the clip of Sound Direction’s “The Horse” to use as my ring tone. And I’m always on the lookout for neat ways to make cellphones useful beyond, you know, using it as a phone.

For example, I used the UCSD library catalog the other day. When I opened the record I wanted (for sake of example, let’s use this one), I noticed a button on the right-hand side of the page that read, “Send by Text Message.” I did, and I received a brief text message with the title, author and call number of the book. Now, you could say that I could have just as easily written down the call number, especially since standard text messages apply. On the other hand, if you’ve ever seen my writing, you know that writing down a call number is no guarantee I’ll be able to read the call number five minutes later in the stacks. So I really find this to be a useful feature of the UCSD catalog.

Continue reading ‘I’m goin’ home and when I wanna go home, I’m goin’ mobile.’ »

Since I posted my review of Cuil, they’ve added Libraryola to their index. When I search on my name, it comes up on the second page. Also, the pictures attached to the links have been cut back; in the first 20 pages of results, the only pictures I saw were either of me or were link-specific. So they’ve been quick to react to the criticism they’ve been getting this week. The search on “Radovan Karadzic” is still not so good, though.

UPDATED 31 July 2008: “Get the Cuil shoeshine” has an update about Cuil’s search results.

The New York Times had an article today about Cuil, a new search engine developed by former Google employees.

Pronounced “cool,” the company’s name is “an old Irish word for knowledge,“ according to the about page). Cuil has so far indexed over 120 billion pages. According to the article, “The company uses a form of data mining to group Web pages by content, which makes the search engine more efficient, [co-founder Tom Costello] said.”

I took it for a test drive, starting with an ego search: “Chris Zammarelli.” I kept SafeSearch on at first. Of the first 11 results displayed:

≠ Four of the results were dead links;
≠ Two of the results were the same link;
≠ Four of the results were results older than January 2008;
≠ Two of the results displayed photos that were irrelevant to the links they were attached to.

More on that last item: on my LSW page, I used to note that I worked at The Brookings Institution. (This was before I switched jobs, obviously.) Cuil latched onto that fact and, since the link to the LSW page was the one that was displayed twice in the first page of results, it attached two Brookings-related pictures to those results. One was the Brookings “B” logo, and the other was a picture of Susan Rice, a Brookings scholar currently working on the Barack Obama campaign. Furthermore, on page four of the results, Rice’s picture was attached to my UMD student page, which I’ve since taken down. Similarly, the Revolting Librarians Redux page has a picture of an astronaut attached to it.

Going through the first four pages of results, I found several repeated links and several dead links. I saw a few links to the Government Information Division, but one thing I didn’t see was a link to Libraryola. I went through the first 20 pages of links, and the URL for Libraryola was nowhere to be found. Turning SafeSearch off did not dramatically change these results.

Continue reading ‘Now what’s cooler than being Cuil?’ »

≠ New LibGig post: “Government Information News Sources, Part Two”

I think we’ll call this segment “Stuff I want to read, but just haven’t yet.” It’s not an elegant title: SIWTRBJHY is almost unpronouncable to even the most determined Gaelic speaker. Still, I can’t come up with something pithier so I’m rolling with it for now.

The first item of stuff I want to read comes from Ellyssa Kroski’s iLibrarian blog for OEDb. What’s sad is that “5 Things Librarians Should Read about Copyright and Sharing Instructional Materials” is a brief summary of a brief ACRL publication [PDF]. I could stop writing this post, read both the post and the PDF, and still have time left on my lunch break to finish this post and go get a better sandwich than the one I’m eating right now.

The next story comes from NextGov: “Census considers a smaller role for decennial count contractor.” Here, I’ve gotten as far as this quote from Rep. Tom Davis: “It troubles me that, this late in the process, the Census Bureau continues to zigzag and make fundamental changes to the work plan for the 2010 count.” Pretend you can see my nodding.

By the way, why does a site about “Technology and the Business of Government” not have an RSS feed? Does that strike anyone else as a bit daft?

Keeping it real on the e-gov tip, the eGovernment Resource Center linked to a post from eGov AU called, “The future of government - global mega-trends.” I really should read this one since I’m trying to put together a session at next year’s SLA conference on this topic. Plus blog author Craig Thomler links to a couple of OECD items, and I am a total OECD fan boy.

Finally, The Morning News linked to the Pitchfork list of Overlooked Records 2008. My first thought was, it’s not even 2009 yet and we’re already whining about the overlooked records of 2008? Seriously, guys, it’s like reminising about the first decade of the new millennium before its even over. (Not that I didn’t watch that.) On the other hand, one of the albums Pitchfork mentions is by Sébastien Tellier, who as you probably know represented France at Eurovision this year. So maybe they have a point.

The Economist has a chart of ALA’s top 10 most challenged books in the U.S. for 2007. The intro to the chart notes, “Despite the ban requests, most challenges are unsuccessful.” The list itself has been out for a couple of months now, but in case you haven’t seen it:

1. And Tango Makes Three
2. The Chocolate War
3. Olive’s Ocean
4. The Golden Compass
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
6. The Color Purple
7. TTYL
8. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
9. It’s Perfectly Normal
10. The Perks of Being A Wallflower

References:

Censorship: No sex please, we’re American. (2008, July 22). The Economist. Retrieved 24 July 2008. Via The Morning News.

Morales, M. (2008, May 7). Children’s book on male penguins raising chick tops ALA’s 2007 list of most challenged books. American Library Association Press Release. Retrieved 24 July 2008.