“In celebration of libraries and
their heritage of technological innovation, OCLC Research is
sponsoring a software contest to encourage innovation in the use of
web-based services for libraries.
Prize
$2,500 in
cash
Visit with OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc., in
Dublin, Ohio
Potentially have your code incorporated in OCLC
services for libraries
You may also use Open
WorldCat, either by simply incorporating links to publicly
accessible records or by enrolling in Open WorldCat's Partner Access program. Contact us
if you wish to discuss enrolling in this program for the purposes of
this contest.
Your mission is to write a program that does
something interesting and innovative with the WorldCat data using at
least one of the OCLC-provided services. You must submit a working
prototype.
Part of your job is to convince us of why your
program is interesting and why it will help libraries and/or library
users; other than that, you're free to implement whatever strikes your
fancy.”
And they were smart enough to ask Jon Udell to be a judge
– good call! I hope we see some really cool stuff come out of
this, in more than just a proof-of-concept way. Makes me wish I could
actually program. Entries are due by midnight on May 15. If
you’re entering, good luck!
It was only a matter of time. OCLC started to "get" RSS
and began providing a feed for
research announcements earlier this year, and now they're
blogging, too. Well, a few of them are, anyway, and it's the folks
behind the Environmental
Scan leading the way. Why? Because It's All Good. :-)
"A cool blog from OCLC Online Computer Library Center staff about
all things future that impact libraries and library users. A
conversation that starts with the Environmental Scan and goes from
there."
Founded in 1967, OCLC Online Computer Library Center is
a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research
organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to
the world's information and reducing information costs. More than
45,000 libraries in 84 countries and territories around the world use
OCLC services to locate, acquire, catalog, lend and preserve library
materials. Researchers, students, faculty, scholars, professional
librarians and other information seekers use OCLC services to obtain
bibliographic, abstract and full-text information when and where they
need it.
OCLC Research is one of the world's leading
centers devoted exclusively to the challenges facing libraries in a
rapidly changing information technology environment.
"From the document, 'The 2003 OCLC Environmental Scan: Pattern
Recognition report was produced for OCLC’s worldwide membership
to examine the significant issues and trends impacting OCLC,
libraries, museums, archives and other allied organizations, both now
and in the future. The scan provides a high-level view of the
information landscape, intended both to inform and stimulate
discussion about future strategic directions.'
I saw a piece of this report last month and even had the chance to
provide some feedback and comments that made it into the final
version. I have not yet had time to read the whole thing, but what I
did see was pretty solid and does provide a good overview of current
and future issues for libraries. Naturally, I agree with a lot of
what's in the report, although I did have an interesting dialogue with
the author, which is where some of my quotes come from (mostly in the
FutureFr
amework section).
Some of the quotes that are not from me but could be because of
their "shifted-ness" include:
"Wi-Fi, short for wireless fidelity, is a
technology that has captured the heart of the information consumer and
is filling tables at coffee shops across the world.... Jupiter
Research reports that 6 percent of U.S. consumers have used Wi-Fi
services in a public place. Why not make the library the first public
place for the next 50 percent?
The high school students interviewed for the scan told us that the
technology tool they wanted most was a PDA device that 'contained all
the information they needed to do their work.' Vendors are
responding. Several vendors now offer PDAs under $100, making it
possible for the information consumer to get a PDA for about the price
of two video games. Personalization, alert technology
and other PDA-friendly information services have brought a world of
convenience to the business user. The information consumer is ready
for libraries to bring 'all the information they need to do their
work' to their PDAs." [Security, authentication, and Digital Rights
Management (DRM), p.
5]
"What if libraries and OCLC and all the other players in the world
of structured access to information erased the organizational charts,
the artificial separations of content, the visible taxonomies, and the
other edifices real or otherwise built to bring order and rationality
to what we perceive as a chaotic universe? What if we built an
infosphere rich in content and context that was easy to use,
ubiquitous and integrated, designed to become woven into the fabric of
people’s lives; people looking for answers, meaning and
authoritative, trustable results? How do we take information,
information sources and our expertise to the user, rather than making
the user come to our spheres?" [Future Frameworks, p.
5]
It will be interesting to gauge the reaction to this document
and to see if OCLC
can successfully use it as a springboard to implementing the
frameworks discussed (or helping their members to implement those
frameworks). I hope they do a follow-up in a year to evaluate its
impact on the organization and/or libraries. Personally, an API into
WorldCat that could be used
as an
ISBN lookup service would be pretty high on my list in terms of
integration into the web in the user's infosphere (hint, hint).
The Ohio College Library Center ( OCLC ) has released a
report on current trends in the information world . The analysis
examines social habits of searching, library economics, and impacts of
digitization, then offers challenging recommendations for information
specialists.
This interview with Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was
conducted by OCLC Researcher Stuart Weibel. Tim agreed to discuss his
perspectives on major trends in the information landscape and their
impact on use and access to public information. This interview was
conducted in support of the OCLC environmental scan of the Library and
Information communities, developed for strategic planning purposes for
OCLC and its member libraries.
This
repository contains works produced, sponsored, or submitted by OCLC
Research. In general, the works are research-oriented and are in the
subject area of library and information science. Many items describe
OCLC Research projects, activities, and programs and were originally
published by OCLC, while others are from peer-reviewed scholarly
journals. The repository contains metadata (MARC, Dublin Core) about
publications and, whenever available and permitted, a link to the full
digital text of items described. The repository is under construction.
At present the repository contains:
* 507
metadata records (out of 913 items published by OCLC staff since
1979) * links to the full text of 288 items.
It
contains current publications back to 2001, all "born digital"
publications, and at least 40% of OCLC Research's corpus of work. A
complete bibliography of OCLC Research publications is available here. This has been added to Research Resources
Subject Tracer™ Information Blog. This has also been added to Directory Resources
Subject Tracer™ Information Blog under Information and Information
Science Directory Classification. This will be added to Academic Resources
2004-05 Internet MiniGuide.
Extreeeeeeme ISBNs! OCLC and xISBN
Extreeeeeeme ISBNs! OCLC and xISBN01/23/2004 02:20 PM The OCLC has a cool little project called xISBN. It lets you provide
an ISBN and get a list of associated ISBNs (from reprints, other
editions, etc.) It's available at...
Just thought I'd let you know that we've put up a new version of the
ISBN database. We've done a lot of work to pull works with variant
titles together (which helps with The Innovator's
Dilemma) and made the retrievals consistent, so that any ISBN in a
group retrieves that same ISBN group (which also helps with I's D).
We've learned a lot about how ISBNs are used (and misused).
Thanks for the update, Thom. Sure enough, my original examples now
work as advertised. Here's what Thom was referring to:
There are a few caveats here. First, the one-to-many algorithm doesn't
seem to be fully bi-directional. In the example above, we'd like to
get from 0066620694, a paperback, to 0875845851, a hardcover. But
although we can get from 0875845851 to
0066620694, we can't get from 0066620694 to
0875845851. [Jon's Radio: Multi-ISBN
LibraryLookup]
Those two links didn't used to yield the same set of ISBNs. Now they
do. Cool!
...
OCLC Project Opens WorldCat Records to Google
OCLC Project Opens WorldCat Records to Google10/30/2003 08:09 AM Barbara Quint reports about how OCLC is allowing Google .. OCLC
Project Opens WorldCat Records to Google .. p Information Todays
webbplats .. Info Today ..
InfoToday
infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb031027-2.shtml track this
site | 7 links
Two little CSS hacks
Two little CSS hacks03/11/2003 10:46 AM Workarounds to vertically align nested blocks and to emulate the CSS's
min-height property in MSIE.
Mac OS X Hacks Put to Bed03/11/2003 11:41 PM Mac OS X Hacks was just sent to the printer, which means it'll
be appearing in online bookstores and on your local brick-and-mortar
bookstore shelves in a couple-three weeks. Whew!
OCSmart Hacks 1.0
OCSmart Hacks 1.008/03/2004 08:01 PM Extends services of any Cocoa application, with tear-off menu support
and more.
New: Flash Hacks
New: Flash Hacks07/13/2004 10:03 AM O'Reilly's Flash Hacks, written by Sham Bhangal, contains 100 tools,
tricks, and techniques for Flash, including scripted and
timeline-based visual effects, page turning animation, and more.
The MIT Gallery of Hacks.
The MIT Gallery of Hacks.01/04/2004 05:52 PM The MIT Gallery of Hacks.
Good-natured creative pranks by MIT
students. The pinnacle was possibly 1999's Great Droid,
with the Great Dome made to resemble R2D2's head to mark the release
of some film or other at the time. In the spirit of the tradition,
students left detailed instructions for the safe removal of the
decoration.
Lots of Gmail hacks are already showing up. I surely do love
programmers that are curious enough to figure out how stuff works to
write mini utilities to let us utilize our time more wisely. [G-mailto]
New: O'Reilly's PDF Hacks
New: O'Reilly's PDF Hacks09/16/2004 09:41 AM O'Reilly's PDF Hacks by Sid Steward shows how to use a variety of PDF
tools--not just Acrobat--to create, rearrange, customize, and present
information as PDF.
Excel Hacks
Excel Hacks05/06/2004 06:58 PM for all you dorks who were geeking out in the Excel Pile thread
washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8534-2004Jun26.html<
br />track
this site | 4 links
New: "Panther" Hacks
New: "Panther" Hacks07/16/2004 09:59 AM
O'Reilly's latest "hack" book digs down into Mac OS X "Panther"
internals.
New: O'Reilly's IRC Hacks
New: O'Reilly's IRC Hacks09/07/2004 10:25 AM IRC Hacks, by Paul Mutton, starts with the basics of IRC clients, then
delves into the protocols and services beneath the surface, and
culminates with building autonomous IRC clients.
New: Excel Hacks
New: Excel Hacks04/09/2004 04:01 PM O'Reilly's Excel Hacks offers 100 tips and techniques that include
hacking pivot tables, designing charts beyond the basic types,
specifying dynamic ranges, using XML, and more.
phpAdsNew Hacks
phpAdsNew Hacks08/16/2004 10:15 PM phpAdsNew 2.0.2 CVS 2004-08-16 Released
Mac OS X Panther Hacks
Mac OS X Panther Hacks08/11/2004 06:15 AM
I finally got round to reading my copy of the wonderful O'Reilly Mac
OS X Panther Hacks book, which, like all of the hacks books, is
clever, informative, well-organised and useful; this one has the
additional merit of having been co-written by my pal Rael Dornfest, who edits the line, and
is witty, silly and very imaginative indeed. The hacks assembled in
the text range from surprising things you can do with iTunes and iCal
to hacking AppleScript to making OS X cooperate with perl and Python,
but my favorite of all is the iOscillate: an iSight camera mounted to
the top of a de-bladed oscillating desk-fan, so that the fan sweeps
the iSight back and forth in a steady, 180-degree arc, covering all
those seated around a table or in a conference. The hack is truly
worthy of the appellation "hack" -- it's ingenious, funny, and
actually useful in a seriously bent way.
Link
IM hacks way up in first quarter
IM hacks way up in first quarter03/23/2005 12:56 PM The number of combined IM- and Web-based attacks increased by 300
percent in the first quarter, Websense says.
Hacks.O'Reilly.com03/11/2003 09:43 AM The full-blown version of O'Reilly's Hacks Series site is now up at
hacks.oreilly.com. In
addition to
info about the current crop of books (Linux Server, Google, Mac OS X),
there are listings of
published hacks, some
complete hacks, and each has its own discussion forum.
Gotta Hack? Got a non-obvious solution to an interesting problem? Throw
your hack into the ring and it just might be in a Hacks
book-to-be. Not a hacker yourself but have a hack or Hacks book you'd
like to see? Suggest
it and perhaps it will be so written.
Developers eye PSP hacks04/05/2005 05:24 PM Blog:
Keep your multiplayer racing games and widescreen movies. For
some people, Sony's PlayStation Portable won't be really cool...
TiVo Hacks Put to Bed
TiVo Hacks Put to Bed10/28/2003 11:06 PM
My month of a thousand hacks ended this morning as I put TiVo Hacks to bed (read: sent it to production).
Raffi, my young
TiVo Jedi friend, good on you, mate! I've learned more about my TiVo
over the past month than I'd ever wanted to. Now where'd I put that
screwdriver...
The book will be in brick-and-mortar bookstore shelves sometime in
August, but you can of course pre-order it from Amazon.
The Internet puts a wealth of information at your fingertips, and
all you have to know is how to find it. Google is your ultimate
research tool--a search engine that indexes more than 2.4 billion web
pages, in more than 30 languages, conducting more than 150 million
searches a day.
The more you know about Google, the better you are at pulling data off
the Web. You've got a cadre of techniques up your sleeve--tricks
you've learned from practice, from exchanging ideas with others, and
from plain old trial and error--but you're always looking for better
ways to search.
It's the "hacker" in you: not the troublemaking kind, but the kind who
really drives innovation by trying new ways to get things done. If
this is you, then you'll find new inspiration (and valuable tools,
too) in Google Hacks from O'Reilly's new Hacks Series.
New: Firefox Hacks03/30/2005 11:47 AM O'Reilly released Firefox Hacks, which includes coverage of migration
from Internet Explorer, anonymous browsing, increasing security,
creation of tags and widgets, and more.
Mac Mini Hacks
Mac Mini Hacks03/19/2005 02:07 AM The Mac Mini is opened with a Putty knife as instructed by Apple
however this method is leaving peoples Mac Mini in damaged conditions
in many cases including scratches, seperation gaps and other...
[[ Visit http://www.macmegasite.com for full article ]]
Spidering Hacks
Spidering Hacks11/01/2003 12:57 PM The latest book in the O'Reilly Hacks series, "Spidering Hacks,"
(written by Kevin "Morbus Iff" Hemenway and Tara "ResearchBuzz"
Calishain) is out. It's the site-scraper's bible, with 100 tips and
tricks for sucking in data from the Web.
Spidering Hacks takes you to the next level in Internet data
retrieval--beyond search engines--by showing you how to create spiders
and bots to retrieve information from your favorite sites and data
sources. You'll no longer feel constrained by the way host sites think
you want to see their data presented--you'll learn how to scrape and
repurpose raw data so you can view in a way that's meaningful to you.
Written for developers, researchers, technical assistants, librarians,
and power users, Spidering Hacks provides expert tips on spidering and
scraping methodologies. You'll begin with a crash course in spidering
concepts, tools (Perl, LWP, out-of-the-box utilities), and ethics (how
to know when you've gone too far: what's acceptable and unacceptable).
Next, you'll collect media files and data from databases. Then you'll
learn how to interpret and understand the data, repurpose it for use
in other applications, and even build authorized interfaces to
integrate the data into your own content.
Firefox Hacks:
Coming in March. I ache with anticipation.
Firefox Hacks is ideal for power users who want to
maximize the effectiveness of Firefox, the next-generation web browser
that is quickly gaining in popularity. This highly-focused book offers
all the valuable tips and tools you need to enjoy a superior and safer
browsing experience. Learn how to customize its deployment,
appearance, features, and functionality.
My work colleague and R&D partner has a book out (with Tom
Stafford)! It's called Mind Hacks and it's from O'Reilly in
their Hacks series. So when you've finished fiddling with your Tivo or
with Google's API, now you can take that spare screwdriver and start
mucking around with that most interesting pieces of squishyware in the
world: your brain.
I think I was lucky enough to be around when the idea for the book
first emerged a few years ago at a social software summit in Finland
organised by Clay Shirky. At the
time I think there was general agreement that it was a bloody good
idea, but I don't know how many of us actually expected to see it in
print. Of course in order for it to make it to print, Mr Webb had to
part-time abandon me in the bowels of the BBC to ponce off and have
fun inside The British Library. He has been much missed (not that he's
coming back or anything), but I think it's been worth it. There's a
weblog to accompany the book at mindhacks.com.
Anyway, it's in my best interests to bask in the reflected glory of
my chum, so I'm going to ask all of you to go and buy a copy
immediately and recommend it to all of your friends - particularly
those you think could do with some help keeping their brains ticking
over. And I expect to see some pictures of you lazy bastards
performing impromptu neurosurgery on each other by the end of the
year!
Sims 2 hacks blowing up01/06/2005 07:46 PM Cory Doctorow:
Hacks for Sims 2 are spreading like wildfire:
Entire neighborhoods of Sims are being mysteriously graced with
eternal youth, while some characters are finding all their needs
fulfilled by a single shot of magic espresso. Others no longer need to
empty the toilet after potty training their toddler. Some Sims are
being abducted by aliens when they glance through their telescope --
every time, instead of just occasionally, which is normal.
All this mayhem is the work of a community of experimenters wielding
hex editors, custom programs and reverse-engineering skills who began
mastering their own Sims 2 worlds immediately after the game's release
last September. The hackers share their weird science with one another
through public websites and forums.
Link
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