Newman Library Idea Lab

Attendees
Arthur Downing, Stephen Francoeur, Joseph Hartnett, Randy Hensley, Ellen Kaufman, Louise Klusek, Ryan Phillips

Google Discover Music
Talked about new Google Discover Music service in which search results are more socially based and about October 23, 2009, radio story from On the Media, “Charting the Charts,” which noted how Billboard is waning in influence and new services are appearing that measure music success differently. One such services is Band Metrics that ranks popularity not by sales but by an aggregation of metrics, including social ones. Search is changing the economic model for music rankings. Big Champagne offers another service that measures rankings using social aspects. What is a credible or reliable metric is shifting from authorities like SoundScan or Billboard to services that look at social use of media.

Google Social Search
This experiment from Google looks at who is in your social graph (your collection of online friends) so that it can present you with search results that are refined by content that your friends have posted online.

Google Reader
We looked at the way that people who use Google Reader can friend others who use the service and share notable feed items with each other.

Google Site Search Tool
The Baruch College website today unveiled its new site search engine powered by Google. The library website will be changing its search site software to Google soon as well.

2D Barcodes
Following up on Arthur’s comments on an earlier blog post here, We talked about 2D barcodes, QR codes, and their potential uses by colleges and libraries. We looked at the barcode service from ScanLife and the video about how Case Western Reserve University used ScanLife codes.

Mobile Websites for Libraries
We talked about various strategies for creating library websites that would render well on browsers in mobile phones.

• UNC Chapel Hill mobile site (details on Chad Haefele’s blog post at Hidden Peanuts)
• District of Columbia Public Library iPhone app
• Chad Haefele’s presentation on mobile web development for libraries

Amazon Kindle vs. Barnes & Noble Nook
While talking about basic differences between new Nook reader coming out in November, we also discussed the Kindle loan program at North Carolina State University and how the service also offers patron-driven acquisitions (hear all the details about this on the Library 2.0 Gang podcast from September 2009 in which Orion Pozo from NCSU was interviewed).

TinyURL vs. HugeURL
TinyURL is a well-known service that will shrink a long URL with a brief one that redirects you to the original site. HugeURL is a funny spoof that turns short URLs into obscenely long ones.

Google. Discover Music
Google just unveiled a landing page called Discover Music specifically designed for searching music. Google has partnered social media services like Imeem, LaLa, Myspace, Rhapsody, Pandora and music companies/label owners such as EMI, Sony Music, Universal and Warner Brothers to customize search results and provide music content. Users can search by band names, songs, albums, lyrics et cetera.

As with typical Google search, precision can be a problem when using common phrases or words as search terms. The first result in a search on my favorite band Low returns the Google Finance page for Lowe’s Companies. This is a surprising example given finance and music are separate search platforms. Another example is the search for the popular Manchester band Oasis. This yields results typical of a regular Google search with inclusions from a number of organizations using the O.A.S.I.S. acronym and even local search listing for businesses with the name Oasis.

But when the search is successful, and returns results as Google and the Discover Music partners have designed, the first results are options to listen to the band from music streaming sites like MySpace, iLike and so on. You can then listen and even buy songs. The remaining results consist of the band website, fan pages, additional social music networks, Wikipedia and so on.

Context of Social Search
What’s interesting about Google’s new search is the featuring of social networking tools in the results for users’ discovery of new music. Discover Music isn’t guiding users to traditional online music retailers to facilitate purchases but rather online networks for music discovery. Discover Music results are directing traffic to Pandora, MySpace, iLike which are designed to guide people to new music based on what other people are listening to.

Related to the results of Google’s music search, last week public radio’s On the Media focused on music in the digital age. Particularly, their segment on “Charting the Charts” explored current and upcoming methods of ranking music popularity given the multitude of avenues people are able to listen to music.

With the economics of the music industry shifting from stores sales, to digital sales and file sharing/streaming, some feel traditional sources for music rankings like Billboard Charts are failing to capture important aspects of music popularity.

The show featured two sources that are trying to capture music popularity in different ways. BigChampagne is a media measurement tool that tracks legal and illegal downloads, online streaming audio, tour merchandise et cetera. Band Metrics is a service that hopes to collect music data based on interest from social networking sites, radio and show attendance.

“Google Makes Searching for Music Even Easier Than It Already Is.” Pitchfork. October 29, 2009. Web.

“Charting the Charts.” On the Media. WNYC. October 23, 2009. Web.

This past weeks episode of “To the Best of Our Knowledge” on Wisconsin Public Radio focused on libraries and reading. The episode as whole is enjoyable and informative but the first segment is particularily relevant to our work as it covers the state of reading in our socety and the efficacy of the book as a format.

Maryanne Wolfe, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University and author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain,” spoke of her concerns about the younger generations of readers who were brought up in a world of computers. According to Ms. Wolfe, students are not reading as well as in the past.

In the interview, Wolfe also referenced Nicholas Carr’s article in The Atlantic, “Is Google making Us Stupid?” Wolfe’s worry is that even though younger generations are reading and have easier access to information, they are only becoming “superficially smart.” They are learning in a manner that lacks in analysis and fails to manifest into inference and deeper knowledge of the subject.

“Libraries.” To the Best of Our Knowledge. Wisconsin Public Radio. August 29, 2009. Web.

Carr, Nicholas. ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic. July/August 2008. Web.

An editorial in today’s New York Times notes that hearings will be held in the fall by a federal court that is looking into the settlement over Google Book Search that Google struck with the Author’s Guild and the American Association of Publishers.

For a good overview of the controversy over the Google Book Search settlement and the larger issue of the future of the book, this 29 May 2009 article by Sarah Glazer from CQ Researcher is great. You may also want to check out other Newman Library Idea Lab posts on Google Book Search.

Glazer, Sarah. “Future of Books” CQ Researcher 19.20 (2009): 473-500. CQ Researcher Online. Web. 29 July 2009.

“Google’s Big Plan for Books.” The New York Times, 29 July 2009. Web. 29 July 2009.

Attendees

Arthur Downing, Linda Rath, Stephen Francoeur, Rita Ormsby, Frank Donnelly, Louise Klusek

New Accounting Standards Codification

Rita Ormsby showed the various ways to access the new Accounting Standards Codification:

• Free basic version on the FASB web site (click the link for “order” in the right where it says “New Users”)
• Academic user version on the FASB web site (accounting students and faculty at Baruch should have the login info and will click “Academic Accounting Access”)
• CCH Accounting Research Manager (via our Databases page)
• RIA Checkpoint (via our Databases page)

Google OS

Discussed the news about Google’s plan to release its own operating system next year. Louise Klusek noted this article from today’s Wall Street Journal that discussed Google’s strategy to compete with Microsoft.

Bing

We compared searches in Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, to those in Google and found some ways that it offered improved results for certain kinds of searches.

Compare “starbucks” in Bing to “starbucks” in Google, for example. Note that Bing automatically clusters results into topics in ways that may be useful (Google just offers a vanilla list of results).

FriendFeed

I discussed how I use FriendFeed to publish from all my web services that I use (Facebook, Twitter, blogs where I am an author, Flickr, YouTube, etc.) in one location that others can subscribe to and add comments. I highlighted the way that I use it for social recommendation of recent articles and blog posts and for submitting requests for help or advice to the librarians and others who subscribe to me in FriendFeed.

Harvard Business Review Curtailing Deep Linking to Articles in Business Source Premier

A number of blogs have commented lately on the Harvard Business School Press’ terms of service that forbid free linking to Harvard Business Review articles in Business Source Premier. It was suggested that maybe the journal may be thinking of moving its content exclusively to its own platform much as Institutional Investor did. We also discussed the way that most database vendors are trying to protect their brands by controlling the way that screenshots of their products are published (as in the case of a tutorial created by a library).

The City of New York is ramping up its efforts to make some of the vast amounts data it gathers and stores more easily accessible. A recent post on the New York Times blog, City Room, detailed major web initiatives that the city just announced it is working on:

• Launch NYC Big Apps, an annual competition for technology companies to develop proposals for new applications to make data sets more usable (the city has selected eighty data sets from thirty-two different agencies for entrants to work with).
• Create a 311 portal site that pulls together all the data on complaints that New Yorkers have left on the city’s 311 phone number.
• Use Skype and Twitter as additional ways to communicate with the city (you’ll be able to call 311 via Skype and receive alerts from the city via Twitter)
• Work with Google to get a better handle on how users are searching for information on NYC.gov and for city information generally in Google searches

You can read more about these initiatives on this press release from the city.

A number of outside companies are already scraping data from various city data sets and offering a friendly interface to that data. A great example of such an enterprise can be found in the EveryBlock service, which offers data harvested from municipal sources in fifteen cities, such as:

• New York
• Chicago
• Los Angeles
• Washington, DC

Chan, Sewell and Patrick McGeehan. “City Invites Software Developers to Crunch Big Data Sets.” City Room. The New York Times. 29 June 2009. Web. 8 July 2009.

City of New York. Mayor Bloomberg Announces Five Technology Initiatives to Improve Accessibility, Transparency and Accountability Across City Government. 29 June 2009. Web. 8 July 2009.

EveryBlock. Web. 8 July 2009.

Beginning this week, the college will be closed on Fridays for summer. Since we usually hold the Friday Tech Sharecase on Fridays, this week’s meeting was on a Thursday (as will be the case for the rest of the summer).

Attendees

Louise Klusek, Ryan Philips, Stephen Francoeur, David Brodherson, Joseph Hartnett, Frank Donnelly, Jin Ma, Jean Yaremchuk, Linda Rath, Mikhail Gershovich, Luke Waltzer.

Scribd

Scribd is a service for sharing documents. Simon & Schuster will begin selling e-books on this site. Upload your own documents, then get an embed code that you can put in your blog or website to display that document in a viewer (see example below).

Francoeur Effective Chat Reference METRO 28 April 2009

100+ Alternative Search Engines You Should Know

List of search engines that focus on specific content or that search or present results in ways notably different from traditional search engines. via ALA Direct, 24 June 2009

“What is a Browser?” Video

People in Times Square interviewed by Google staff to see if they knew what a browser was. Much confusion ensues…

Library Mashup

The web site for the Manchester City Library (NH), which was spotlighted at a presentation at the recent SLA meeting, features content that is pulled in from a number of different sources and aggregated on the library’s home page.

VOCAT

A project of the Schwartz Communication Institute, VOCAT stands for Video Oral Communication Assessment Tool. It offers online rubrics for scoring oral presentations and videos of recorded presentations (there are 6400 scored and recorded presentations in the system now). Used by Zicklin, Wall Street Careers, and other groups/units in the college. The system generates reports; data can be output to Excel. Maybe we could pull out scores for citations to help us assess the library’s efforts to instruct COM 1010 students about doing research. The Schwartz Communication Institute want to add the abiity to score group presentations and to allow for peer evaluation. They are alsofiguring out how this system might be shared with other institutions.

WordPress and the New Blogs

Demonstration of how to login to the Reference at Newman Library blog, edit your profile so your full name is displayed next to any posts, change your password to something more memorable, and add a new post. The brand new blog, Newman Library Idea Lab, was also shown. This latter blog features an automated way to apply tags to posts using Tagaroo, a WordPress plugin from Calais (a Thomson Reuters company).

Feed2JS

The Baruch Blogs page and the LIS Blogs page (found on Reference at Newman Library and Newman Library Idea Lab) feature automatically updated displays of recent blog posts using a free service called Feed2JS, which gives you embeddable JavaScript based on any RSS URL you provide.

Recently a few articles have highlighted the ongoing Google Book Search controversy. The CNET article linked below does a good job of outlining the competing interests as pertaining to the copyright issues/proposed settlement and the monopolistic implications of the Google Book project.

One article I find really interesting is the second below from Reuters. This article glosses over the finer details of oppositions arguments to defend Google Books. The argument the author presents is that Google is advancing human knowledge, granting access to information where there was none, and in light of this the opposition concerns are either invalid or outweighed by Google’s lofty goal.

Shankland, Stephen. “Google’s digital-book future hangs in the balance.” CNET. 15 June 2009. Web. 24 June 2009.

Gimein, Mark. “In Defense of Google Books.” Reuters. 24 June 2009. Web. 24 June 2009.

Attendees

Arthur Downing, Jean Yaremchuk, Linda Rath, Louise Klusek, Lucas Waltzer, Mikhail Gershovich, Ryan Phillips, Stephen Francoeur.

EtherPad

Free service that offers collaborative simultaneous editing of documents. We used this service for taking notes for today’s meeting. EtherPad was used at LibCampNYC last week by people in sessions so they could collaboratively take notes.

backchan.nl

Free service that allows attendees in a presentation or class to post questions and vote on them. Can be displayed in the room where the presentation so everyone can see it and respond to it (including the presenter). A similar service come from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, which offers its Question Tool for free use.

Berkman Institute Center for Internet & Society

Has lots of great presentations and lectures available as audio and video files.

CUNY Academic Commons

Social network for members of the CUNY community. Uses BuddyPress, MediaWiki, and other services. If you want to sign up, contact Mikhail Gershovich directly, as the site currently has problems accepting new accounts from people with Baruch email addresses (a problem that will soon be fixed). Among the many functions offered here, users can use this site to create individual and team blogs. Another example of the use of BuddyPress in higher ed can be found in the example of the Macaulay Honors College at CUNY, which has created a network of students, faculty, and administrators who are part of that community.

Blogs @ Baruch

New theme search functionality coming soon that will make it to do more refined searches for particular aspects of themes. The admin panel for Blogs @ Baruch is being redone this summer. Blogs @ Baruch features course blogs, professional development blogs, faculty blogs, and even a student magazine (in the works).

Open Book Plugin

The Newman Library Idea Blog (soon to be launched; see below) will have this Word Press plugin available. It allows blog post writers to display jacket art for books they discuss in posts and offer links to Open Library pages for books mentioned. It was noted that due to moves from OCLC regarding ownership of cataloging records, CUNY is looking into getting our records in Open Library so that we can always have a place to access our own records.

Newman Library Idea Blog

Discussion about this new blog that Stephen and Ryan are working on. It was agreed that the reference blog, which is currently hosted on Blogspot but will soon be migrated over to Baruch’s WordPress service, should have a similar layout to the Newman Library Idea Blog but have a different color scheme to help distinguish the two sites.

Google Book Search

We discussed the possibility of putting links in the records for the Docutek system for course reserves to Google Book Search records if the book we have on reserve is also partly or fully available online in Google Book Search. An example is Howard Gardner’s Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, which is almost entirely available. If you look at too much content, though, Google doesn’t let you see any more pages (unless you close your browser and then come back to the book, perhaps).

Ebooks and the Kindle

Discussing Google Book Search brought up the matter of whether our students would want to read e-books. It was noted that Simon and Schuster announced they’ll sell digital books exclusively at Scribd. It was also mentioned that Mike Waldman and a CIS professor are working on a grant to get Kindles for each member for a CIS class whose textbooks will exclusively be titles found in Books 24×7.