Posts from — May 2003

Reviews. Interesting remark in this Dan Dennett review of Tom Nagel's Other Minds:In an informal survey, I have been asking philosophers a slightly different question recently, and will be pleased to field further answers in response to this review: Which would… [Matthew Yglesias]

oh what a question this poses….. i can't think of a genuine response that anyone could give that would be a good situation….

“Consumer Protection”: Statement by AHA/OAH Joint Committee on Part-Time and Adjunct Employment. “Everyone in the historical profession has a stake in ameliorating this situation. It is important to halt the erosion of tenure track positions, and where possible to increase them. It is equally important to improve the working conditions and lives… [Invisible Adjunct]

this is an interesting development, but i'm not sure it will change much….

just what everyone needs, i think, yes, everyone needs stuffed giant microbes\
from dave barry's blog

BBC's weekly news quiz. I hadn't seen this before, but the BBC offers a weekly world news quiz. And they mean world. If you're limiting your news intake to Fox News, or even the NY Times, you might not be able to answer all the questions correctly. My showing was a pathetic 2 for 7. Granted, I've been head's down in development mode for the past few weeks, only coming up for food, sleep, and the NBA playoffs. But that's no excuse, I must up my ingestion of foreign news products at once! (Wait a second…is this some sneaky BBC marketing ploy to make me spend more time on their site? And did I just totally fall for it?) [megnut]

hmm, sounds like fun…. i nabbed a 5/7 but that is in part because i tend to read the yahoo most emailed category every day.

Krispy Kraziness. I went into a Krispy Kreme for the first time the other day. Every time I go by the place… [Kieran Healy's Weblog]

in which he says: a single krispy creme doughnut machine produces more calories in an hour than the whole of 17th-century Britain could in a year

which isn't entirely believable, but in the end is….

CSS Zen Garden. CSS Zen and the art of motorcycle website maintainance; a stunning demonstration of what can be accomplished visually through CSS‰??based design. [MetaFilter]

interesting…

More movie finds.

Sundance is currently playing Revolution OS, the independent film about the rise of linux. The usual cast of characters show up in all their nerdy glory and Stallman takes his usual digs at the open source movement (”it's not really free!”). I was disappointed that he didn't sing the free software song in his robes, but at least the song did show up in the credits. It was funny to see the movie almost go out on a high note, by covering IPOs at the peak of the bubble (including interviews with Rob Malda, who gets a spot in the IMDB because of it, dammit), but they saved it at the end, by including stock prices from summer of 2001. Interesting all around and a great snapshot of a time and of a movement.

[A Whole Lotta Nothing]

I've heard good things about his movie, and nearly purchased it until i decided i wasn't teaching this bit of information any time soon.

EduBlogs with Another Sort of Edge. There's been a lot of talk in the blogosphere about the phenomenon of the scholar bloggers (much of it, of course, by and for the, uh, scholar bloggers). But there's a lot more to higher education than the academics who… [Invisible Adjunct]

trying not to talk about it, honest, i am….

Oh the Things We Could Do with WorldCat!.

Wow – Peter Janes caught a heck of a post by Tim Bray about OCLC's WorldCat database!

About as Big as the Web

“In recent months, I've been having serious fun on the job working with OCLC WorldCat data. WorldCat is big – about as big as the Web, and in some respects richer. It is also amazingly under-utilized (what was the last time you did a large-scale search on anything but Google?), and we'd like to fix that. Herewith some notes on who OCLC is, what WorldCat is, and some of the fun we're having. (Warning: long, and with some pitching for Antarctica; but some juicy screenies, and infojunkies must read.)…

Basic stats are available online, and they're impressive (this from the April 2003 snapshot): 798 million books, 40,974,753 unique book titles, 2,475,845 serials, 692,264 maps, and so on, totaling over 883 million copies of 49 million different pieces of our species memory.

This is remarkable, especially when you consider that it was all built by hand. I am in awe of WorldCat; I think it is one of the enduring monuments, one of the reasons why we can (occasionally) be proud to be human….

Long past time, in fact, to take the worlds' OPACs, and especially WorldCat, and build a general-purpose research tool for everybody; with this and Google we would really be covering the bases.

The community of librarians has devoted tens of thousands of lives, in aggregate, to the stewardship of this remarkable body of knowledge, and it is just wrong that it isn't an everyday part of the Web.”

Read the whole thing, even if you're already a librarian and know what WorldCat is. I've been saying for quite some time that WorldCat could become as dominant as Google if OCLC would just open it up. I'm excited that a guy like Tim is working on ideas leading down this path, and I can't wait to see what he has up his sleeve!

[The Shifted Librarian]

Feeding the information fetish can be problematic…. I've played with worldcat before and been lost for hours….

Internet Bookmobile. Jack Schofield writes in The Guardian about Brewster Kahle's heart-enhancing project, the Internet Bookmobile. Each van has a million digitized public domain books. Writes Jack: “It takes about 20 minutes to print out a 300-page Wizard of Oz,” says Kahle, “and if you have four printers, you can produce up to 30 books an hour. And you can do an edition of one, which is interesting. Harvard says it costs $2 to lend a book out, then put it back on the shelf, so it's cheaper to give them away.”… [Joho the Blog]

We've had digital books up at VT for ages, and I guess CDDC has around 5000+, project gutenberg plus a few other minor archives. all of it is fairly interesting in the end, someday i will sit down and see if i can find out which books are most popular in our collections perhaps.