Patronizing » Google

Distributed Storage and Libraries

Josh — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 02:44:51 +0000

A recent post on distributed file systems got me thinking about their use in academic environments. Found via Slashdot, the article was about Cleversafe, a distributed file system licensed under the GPL.

Libraries would be a perfect environment for distributed storage. Obviously, we always need space. We’ve got hundreds of computers which are usually under low load. And most have several gigabytes free.

All that’s needed is a server running on the public PCs that doesn’t interfere with normal use.

Wikipedia has some additional links on Distributed parallel fault tolerant file systems. Another free distributed fault tolerant filesystem is Hadoop, which seems to be vaguely based on GoogleFS.

Google co-op and reference services

Josh — Sun, 14 May 2006 07:34:40 +0000

Earlier this week Ryan Eby mentioned Google’s new co-op service and possibly using it for reference services.

We’re replacing our existing electronic resources system with libdata. Since I helped with the project, I knew enough about the system to have it spit out a subscribed links file.

You can test out the MSU Libraries Getting Started Guides subscribed links by subscribing to it in my Co-op profile.

If you run libdata and know Python, you can also try using the libdata co-op export script.

This is just the start of what’s possible. Labeling specific sites will allow reference librarians to tag authoritative and scholarly sites. No more building lists of URLs in libdata or another custom software platform. We can then have users subscribe to our expert’s sources. Instead of telling students that Google is bad, we can work to improve it.

Alternative interfaces to digital collections

Josh — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 20:30:02 +0000

I’m currently working at the MSU Libraries on a grant to create alternative/gaming interfaces to the Making of Modern Michigan project.

We’ve come up with a lot of really great ideas. Among them are an automatically created subject hiearchy using WordNet and a Google Maps overview of some of the collections.

If you get a chance, check out some of the work at MMM alternative interfaces.

All your Google Base are Belong to Us!

Josh — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 19:55:11 +0000

I’m sure that title has been repeated many many times today. Today Google unveiled Google Base, a simple web database that allows you to include rich metadata for items. Google will then index and allow others to search the information.

How does this affect libraries? Take a look at one of the example schemas: “Reference Articles”. Imagine an army of millions of people inputting book and article metadata. They’re cataloging. Which is what this is doing, it’s replacing the cataloger. But, how can we trust the information that is put in? Well, it’s simple economics. Trustworthy sources of metadata will rise to the top. In addition, millions of people will be looking at the data, so errors will be fixed fast. Take a look at freedb for an example of trustworthy user-submitted metadata.