Mining Metadata

 Now that April showers have brought May flowers, can June be far behind, when thoughts turn to planning weddings and …online polling. 

I saw an article in the weekend Wall Street Journal regarding the effects of social networking on organizing weddings:  “iDo:  With online polling, brides-to-be are turning to a new type of wedding planner–a few hundred of their closest friends.”  From the article:

These couples are part of a Web generation accustomed to sharing minute-to-minute details of their personal lives online and getting instant feedback and comment from friends. As the Facebook crowd reaches marrying age, they are holding on to their social-networking habits. Collaborative wedding plans are only a part of “the wikifying of everything,” says Carley Roney, co-founder of The Knot, a firm that helps nearly two million couples plan their weddings each year.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120976478670563609.html?mod=weekend_journal_primary_hs

I am starting to go through and clean out stacks of printed matter that I haven’t gotten to during the semester and came across my Library Journal supplement of 2008 Movers and Shakers.  I decided to see which ones had blogs and have compiled the following list of bloggin’ movers and shakers (with a wiki and a web site thrown in for good measure):

Community Builders

1. Peter Bromberg: http://cebuzz.wordpress.com/
   http://librarygarden.blogspot.com/

Innovators

1. David Lee King:  http://www.davidleeking.com/

2.0 Gurus

1. Christopher Harris: http://schoolof.info/infomancy/
2. Evette Atkin:  http://theunlibrarian.net/blog/
3. Char Booth:  http://infomational.wordpress.com/
4. Michelle Boule: http://wanderingeyre.com/
   Also contributes to:  http://www.techsource.ala.org/blog/
   http://litablog.org/
5. Tim Spalding:  http://www.librarything.com/thingology/
   http://www.librarything.com/blog/

Problem Solvers

1. David Rothman:  http://davidrothman.net/

Advocates

1. Mario Ascencio:  http://betweenxandy.blogspot.com/
2. Alex Youngberg:  http://www.cupe391.ca/blog/
3. Daniel Cornwall:  http://alaskanlibrarian.wordpress.com/
   http://freegovinfo.info/
4. Amanda McKeraghan:  http://www.scrldwiki.org/index.php/Main_Page

Marketers

1. Amy Buckland:  http://librarystudentjournal.org/index.php/lsj
2. Tony Tallent: http://yestoknow.wordpress.com/

Mentors

1. Karen Brook-Reese:  http://clpteens.blogspot.com/
   http://myspace.com/clpteens

Complete list of Movers and Shakers by state:

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6535115.html

Jill Hurst-Wahl, in Digitization 101, has written a post about the student blog (http://ist677.blogspot.com/) which is a part of the graduate class she teaches at Syracuse University called “Creating, Managing, Preserving Digital Assets.” 

Sounds like a good idea, I thought, as I scanned my RSS feeds for blog fodder.  It’s also a good source to browse some digital repositories and libraries.

An interesting feature of the blog is a Meebo Me widget:

A new addition this year was the Meebo Me widget. Meebo is an instant messenger service that allows me to receive IMs from several services in the same “window.” The Meebo Me widget allows anyone to communicate with me from the blog’s web site, as long as I’m in Meebo. (It will tell you if I am online.) This was not only useful for the students in communicating with me about assignments, etc., but I found that others liked talking to me through Meebo. Given its usefulness, I may add a Meebo Me widget to this blog.

http://hurstassociates.blogspot.com/2008/04/student-blog-posts.html

Here is an interesting site by the person responsible for the Samuel Pepys site — Byliner.  It aggregates the headlines from selected magazine and news websites and indexes the stories by author.  You can create a list of favorite authors (from a list on the site) and every time you return to Byliner, you can get the stories published by the authors on your list since the last time you visited the site. I guess this would be a more specific complement to RSS feeds since you can get just the stories by particular authors.

Samuel Pepys, painted by J. Hayls in 1666 (wikipedia.org)

The Diary of Samuel Pepys is now available online as a blog.  You can even subscribe to it (daily or monthly summary) via RSS!  You can catch up with the Diary by clicking on “The Story So Far” to get background information and summaries.

http://www.pepysdiary.com/

Via Gregorgy Cowles in Paper Cuts

Rabbi Meachem Youlus of the Save a Torah Foundation. 
Photographs:  Brendan Hoffman for the New York Times

There is a fascinating story in today’s New York Times about a Torah that has been discovered that was hidden during World War II before the Germans invaded the Polish city of Oswiecim and renamed it Auschwitz:

It is the story of a sexton in the synagogue in the Polish city of Oswiecim who buried most of the sacred scroll before the Germans stormed in and later renamed the city Auschwitz. It is the story of Jewish prisoners who sneaked the rest of it — four carefully chosen panels — into the concentration camp.

It is the story of a Polish Catholic priest to whom they entrusted the four panels before their deaths. It is the story of a Maryland rabbi who went looking for it with a metal detector. And it is the story of how a hunch by the rabbi’s 13-year-old son helped lead him to it.

Rabbi Menachem Youlus removes dirt from a Torah that had been buried in a Polish cemetery to keep it from the Nazis

About Torah scrolls and the efforts to recover and restore them:

A Torah scroll contains the five books of Moses, and observant Jews read a portion from it at services. Its ornate Hebrew must be hand-lettered by specially trained scribes, and it is considered unacceptable if any part is marred or incomplete. For years, Jews around the world have worked to recover and rehabilitate Torahs that disappeared or were destroyed during the Holocaust, returning them to use in synagogues.

“From Auschwitz, a Torah as Strong as Its Spirit” by James Barron
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/30/nyregion/30torah.html?ref=nyregion

This system for cross-repository browsing ( http://www.richtags.org/)  sounds promising.  It  was presented at the recent Third International Conference on Open Repositories.

Abstract:

We present RichTags, a system for cross-site browsing and exploration of digital repositories. Categorical and faceted search across repositories is poorly supported, especially compared to the support of keyword search through internet search engines. We combine a variety of information retrieval techniques to determine categories of papers, to enable cross-repository browsing by category. The browsing and exploration of this metadata is achieved through a multi-faceted dynamic exploration interface. Social interaction features have also been added to enable cross-repository tagging, commenting and sharing of papers into groups. These social features are available via an API to enable future work to add plugins to pull comments back to the repositories.

http://pubs.or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/3/

More papers from the conference are available on the website:

http://pubs.or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

Via Stephen’s Web

You can now get Dilbert comics (from http://www.dilbert.com/) via RSS feeds. There’s even a blog!

Via RSS Specification Blog

I’ve just come across a blog (via if:book) which incorporates lots of bloggers in a blogging format that goes beyond the “reverse chronological” structure I’m used to seeing. The blog is called “SpaceCollective”: “Where forward thinking terrestrials exchange ideas and information about the state of the species, their planet and the universe, living the lives of science fiction today.”

The question “How many bloggers does it take to screw in a light bulb?” is asked on the blog when you click to find out more about SpaceCollective. Here is part of the answer:

“It only takes one mutant cell to change the course of human evolution. And every time one internet user shares a good idea, it may exponentially reach the minds of two, four, or perhaps a million people who across it on their non-linear path.”

While you can still click on “recent activity” to find the latest posts, there are also sections at the bottom for “Featured contributors”, “Featured posts,” and “Popular posts”. One nice feature is “Epiphanies” with video clips of contributors sharing “sudden insight and moments of clarity.”

http://spacecollective.org/

An interesting trend: fewer people are reading books, but more books are being published:

In 2007, a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from 300,000 in 2006, according to the industry tracker Bowker, which attributed the sharp rise to the number of print-on-demand books and reprints of out-of-print titles. University writing programs are thriving, while writers’ conferences abound, offering aspiring authors a chance to network and “workshop” their work. The blog tracker Technorati estimates that 175,000 new blogs are created worldwide each day (with a lucky few bloggers getting book deals). And the same N.E.A. study found that 7 percent of adults polled, or 15 million people, did creative writing, mostly “for personal fulfillment.”

“You’re an author? Me too!” by Rachel Donadio
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/books/review/Donadio-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ei=5088&en=6e1d4f28c0d41043&ex=1366948800&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss