Submitted by Karen G. Schneider on April 3, 2006 - 3:02pm
 In my first article in this series, I wrassled with the biggest bear in the forest: how most online catalogs lack relevance ranking. That's one big hairy bear, but as some readers pointed out, it's a little forced to pick on relevance ranking, out of the context of all the other important features most online catalogs don't offer—or are features implemented so badly that librarians disable these features rather than further confuse the poor user, who just wants to find a book or DVD, for crying out loud.
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Submitted by Teresa Koltzenburg on April 1, 2006 - 2:41am
Submitted by Tom Peters on March 30, 2006 - 12:13pm
Near the conclusion of the Computers in Libraries Conference in D.C. last week, Paul Miller (pictured at your left) from Talis, a United Kingdom-based library-automation vendor, presented an interesting session about the challenges of Web 2.0 to libraries.
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Submitted by Tom Peters on March 25, 2006 - 9:35am
Lee Rainie from the Pew Internet and American Life Project gave Friday's keynote address. He's a very lively speaker—mentally I started referring to him as Peppie le Pew—and he has lots of data and facts about how Millenials (those born between 1982 and 2000) think, use the Internet, search for information, communicate and form communities, and believe in themselves and the technologically and media rich lives they lead. If Stephen Abram wants facts, Peppie has 'em.
Rainie organized his talk around eight key realities of the Millennial generation: Read More »
Submitted by Tom Peters on March 25, 2006 - 9:12am
Thursday—The second day of the Computers in Libraries Conference in DC was packed with sessions. Megan Fox from Simmons College started it all off with her keynote presentation about planning for a handheld mobile future. She encouraged the conference attendees to understand both the possibilities and limitations of offering library content and services for use on handheld information appliances (cell phones, PDAs, MP3 players, portable media players, GPS devices, smart watches, gaming devices, ultra PCs, etc.) with small screens. If you've ever heard Megan speak on this topic, you know she packs in a lot of tremendous information in a small amount of time. Read More »
Submitted by Tom Peters on March 23, 2006 - 11:56am
 Wednesday—The first day of the Computers in Libraries Conference in Washington, DC. It's the 21st annual, but my first. I was up at 3:00 a.m. to catch my six-a.m.-red-eye flight from Kansas City. After I stumbled out of bed and dressed, I called Max to go for a walk, and he indeed got up off the sofa, but he had a quizzical look on his face as we headed out into the frosty night.
After the walk, off to the airport.
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Submitted by Teresa Koltzenburg on March 22, 2006 - 11:51pm
“Libraries are…" I can't finish that sentence; I can't seem to come up with an encompassing term or pithy phrase to finish it in a way that would do justice to the notion of the library, the value libraries provide to humanity, and all the library facets we encounter in the Information Age.
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Submitted by Karen G. Schneider on March 13, 2006 - 1:28pm
I recently wrote about NCSU adding a search engine to its online catalog. But after talking to librarians who asked me, “So what did they get for doing that?” I realized I need to back-pedal and explain how a search engine makes an online catalog easier to use (or, as Andrew Pace puts it, "Why OPACs Suck").
Cream Rising to the Top
I'll start today with relevance ranking—the building block of search, found in any search engine, from Google to Amazon to Internet Movie Database to little old Librarians' Internet Index. Read More »
Submitted by Tom Peters on March 9, 2006 - 1:15pm
 In today's online New York Times (no-cost subscription required), David Pogue has an interesting article ('Almost iPod, but in the End a Samsung') about the Samsung Z5 MP3 player as a pretender to the throne currently occupied by the iPod Nano.
If you're having a hard time imagining how a newspaper article about such a tight, techie topic could be interesting, let me tell you that I think this article really is about the gestalt experience of using any personal, portable infotainment / communication appliance, be it an MP3 player, cell phone, PDA, tablet PC, or anything else you can imagine. Read More »
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