Mahalo

Little Sammy Sneeze, Winsor McKay, c1904-1906 (Public Domain)

Mahalo

I spent some time on Mahalo getting a better feel for the search engine. I joined and recommended some comics oriented sites like http://www.comixpedia.org/ , a guide to web comics and File 49 by Sara Turner http://www.mlatcomics.com/file49_index.html

I put together a list of recommended comic sites and ran it up on Maholo. They do have a person check your recommendations. One didn't have proper security. So, the site is quite real.

I am using the name MytGroo. I don't know why, I should have chosen BookCalendar.

http://www.mahalo.com/member/Mytgroo?tab=1&filter=&page=7&

Cromely left me a message that Jason Calanis, the founder of Mahalo was on Twitter. So now, I am following his tweets. http://twitter.com/JasonCalacanis

Mahalo is clearly not a very academic search engine. If you look through the top fifty searches, the number one choice appears to be video game walkthroughs, then guitar instruction, then baking, followed by Sarah Palin. It is not just Sarah Palin, there are a lot of results for Paris Hilton as well. Still, I am enjoying looking through the chosen results.

The search engine itself is in beta. There are a whole bunch of links underneath the search engine with featured articles and news. This one caught my eye. The zero dollar bill.
http://www.designrelated.com/inspiration/view/Karen/entry/2668

I searched for literature and found something interesting. They have a number of complete profiles of individual books. This is the profile for The World Without Us http://www.mahalo.com/The_World_Without_Us . Many of these profiles are of classics like 1984. http://www.mahalo.com/1984_Book . This may be useful for reading assignments.

I can't seem to shake the cold I have, it has turned into something worse. I am resting a lot and drinking tea by the gallon. I saw my doctor last Friday. It still hasn't stopped. I am going to see him again tomorrow.

Google and Libraries One Day Conference

Hello, today, I went to a one day conference. Google and Libraries, An International Conference Sponsored by the International Information and Analystical Center (ILIAC) at the Harriman Institute and Columbia Libraries. I took the #2 subway train up to Columbia University around West 118th street. Columbia University in New York is an edifice of brick and stone with very little greenery. It is in an exclusive area in the upper west side of New York.

The conference was on the fifteenth floor. They had coffee when I got there at 8:45 a.m. in the morning. The Metro New York Library Council listed the event. http://www.metro.org/

When I got there the room was full. It was rather interesting, because many of the people were from Russia or other European Union countries. There were four speakers that day. They covered a huge amount of material. I won't be able to even finish writing about it in this post, there was so much material covered. The four speakers were Yakov Shraiberg, Jill Cirasella, Laura Quilter, and Siva Vaidhyanathan.

They all managed to hold my interest for the whole conference. I found these particular things which they talked about in each session to be the best parts of the sessions.

Yakov Shraiberg in his session, Google and Libraries of Russia & the CIS quoted Larry Page with the following quote, "The best working search engine is the one that comprehends what the user is seeking and provides him/her exactly what he/she wants." In Russia, Google is the third most used search engine after Yandex and Ramber. http://www.yandex.com/ is completely in Russian, so is http://rambler.ru/

Jill Cirasella in her session, Reference Retooled: How Google Tools Strengthen and Streamline Reference basically spoke an ode to how useful Google tools are for the reference librarian. She mentioned a couple of new tools which I hadn't heard of, Google Suggestions http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en, a tool which comes up with suggested endings for searches, and Google Sets http://labs.google.com/sets, a tool which identifies words that part of a set. These are both example of where Reference often fails to clarify a question. They are both experimental search engines part of the Google Labs website http://labs.google.com/sets. I am not quite sure what this means.

She also showed the video which I have seen at many conferences, Information Revolution by Michael Walsh. The video is available on the internet, however, he specifically asks that you not post it on your website if you sell anything. I am not posting it here because of this. With this, she suggested that people read the article "Ontology Is Overrated" by Clay Shirky. http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html

At this point after the first two speakers we had lunch. I chose vegetarian, because most take out vegetarian is better than ham and cheese sandwiches. They had a mozzarella, red pepper, and eggplant sandwich for vegetarians.

The third speaker,

Laura Quilter talked about Google, Digitalization Projects, and Library Contracts.

A lot of this was about how Google often presented difficult contracts for libraries to follow for digitization of their books. There are numerous lawsuits going on against Google Books, specifically, the Association of American Publishers, and the Publishers and Authors Guild concerning copyright. The lawsuits are focused on Fair Use. Google is claiming that Google Booksearch is a form of Fair Use, while others are claiming it is not.

In response to the Google Digitalization Projects, Microsoft has formed the Open Content Alliance, another digitalization project for public domain materials.

Apparently, many libraries that participated in the Google Digitalization projects are having difficulties with the contracts. There are often exclusivity clauses on how the scanned materials can be used. Also many libraries are reacting against the idea of turning what they consider public domain use over to a private company like Google. The issues presented were interesting. To find out more please look at her website http://lquilter.net/index.php

The last speaker was Siva Vaidhyanathan, whose presentation was The Googlization of Everything. What was very interesting was that he said that Google personalizes all of its searches to the individual based on the IP address or the log in to Google of the person in question. This mean different people get different results based on their search histories.

Siva talks about how Google is trying to become a "Universal library." Their mission statement is very similar to what librarians normally do. He quotes Google with this "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible." He also quotes the famous line attributed to the unofficial byline of Google, "Don't Be Evil."

He is also is quite critical of Google in some ways. He thinks of them as a private company moving into an excessively public space. The Google definition of "Fair Use" is quite expansive.
He has a blog http://www.sivacracy.net/ . Unfortunately, it was down today, Monday, while he was at the conference. He was taking notes though. I think he will post quite a bit.

I was surprised. You could almost say that Wikipedia is becoming all things to all people. It is part of the universal library concept. I have noticed that Wikipedia is increasingly showing up at the top of Google searches. They are becoming more and more popular. I like to think that some of the original founders who were part of the Dorsai Embassy, http://amanda.dorsai.org/ decided to get together and build the "Final Encyclopedia," a concept forwarded by Gordon R. Dickson as part of his Childe Cycle in science fiction. This is of course a silly rumor. Still, I hope it spreads a bit.

I use both Google and Wikipedia regularly. Google is my favorite for general searches, but for directory searches, I still like Yahoo. For concise searches, I often use Mamma. They are different tools used for different purposes. If I want to find web sites with databases built into them I use Complete Planet which is a site listing over 70,000 searchable databases. http://aip.completeplanet.com/

The one disappointment I had with this conference is that they did not provide me with a permanent name badge with the name of the conference. I would have added it to my bag of conference buttons. I got a staples peel off to put my name on. I have the conference program, I may save it. They also had a nice wall calendar in russian and english as a free giveaway.

I am very surprised at the quality of the conference. Very few one day conferences have interesting speakers for all four sessions.

AALBC, Search Engine Submission

I am going to mention the African American Literary Book Club because I like the site design. One of my colleagues found out about it at Book Expo America in 2005. It has since grown to be one of the largest and best sites for reviewing African American literature. http://www.aalbc.com/ .

There are a few very good black science fiction and fantasy writers. A few good books which I can recommend are Steven Barnes, Zulu Heart-- An alternate America where the Moor's settle America and enslave the Irish and many Europeans. Europe has suffered an unrecoverable plague. Maryse Conde-- Who Slashed Celinare's Throat A Fantastical Tale-- a magical realistic fantasy which is set in Guadeloupe which combines political and social intrigue with vodun. The third novel is I am going to recommend is Clay's Ark by Octavia Butler about an alien plague that changes people into carriers of a mutated virus. A deeply dark book about our basest desires and what it means to stay human when you no longer are.

A lot of the patrons who come to the library like urban fiction. It is not my cup of tea, but because it has been asked for so much I can list a lot of authors even though I don't read them. I can even guess what people might like because the same people tend to choose a specific set of authors. Some of the authors which are being asked for are Zane, E. Lynn Harris, Chunichi, Karl Weber, Terri Woods, Omar Tyree, Noire, and others. I took the time to read Omar Tyree and I find him to be a very good writer. He is better than Iceberg Slim or Donald Goines the old school street authors which people sometimes ask for where I work in my opinion. I am not that fond of Eric Jerome Dickey, I don't like his writing style, but a lot of people love it. Most of the books come in soft cover trade paperbacks.
__________________________________________________________________


Hello, I have been thinking about search engine submission. I retried submitting my site to different search engines through http://www.submitexpress.com/ . I also put the search engine into a variety of directories, selecting a variety of them from http://submiturl.nu/ . Hopefully, this will start getting me some results from search engines. I have not gotten a single result from search engines according to hit counter, or from keywords. Everything has come from specific blog searches, forums, and blog sites.

___________________________________________________________________

Another site of interest has come up when checking where hits to my site were coming from. It is Google Reader, a blog reading tool put out by google. http://www.google.com/reader/view It looks mildly interesting.

The Recruiter, The Competitive Intelligence Professional And The Librarian

Aynsworth Rand Spofford, Librarian of Congress, 1864-1897

For a while during the internet boom, I worked as a sourcer locating people for an internal recruiting department. There are some librarian positions at the larger recruitment agencies and outplacement services. At the outplacement companies they help executive locate companies and find information on companies they are applying to.

Internet Sourcer is a kind of specialist position, it is finding people on the internet to interview as hires. It can also include other things like examining company web sites, tracking certain kinds of news, looking at layoffs, finding sales leads, and identifying similar companies to the company you are working at.

At the company, I took the beginning, AIRS training-- Advanced Internet Recruting Strategies. http://www.airsdirectory.com/, What this really means is that I was trained in how to find people on the web. Recruiters look at web sites, forums, people databases, blogs, alumni associations, social networking sites and anywhere that people may gather on the internet. They often take the time to learn the more advanced commands in internet search engines like link, url, file type so they can find specific documents leading to resumes or people. They also use specialty people search engines http://www.zoominfo.com/ , a biographical database, http://people.yahoo.com/ an excellent people finder.

I also used many more web tools as a recruiter than as a librarian. I had the Alexa toolbar which I checked to see who used a certain site. I used the http://www.completeplanet.com/ deep web search engine, I had several tools on my desktop like http://www.webferret.com/
and http://www.copernic.com/


In addition, they extract information from web sites, phone numbers, titles and addresses using software like Black Widow Site Sucker, or Webmole email extractor. There are various trainers who show people how to find people on the web. Probably the most famous of these is http://www.jobmachine.net/ , Shally Steckerl. There are others as well.

This makes many of them more proficient in searching the web than many librarians who are mainly focused on searching for documents and basic information. In fact in most public libraries, librarians are discouraged from letting people use email, forums, or blogs because they consider it disruptive. Things like myspace.com and facebook.com are frowned upon. But, this is where people are going to now. Social networking sites are becoming very popular. There is even one to share personal libraries, http://www.librarything.com/ .

Things like http://www.linkedin.com/ are an incredible opportunity for people who find people as their business on the web.

Librarians in the public setting and in many cases in the corporate setting have fallen very far behind the curve in using the internet to find information. They are now just getting into blogs and other social networking software. Recruiters have been there from the beginning because they are looking for people.

The other group which is using the web much more extensively than librarians in many cases are the competitive intelligence professionals. People like David Carpe use the internet as a source for finding information about competitors companies. http://www.researchzilla.com/ is one of David Carpe's websites. They also spend a lot of time finding people to interview so they can find out what is really happening inside a company. The web is a giant interconnected group of people that are writing about themselves, their interests, the places they are working at, the places they are working for, and just about anything else under the sun.

Librarians are not connected into the people part of the web. The web is not static, it is not the printed page. It changes dynamically. This is a nice little diagram of what social networking is:
http://www.orgnet.com/sna.html . People share websites in clusters. There is usually a central authoritative website which most people are linked to or discuss. The same goes for newsgroups. There are usually one or two people who have the most clout in a forum or newsgroup. Finding these people often identifies who you can ask where certain information is.

Librarians should take the time to learn more about how the internet works, especially the people focused part which is being ignored for the most part.

A lot of the strategies I have used to promote this site have come from my brief experience as a sourcer. I have searched newsgroups to find the proper group to post to, I have searched forums to identify where to drop links, I have looked at social networking sites to see where I can post comments or get widgets.

Anyways, this is part of my two cents for the day.

I have learned quite a bit trying to promote this web site. It has been a very interesting experience so far.
___________________________________________________________________
Let me get back to what I am focusing on books. I am thinking about bookselves right now and the proper way to shelve books in a bookstore or library.

Ideally when books are placed on the shelf, all the spine labels should be visible as well as writing on the spine, they should be hal an inch in from the edge of the bookshelf. The books should not be packed too tightly together because it breaks the spine of the book and causes it to split in half.

There should be a bookend on each shelf with approximately 3-5 inches of space at the end of the shelves. Shelves should be dusted regularly.

No books should be laid on top of other books. This can be dangerous because this leads to a chance for the books to fall off the shelf and hit somebody. Larger books can be dangerous especially if they fall and hit someone in the head or foot.

Ideally bookshelves should not be too deep and should include a bracket in back to prevent the books from falling behind other books.

I've always found steel case bookshelves to be the best. Wood may look nice but it is not very practical in some cases.

__________________________________________________________________

I am further into A Feast for Crows. I am on about page 60.