Microsoft Office Research Service for Shrew

Posted on August 18, 2006 by Josh

David Walker created a SRU Interface for III servers called Shrew. I first read about it in Ryan Eby’s post SRU Interface for the III XML Server.

It didn’t take much to modify my Microsoft Office interface for OAI servers to support this too. So now you can query the library catalogs that Shrew supports in Office.

Here are some screenshots.

It’s open to the public, but still in the testing phase. If you want to use it, open up Word or another Office program, in the sidebar choose Research from the top dropdown. Down near the bottom choose Research Options. Then choose Add Services. The URL is: http://lib0059.lib.msu.edu:6891/axis/services/OAIResearch

Here’s the code: oairesearch-0.1.tar.gz. It’s a horrid mess, but I figured I’d make it available.

Posted in catalog, iii, opac, SOAP, sru, srw, web services | Leave a comment

Open Access and Peer-to-Peer Review

Posted on July 5, 2006 by Josh

Related to Ryan Eby’s recent post about PLoS One, last month’s Wired had an excellent article about open-access publishing and Harold Varmus. Also in that issue is an article on harnessing the power of crowds for distributed computation. It mentions things like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

What’s missing is tying the two together. With open-access publishing and the proper distributed framework we could have a new model of democratic publishing. Nature is discussing some of this in their Peer Review Debate.

Opening up the peer-review process doesn’t necessarily dilute the quality of science published. With a proper reputation or trust system we could still meets scholary standards.  A reputation system could even give papers a rating depending on who reviewed them.  If the article was reviewed by experts in a field, it could have a high rating.  If it was reviewed by web nobodies, it could have a low rating.  Browsing systems could be setup to browse by this trust metric.

Posted in open access, reputation systems, trust networks | 5 Comments

Library Director Stands Up for Privacy

Posted on June 22, 2006 by Josh

I know a lot of the content on this site is critical of librarians, especially when it comes online issues. But I have to say almost all librarians have it right on when it comes to privacy.

Slashdot just posted an article titled Library Chief Criticized for Requiring Subpoena talking about a librarian who protected the privacy of library patrons, and who has received public criticism from the mayor and borough officials.

The North Jersey Media Group article Library chief draws cops’ ire has some great quotes from the director about the importance of privacy. From the article: Borough labor lawyer Ellen Horn felt that the library director, Michele Reutty, was more interested in “protecting the library” than helping police.

No, she was protecting the privacy of citizens who use the library. For that matter, protecting privacy in general. As she Horn states: “The main issue here is privacy of information, and all of this could have been handled by education.”

Posted in privacy | Leave a comment

Google co-op and reference services

Posted on May 14, 2006 by Josh

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.

Posted in Google, technology | 1 Comment

The power of collaborative editing

Posted on May 5, 2006 by Josh

At MSU we recently imported most of the The Making of Modern Michigan digital collection into a wiki. We’re getting some great additions to the wiki, corrections to the main authoritative page and some wonderful personal comments in the discussion pages. I’ve included some sample links below:

First, two different comments from different people. One who used to work at the old dealership, and one who works in the current building. Click on the article link to view the actual dealership.

Second, memories of an old drug store.

Last, somebody found their dad in an old photo.

Posted in Internet, technology | 2 Comments

MSU Library – Amazon Integration

Posted on April 23, 2006 by Josh

I’ve modified Greasemonkey scripts by Carrick Mundell (based on work by Jon Udell) and the Silkworm Threadster extension to work with MSU libraries catalog.

The first script checks whether a book you’re browsing on Amazon’s site is available in the MSU libraries. The second retrieves information from Amazon to insert into the MSU catalog page you’re browsing. You can see some pictures here:

MSU-Amazon integration

The script t to lookup MSU status is here: amazonmsu.user.js

The script to insert information into the MSU catalog is here: amazonmagic.user.js

One warning, the amazonmagic script connects to the Amazon API via a gateway on my server. This was because it requires an Amazon API subscriber ID, which should be kept private. I’m not currently logging any requests, but this might change in the future. If you have privacy concerns, you can disable the script in Greasemonkey, or just not install it.

Posted in greasemonkey, technology | 3 Comments

What patronizing.org is all about

Posted on April 12, 2006 by Josh

I’ve been working in a library for the past two years. Although I don’t have a library degree, I do have a degree in a field that works with many of the same issues. Cognitive science also deals with questions about information and how humans process it.
But that doesn’t really explain why this blog was created. It was created because I grew tired of watching traditional librarians fight technologies that could be beneficial to the user. The great example of course being Google Scholar.

I’m tired of hearing crap like “We’ve already paid a lot of money for the licensed indexes, so we should use them.” I’m tired of hearing librarians condescend to the very people they’re trying to help. If patrons are going to other sources it’s not because they’re “unskilled in information literacy” or stupid. It’s because we’ve failed in providing easy to use tools.
So this blog will be equal parts rant and technoligical trinkets that may help patrons and librarians alike.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Alternative interfaces to digital collections

Posted on April 12, 2006 by Josh

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.

Posted in Google, Internet, technology | 2 Comments

Microsoft Office Research Service for OAI repositories

Posted on April 12, 2006 by Josh

I implemented a Microsoft Office Research with Apache Axis. It provides access to any OAI repository that supports SRU/SRW right from inside Microsoft Office.

Newer versions of Microsoft Office provide a sidebar that offers research services such as dictionary and thesaurus lookup. Microsoft has also provided an API to allow developers the ability to create their own research services.

I’ve created a service that uses this to provide OAI/SRW results in Office.

Details here

Posted in oai, sru/srw, technology | 1 Comment

All your Google Base are Belong to Us!

Posted on November 17, 2005 by Josh

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.

Posted in Google, Uncategorized | Leave a comment