Trying to define a “core” collection for theological libaries or a minister’s “book shelf” has a recurring effort among theological librarians. Mostly, we don’t experience the limits of portablity and the constraints of an unstable infrastructures for provision of electricity and Internet access. This article about the WHO’s effort to provide a core collection for of books and papers for medical practioners within the physical constraints of what can be packed into a Blue Trunk is an interesting challenge. What would we pack into the trunk for a minister in such an area?

PLoS Medicine: Where There Is No Internet: Delivering Health Information via the Blue Trunk Libraries

The BTL is “a ready-to-use documentation module� [4] of about 150 WHO and non-WHO books and manuals fitted into a blue metal trunk (Figure 1). The materials are arranged and filed in such a way that users can easily identify the ones that they need. Fourteen topics have been chosen using a basic classification code, e.g., General Medicine and Nursing (100), Community Health (110), and these codes are written on each filing box.

Plagiary: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication, and Falsification a new open access journal has posted Jonathan Band’s “The Google Library Project: Both Sides of the Story.”

From the journal’s Web site:

International in scope, Plagiary: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication, and Falsification is a new scholarly journal devoted specifically to the study of plagiarism and related fabrications/falsifications within the professional literature (i.e. scholarly journals and books) and popular discourse domains (i.e. journalism, politics, audio-visual texts). Providing a forum for scholarly discussion and research on trends and phenomena (both recent and historical) related to plagiarism, Plagiary features refereed research articles, “Perspectives” articles, book reviews, and responses as a point of focus on issues of vital importance to professional and popular discourse communities.

Narrowcasting to Faculty and Students

Libraries provide thousands of e-resources, but most users need only a handful. Miami University has created an interface which enables subject specialists to select from electronic resources provided by the Libraries, add links to related resources, and post announcements in each subject area. In addition, subject specialists can create multi-database searches for each subject area. Subject specialists can make immediate changes, web developers are relieved of reviewing and making changes submitted by others, and students and faculty see the resources they need. The University portal will eventually link to subject areas corresponding each students’ classes and faculty member’s teaching area.

In the evenings, I try to read few blob entries. I’ve been intrigued by how they are like following a bibliographic trail. Tonight, I started with John Blyberg’s entry about the conversation between Michael Casey and Michael Stephens on Library 2.0 on ALA TechSource.

The ALA TechSource posting led me to the wikipedia article about “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail” which ultimately led me to Christ Anderson’s article in Wired “The Long Trail.”

The Wired article is a really fascinating article about the business models that are emerging (or need to emerge) as we move from an economy of scarcity to an economy of abundance. I finally ended up at Anderson’s blog, The Long Tail…” and read his most recent post: “The Probabilistic Age.”

The purpose of this narrative is to point to the similarity of following a bibliographic trail in a print publication in which the bibliographic trail is documented with traditional footnotes or endnotes. But the differences are significant. I still haven’t completed John Blygerg’s posting. If this had been a print publication, I would probably have finished the original article first, then followed the bibliographic trail….

The idea of a “Long Tail” makes a lot of sense in the library world. Obviously we want to add popular books to the collection, but that kind of collection would be very small. A good library collection includes books that will be interesting to a wide variety of people over a long period of time….

Wired 12.10: The Long Tail
Hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody. Not enough shelf space for all the CDs, DVDs, and games produced. Not enough screens to show all the available movies. Not enough channels to broadcast all the TV programs, not enough radio waves to play all the music created, and not enough hours in the day to squeeze everything out through either of those sets of slots.

This is the world of scarcity. Now, with online distribution and retail, we are entering a world of abundance. And the differences are profound.

…

With no shelf space to pay for and, in the case of purely digital services like iTunes, no manufacturing costs and hardly any distribution fees, a miss sold is just another sale, with the same margins as a hit. A hit and a miss are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.

I’m not sure the library catalog will continue long-term, but if it does, it will surely be enhanced. This offers an interesting possibility for the enhancement…

Lorcan Dempsey’s weblog: On demand book search
Now, one potential advantage of the book mass digitisation initiatives currently underway is that they are potentially creating a ‘book content index’ in the way that the search engines currently have a ‘web content index’. Amazon is opening up a business which makes that ‘web content index’ available to other applications through its APIs. Which leads to an interesting question: Will Amazon open up its ‘search inside the book’ indexes in this way also (or can it)? Or will another player – Google for example – develop such a service? Or … Does anybody yet have a critical mass, or will they soon?

Such a service would be very useful, and if offered in an appropriate way could be integrated into library catalogs or other library services. Indeed, libraries could build vertical applications on top of such a service.

Much of the criticism of Wikipedia has assumed that commercially produced encyclopedias are without error. The recent “peer-reviewed” study by Nature suggests there isn’t much difference…

news @ nature.com – Internet encyclopaedias go head to head – Jimmy Wales’ Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries, a Nature investigation finds.
However, an expert-led investigation carried out by Nature — the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and Britannica’s coverage of science — suggests that such high-profile examples are the exception rather than the rule.

The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three.

Conversations about “Library 2.0″ have been on-going for a couple months, related in part to discussions (and a conference) about Web 2.0. The ideas have been developing for much longer, though. Lorcan Dempsey and the folks at OCLC have been developing similar ideas for a number of months. The good folks across the Charles River (Digital Library Research Group) continue to work on DSpace and Semantic Web projects.

Tallis may be the first ILS vendor to engage in the conversation. The white paper by Ken Chad and Paul Miller tries to frame the conversation:
Do Libraries Matter? The Rise of Library 2.0

1. The Library is everywhere
2. The Library has no barriers
3. The Library invites participation
4. The Library used flexible, best of breed systems

The paper is worthy of conversation. Fleshing it out is the challenge. The thing missing, or at least not clearly articulated, is the educational mission of the libraries, particularly academic libraries. The white paper feels like it has a bit of a public library slant. Even if I’m correct, the authors appear to be on target in their assessment of user expectation and emerging technologies.

There’s been an interesting conversation developing recently about new approaches to linking that build on OpenURL. It’s been through several iterations, with some effort focused on COiNS (ContextObjects in Spans), a means of embedding an OpenURL kind of statement in static web pages. It’s still really in the concept stage, but it’s an interesting conversation. Here Daniel Chudnov takes another stab at it…

quick thought experiment re: unAPI