Over on the blog I set up for students in my section of LIB 3040, I wrote a post about a recent study that suggests that racial stereotypes are encoded into the algorithm used to determine what ads to display alongside your search results in Google.
Attendees
Arthur Downing, Stephen Francoeur, Louise Klusek, Jin Ma, Mike Waldman, Kevin Wolff
Search Algorithms
We watched a video from Google about how they update the search algorithm every day based on data.
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We also discussed the way that Google’s business is so driven by data from all its services, a topic raised in Steven Levy’s recently published book, In the Plex. We considered how your location and who your online friends are can shape your search results, something that Eli Pariser gets at in the video from TED that we watched.
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New Library Website
We got a peek at an early working draft of the home page supplied by the developer based on the student input that was previously posted in the Idea Lab. Several more drafts are expected before the home page is put through rounds of usability testing with students. We talked about how a search box for a discovery layer from Summon might work on the home page.
Attendees
Arthur Downing, Lisa Ellis, Stephen Francoeur, Joseph Hartnett, Jin Ma, Ryan Phillips, Stella Varveris, Michael Waldman
Intro
In advance of the meeting, attendees were asked to focus on the topic of social networks and academy:
What We Discussed Regarding Social Networks
Mobile Databases Page
We got a preview of the mobile databases page that will link users to library databases that are optimized to work on mobile phones. The page itself is just an ordinary LibGuide page that looks kind of odd in a regular browser but renders in a much more mobile friendly way in a phone’s browser. The draft of the page shown was the result of the second round of usability testing; the release version of the page will be subject to one more round of usability testing.
LibX Toolbar
A new Firefox/IE toolbar is being developed that will let users search the catalog, our e-journals lookup tool, or Bearcat regardless of what site the user happens to be on. Another notable feature is that when the user is on a book page in Amazon or other online booksellers, a Bearcat icon will appear on the screen that when clicked will run an ISBN lookup in the catalog to see if we own a copy of that item.
Siva Vaidhyanathan’s 2010 book, The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry), has been on my to-read list for a while now (the library’s copy is on order). In the meanwhile, I got a really good overview of the issues Vaidhyanathan wants to raise from this podcast from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where the author recently spoke.
On a related note, I want to say that if there were just one podcast that I could recommend to academic librarians, I would suggest MediaBerkman, which pulls together the interviews done at the center as well as the presentations by scholars.
MediaBerkman: home page | podcast feed
Attendees
Frank Donnelly, Stephen Francoeur, Ellen Kaufman, Rita Ormsby, Ryan Phillips, Linda Rath
How Much Information
We watched this video featuring Martin Hilbert, a researcher at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism who recently co-published a paper in Science that estimated how much information we can store and compute. We also listed to an interview with Hilbert that was done on the journal’s podcast. The overwhelming scale of information available can be seen in this press release’s overview of the paper’s findings:
Looking at both digital memory and analog devices, the researchers calculate that humankind is able to store at least 295 exabytes of information. (Yes, that’s a number with 20 zeroes in it.)
Put another way, if a single star is a bit of information, that’s a galaxy of information for every person in the world. But it’s still less than 1 percent of the information stored in all the DNA molecules of a human being.
2002 could be considered the beginning of the digital age, the first year worldwide digital storage capacity overtook total analog capacity. As of 2007, almost 94 percent of our memory is in digital form.
In 2007, humankind successfully sent 1.9 zettabytes of information through broadcast technology such as televisions and GPS. That’s equivalent to every person in the world reading 174 newspapers every day.
On two-way communications technology, such as cell phones, humankind shared 65 exabytes of information through telecommunications in 2007, the equivalent of every person in the world communicating the contents of six newspapers every day.
In 2007, all the general-purpose computers in the world computed 6.4 x 10^18 instructions per second, in the same general order of magnitude as the number of nerve impulses executed by a single human brain. Doing these instructions by hand would take 2,200 times the period since the Big Bang.
From 1986 to 2007, the period of time examined in the study, worldwide computing capacity grew 58 percent a year, 10 times faster than the United States’ gross domestic product.
Telecommunications grew 28 percent annually and storage capacity grew 23 percent a year.
We also took a quick look back at a well known study from 2003 by Peter Lyman and Hal Varian about how much information existed.
Art Project
We took a spin through Art Project, a new service from Google that uses its Street View technology to map out the interiors of art museums around the world (such as the Frick Collection) and that lets you zoom in incredibly close to art in those institutions (see, for example, Rembrandt’s “The Nightwatch” at the Rijksmuseum).
We talked about who owns copyright for works of art held in museum after reading this copyright notice on the FAQ page for the Art Project website:
Why are some areas or specific paintings in the museum Street View imagery blurred?
Some of the paintings and features captured with Street View were required to be blurred by the museums for reasons pertaining to copyrights.
Ebooks
We talked briefly about patron-driven acquisition of ebooks and about how services like Portico will allow us to access ebook content that we’ve licensed even if the provider goes out of business. Since Mike Waldman was unable to attend today’s Tech Sharecase, we agreed to hold off until a later meeting any discussion of the criteria that a librarian might use when deciding which format to purchase a specific book: ebook vs. hardcover vs. paper.
We took a look at how book records in the catalog for Johns Hopkins University connect to various web services that enhance the information normally available in a record: a search box for Amazon’s Search Inside the Book service, links to ebook versions that are freely available at Hathi Trust, Google Books, and much more. These enhanced records are powered by a piece of open source middleware called Umlaut.
A second edition of Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment was also a subject of discussion, as the author, David Bordwell, was selling the PDF directly after the university press that published the first edition let the book go out of print.
SSRN
We poked around in SSRN, a repository of papers in the social sciences, to see how it ranked Baruch among other business schools whose faculty have contributed oft-downloaded papers.
This afternoon, using the Google Search Stories service I spent all of 5 minutes putting together this video on open access. I’m wondering if there might be an interesting and fun classroom activity to do with students that has them using this service.
Attendees
Arthur Downing, Stephen Francoeur, Joseph Hartnett, Ellen Kaufman, Rita Ormsby, Ryan Phillips, Michael Waldman
Google Maps Mania
We looked at some of the mashups of Google Maps found on the site, Google Maps Mania:
Using Google Maps Drag and Zoom
We looked at an Google Map Labs tool (Drag ‘n’ Zoom) that you can turn on in Google Maps that lets you zoom in by drawing a square with your mouse on a map region.
Death of Bloglines
In talking about the recent announcement that Bloglines, a feed reader, would be shutting its service down soon, we discussed the increasing reliance of some on Twitter and Facebook for alerts to notable items from RSS feeds (especially blog posts).
Students on Twitter
We talked about whether it seems like more Baruch students are on Twitter these days and fewer are on Facebook. If you look at the Twitter search on “baruch college” you’ll see that a number of the tweets are clearly from students. It also appears to be the case that campus use of Skype is larger than expected.
Summon Adds Its 100th Customer
An announcement from Serials Solutions about Summon led to this interesting article by Sean Fitzpatrick in American Libraries.
Libraries Acquring Ebooks Rights?
An interesting blog post by Eric Hellman about whether it might make sense for a national consortium of libraries to form that would try to negotiate for rights to select ebooks.
Hathi Trust
We took a look at the Hathi Trust website to figure out what exactly the project offers (backup and preservation of digitized books). We then played around with the search inside books feature and compared it to Google Book Search and the Internet Archive’s collection of digitized books.
Google Instant
We discussed whether Google Instant might improve our students’ search skills or worsen them.
The PPC Blog recently offered up this informative image, Learn How Google Works: In Gory Detail.For some quick commentary on the infographic, check out Roy Tennant’s blog post over at Library Journal.
While investigating who was behind this blog (a company that offers training in search engine marketing), I learned that PPC stands for “pay per click” (the phrase is not new to me but the acronym was).
Attendees
Arthur Downing, Ellen Kaufman, Robert Drzewicki, Stephen Francoeur, Ryan Phillips
Kobo
We briefly discussed Kobo, a competitor to the Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook. A comparison chart provided at the Kobo web site charts Kobo’s features amongst its competitors.
Information Aesthetics
We then discussed the blog Information Aesthetics. This blog seeks out and presents projects that display information and data in creative ways. Some examples discussed were information arcs, the bible cross reference visualization project and a wheel of nutrition that displays portion sizes on dinner plates.
The conversation moved towards other ways of displaying information and the tools used to do so. Microsoft was mentioned given the fact that Excel 2010 is going to incorporate Spark Lines. We then took at look at Google Motion Charts that can be used in iGoogle and Google Docs. A few of us were introduced to motion charts through Hans Rosling’s Wealth & Health of Nations Motion Chart and his TED Talk . Also shown was the Wall Street Journal’s market sector maps for stock performance.
A couple of other web sites were mentioned: 1) Many Eyes a site for sharing data visualization and 2) InfoChimps for downloading all sorts of data sets.
Also touched upon was the Netflix prize. This was a $1 million contest for accurate predictions of movie ratings based on Netflix user movie preferences. The prize was awarded last September and a new contest was announced.
Miscellaneous
The conversation then moved to the current and future state of student printing, some of the issues and possible solutions. We also discussed the use of GoogleDocs on campus.
Lastly, we talked about the Boston, MA, public media outlet WGBH’s Open Vault–their online media archive and library. Roy Tennant’s covered Open Vault in a recent Library Journal blog entry.
Attendees: Robert Drzewicki, Louise Klusek, Kannen Mohan, Mike Waldman, Arthur Downing, Joseph Hartnet, Ryan Phillips
Bing Augmented Reality Maps
We began the Tech Sharecase by watching Microsoft’s Blaise Aguera’s TED presentation on Bing’s augmented-reality maps. The presentation demoed the image and video capabilities that have been integrated into Bing Maps. The demo features live video feed from Seattle’s Pike Place accessed directly from Bing. This is similar to rumored Google plan to move beyond Street Views to capture the inside of retail stores.
Applications for such capabilities in the Newman Library may include virtual tours of the library building as well as capturing the history of the building as a power station. This could also be a solution to the lack of signage in the library.
More Online Map Discussion
The conversation then turned to Four Square. Four Square is a social networking tool that pinpoints geographic locations people visit and currently are. Users can view locations, called venues, and see what the venue has to offer, who’s been there and how often they’ve been there (through frequency of virtually tagging themselves). The person who “visits” the venue the most often becomes the “Mayor” of that venue. Currently, Stephen is the “Mayor” of the Newman Library on Four Square.
We discussed the possibility of a contest for students to compete to become the Mayor of the Newman Library on Four Square.
Also discussed is the website Please Rob Me which posts feeds of people announcing via twitter they’ve left their home. The site posts these as “Recent Empty Homes” and thus an opportunity for theft. The web site seeks to promote the dangers of announcing such information publicly, or as the website describes “The goal of this website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc.”
Googling "Newman Library"
We then discussed the misinformation in searching via Google Maps. For instance, if you google Baruch, the phone returned is for the dean of the Weissman School. The website address returned when googling the Newman Library is athletics.baruch.cuny.edu.
Google News, Fast Flip, was also discussed. Fast Flip is the service at the bottom of Google News that allows you to flip through the stories as if flipping through a magazine. News featured here tend to be a combination of the odd, gossipy, science-oriented and tech-oriented.
Chat Widget in EBSCOhost
Changing topics entirely, we conversed about the new capabilities to add a chat widget into the EBSChost databases. It’s possible for our 24/7 chat service to reside in a space on EBSCOhost. It would be an opportunity for students to access a librarian while searching any EBSCOhost database.
A possible pitfall to adding a chat box would be a disconnect in context between the patron and librarian. A Baruch Librarian, or another librarian in the QuestionPoint consortium, would not know if the patron came from EBSCOhost or the Newman Library webpage. If a different set of expectations existed, or a different type of question was being asked by a patron coming from EBSCOhost, it might lead to problems when a librarian is unaware of a patron’s origin.
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