userslib.com

This morning was the Gaming & Social Networking, A New Direction for Libraries session, a presentation that was part of the MLibrary 2.0 event series.

The speakers were Eli Neiburger from the Ann Arbor District Library, Jane Blumenthal the Director of Health Sciences Libraries here at UM, and Lisa Hinchliffe, Coordinator for Information Literacy Services and Instruction U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Brian Mathews (Information Services Librarian & Distance Learning Services Coordinator, The Georgia Institute of Technology & the Ubiquitous Librarian Blog) was also supposed to speak but couldn’t make it due to flight cancelations.

All the presentations were excellent and I’ll write more about them soon.

For now, I’ve just uploaded some pics of Librarians in action - trying out a few gaming options offered at the AADL. Photos for this event and other MLibrary 2.0 events can be found on the Flickr MLibrary2.0 group page.

• You’re It! A blog on tagging
  (tags: tagging Blogs)

• Walk Score - How walkable is your house?
  (tags: googlemaps mashup)

• Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design
  (tags: Accessibility Design Usability)

• Generic Librarian
  Shevon’s blog
  (tags: Blogs Library2.0 UMLibrary)

• iA Web Trendmap 2007
  (tags: web2.0 visualization)

• Flickr: Photos from Bnice2mice
  Cool illustrations and awesome crochet food and stuff
  (tags: Illustration craft portfolio)
• Wired: As Facebook Grows, Longtime Users Draw Privacy Veil
  Nice image too - tshirt that says “I facebooked your mom”
  (tags: facebook Library2.0)

Just released yesterday, The Internet Archive’s Open Library project now has an extensive wiki-ish book site. Their goal is for users (anyone) to populate it with every book. Some books already have some full-text and some link to the scanned images via their old pageturner. I think this will be interesting to follow since most of the content is user-generated and I’m wondering how well this will take off. Lots of people already use LibraryThing, but thats more about making your own collection - so there’s (maybe) more incentive to tag and comment. The Open Library is about making one big collection.
Link To Open Library Beta

I’ve just updated the MLibrary 2.0 website to include a link to a few podcasts (thanks to Dave!) from the “MLibrary 2.0: The Future is Now” event we had back in June. There are podcasts of the session introduction from our Associate University Librarian Brenda Johnson and presentations from Kristen Antelman from NCSU and Peter Morville. Here’s a link to the feed.

An article I co-authored just came out in D-Lib Magazine. Its mostly technical, but does touch on some interface issues.

Enhancing Search and Browse Using Automated Clustering of Subject Metadata by Kat Hagedorn, Suzanne Chapman, and David Newman. D-Lib Magazine
July/August 2007, Volume 13 Number 7/8.

Abstract:

…The University of Michigan and the University of California Irvine joined forces to test automatically enhancing metadata records using the Topic Modeling algorithm on the varied OAIster corpus. We created labels for the resulting clusters of metadata records, matched the clusters to an in-house classification system, and developed a prototype that would showcase methods for search and retrieval using the enhanced records. Results indicated that while the algorithm was somewhat time-intensive to run and using a local classification scheme had its drawbacks, precise clustering of records was achieved and the prototype interface proved that faceted classification could be powerful in helping end-users find resources.