Monthly Archives: August 2007

Intentional data again: Super crunching

The current issue of Newsweek discusses a new book on the use of aggregated user data: Super Crunchers: why thinking-by-numbers is the new way to be smart. As more activities move online, we have more data about intentions, choices, attention. The punchline of the story is that service choices are increasingly guided by intelligence mined … Continue reading Intentional data again: Super crunching →

The academic library and its users

I mentioned Jim Collins’ book on the social sectors the other day. I have just acquired Susan Gibbons’ book, The academic library and the net gen student: making the connections. I was interested to see her make use of Collins’ material in the opening chapter where she suggests the following as the mission of an … Continue reading The academic library and its users →

QOTD: Google moves further into library territory

Hardly a library discussion goes by without a mention of Google. Nicholas Carr discusses reports of their major data center in The Dalles, Oregon. From one of the reports: Patchett goes on to describe the many community-service projects that Google employees are involved in around The Dalles, from wiring an outdoor stage to lending IT … Continue reading QOTD: Google moves further into library territory →

Publish or perish

Publish or perish is interesting looking: Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and presents the following statistics: …. [Publish or perish] Among the statistics it generates are: Total number of papers; Total number of citations; Average … Continue reading Publish or perish →

Syndicating moi

I was looking at Macenstein earlier. And was slightly surprised after a while to notice that amongst the Amazon ads appearing on the right were some for very familiar stuff. Turns out that Macenstein is feeding me my own personalized Amazon data. And it looks as if other people might be similarly surprised as there … Continue reading Syndicating moi →

Communication

Update: my comments about the published literature below are about the library literature, a very specific set of journals and organizations. I am not trying to make any statement about the general value of the ‘published literature’ relative to blogs or other media. We have lots of places to ‘publish’ positions, views, findings, …. Consider … Continue reading Communication →

Long playing video

An off-topic weekend entry …. I loved the nice conceit in this youtube video. A retro moment for mature readers. This is Redwood Tree from St Dominic’s Preview, the Van Morrison, er, LP. I was interested to see that embedding was disabled by request, something I had not seen before.

Serendipity in stacks, racks and online sytems

We have just spent a while on the San Juan Islands (off the North West coast of Washington State and East of Vancouver Island for unfamiliar readers – Wikipedia). I bought a couple of books in the congenial Pyramidion Used and Rare Books in Eastsound on Orcas Island. I was surprised and pleased to find … Continue reading Serendipity in stacks, racks and online sytems →

Holidays

No posting for a while as we are going on vacation aka holiday.

A catalogue in your face

I was interested to see the Page Tools in the University of Alberta catalogue (look in the left hand bar below). A reader can send a correction or suggestion to the library: it would be interesting to know how many folks use this option and what types of suggestion are made. Also interesting to see … Continue reading A catalogue in your face →