The CBC radio show Spark has posted the unedited version of an interview they did with me last week about ShelfLife and LibraryCloud. A much shorter version of this will air soon.
Thanks, Nora Young!
Michael Jensen explains why the National Academies Press decided to make its material openly available.
Eric Frank is the president and co-founder of Flat World Knowledge, Inc., which publishes peer-reviewed online textbooks available under Creative Commons license. He explains his business.
Avi Warshavsky builds online textbooks for Center for Educational Technology in Israel. He talks about whether textbooks have a future.
Listen: 20:46
(Also in ogg)
The way we search for information on the web has antecedents in the way search works in traditional libraries and research journals. There’s metadata, and there’s also a sense of allowing the content that is most cited to float to the top.
So why the library of the future still being waylaid?
While research journals and paywalled sites often have an advantage when it comes to organization and quality of content, sites like Wikipedia dominate the educational web due to their openness and collaborative nature.
For Episode Nine David Weinberger spoke with Kevin Kelly — journalist and author of the book What Technology Wants — about search, openness, and the future of the library.
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Creative Commons music courtesy of Brad Sucks and photo courtesy of yellowsofa
Snippets of recent happenings in the Lab:
Matt Phillips:
I spent the week working on LibraryCloud News (a project that Jeff, David, and I have been batting around for a while). We hope LibraryCloud News will become the Hacker News for library dorks (instead of startup dorks). It’s a place where you can submit questions or a link to the community and then engage the community
through comment-style discussion. (Exactly the way Reddit and Hacker News work) LibaryCloud News is powered by the same code that powers Hacker News and is humming along in the Amazon Cloud. If you’re interested, we’d love to have you help us beta test LibraryCloud News at http://news.librarycloud.org/
Paul Deschner:
I spent a good portion of the week researching and installing Hadoop (distributed data processing) and Mahout (machine-learning algorithms) on one of our servers and running test scripts, in preparation for doing large-scale textual analysis over full-text corpora and metadata.
Kim Dulin:
I recently was a member of a panel talking about DIY Libraries at the New School’s Mobility Shifts conference. Fellow panelists were Deanna Lee of the New York Public Library, and Linda Johnson, Director of Brooklyn Public Library. The three of us were asked to talk about how libraries’ strategies for cultural outreach, and for supporting patrons’ self-education, have evolved. The New School’s Shannon Mattern, moderated. We had a wonderful audience of students, librarians and others interested in how libraries are expanding their roles, especially as it relates to DIY learning. Lee gave a demonstration of Biblion, the NYPL’s new ipad application for browsing its digital collections. Johnson discussed ways that the Brooklyn Public Library is reaching out to citizens in the borough to boost computer literacy. Johnson noted that over 40% of Brooklyn residents do not have any type of internet access. To counter this, the Library has been lending laptops to users in the community, as well as providing computer classes, with great success. I spoke about the Harvard Library Innovation Lab and our ShelfLife / Digital Public Library of America’s Beta Sprint entry. It was a fun and inspiring event.
David Weinberger:
I participated in the Library Lab fair, where our Lab showed the two of its projects that received grants: LibraryCloud and a series of library innovation podcasts.
Jeff Goldenson:
Spent the week working on the Ruhleben library exhibition.
Annie Cain:
Was out most of the week on vacation.
The Royal Society — publisher of the first peer reviewed scientific article in history — has announced that its entire archive (which goes back to 1665) and all future issues will be available online for free. Here’s the searchable index.
The Association of College and Research Libraries has signed the Berlin Declaration. The ACRL is a division of the American Library Association, and has 12,500 members (which is about 20% of the ALA’s membership). The Berlin Declaration was written in 2003 and encourages open access publishing. [via American Libraries Magazine, and a hat tip to David Curry.]
There’s a blog about the library of works being accumulated by the Occupy Wall Street folks. The list of titles is a LibraryThing.
Wouldn’t that be an interesting collection of metadata to pull into LibraryCloud?
For those interested in comparing the demos of the 6 DPLA Beta Sprint finalists (to be presented Oct. 21 in Washington, DC):
DPLA announcement of 6 finalists
Links to the demos: