Friday, January 24, 2003

Peter Suber, "The serials pricing crisis is now in its fourth decade. We're long past the point of damage control and into the era of damage. Prices limit access, and intolerable prices limit access intolerably. Every research institution in the world suffers from intolerable access limitations, no matter how wealthy. Not only must libraries cope by cancelling subscriptions and cutting into their book budgets, but researchers must do without access to some of the journals critical to their research. " The most interesting part to me was the notes/links at the end of the article. 5:27:55 PM    comment [] Jon Udell: LibraryLookup homepage "If your local public (or college) library is one of these Innovative, Voyager, iPac, DRA, or Talis Web-enabled libraries, find your library on the list and drag its link to your browser's link toolbar. (Not listed? Try building your own.) Clicking the link won't work. The links listed on these pages are bookmarklets -- little bits of JavaScript code. You "install" one by dragging it to your browser's link toolbar. After you've "installed" your bookmarklet in this way, you can look up books at your local library. Let's say you're on a book-related site (Amazon, BN, isbn.nu, All Consuming, possibly others), and a book's info page is your current page. (Specifically: its URL contains an ISBN. Choose a hardcover edition for best results -- see tips below.) You can click your bookmarklet to check if the book is available in your local library. The bookmarklet will invoke your library's lookup service, feed it the ISBN, and pop up a new window with the result..." 4:35:30 PM    comment [] The Accidental Systems Librarian - Contents and Links Everything you ever wanted to know about becoming a "Systems Librarian" 4:12:38 PM    comment [] XML.com: Introduction to XFML [Jan. 22, 2003] "XFML is a simple XML format for exchanging metadata in the form of faceted hierarchies, sometimes called taxonomies. Its basic building blocks are topics, also called categories. XFML won't solve all your metadata needs. It's focused on interchanging faceted classification and indexing data. XFML addresses the following problems with basic hierarchical classification: Creating and maintaining a good topic hierarchy is a lot of work, ask any librarian. Indexing (categorizing) large amounts of content consistently is even harder. See Cory Doctorow's "Metacrap". Creating a centralized hierarchy to organize a large amount of information doesn't scale. (If you think Yahoo's hierarchy scales, ask yourself why you keep turning to Google.) XFML provides a simple format to share classification and indexing data. It also provides two ways to build connections between topics, information that lets you write clever tools to automate the sharing of indexing efforts. It's based on the principles of faceted classification, addressing many of the scaling issues with simple hierarchies. Facets sound scary and librarian-like, but they are really just a common sense approach to classifying things. Instead of building one huge tree of topics, a faceted classification uses multiple smaller trees (each tree is called a facet) that can then be combined by the user to find things more easily..." 4:04:52 PM    comment [] Where Next for RSS? "People who hang around with bloggers all know what RSS is (if you don't, I'll introduce it.) RSS is headed for some interesting times as regards client software, traffic management, and business model, and it would be reasonable to expect some breakage along the way..." 4:00:22 PM    comment [] New Architect: You Are Here "The old search engine ways are just not working. There are obvious flaws with ranking pages by relevance—keyword spamming being the most prominent. And listing pages by popularity, Google's current system, all but rules out pages that might be valuable but collect few return links. Perhaps the most heated race at the moment is to create a search engine that goes beyond the timeworn concept of ranking pages by popularity or relevance alone. That means developing a search engine that not only understands what you want, but also can reach into multiple platforms—your email or your intranet, for example—and deliver results in a clear way. It also means the ability to decipher ambiguous searches, recognize natural language, and deploy sophisticated multifactor search algorithms..." 3:57:48 PM    comment [] MIT OpenCourseWare "MIT OCW is a large-scale, Web-based electronic publishing initiative funded jointly by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and MIT. Its goals are to: 1. Provide free, searchable, coherent access to MIT's course materials for educators in the non-profit sector, students, and individual learners around the world. 2. Create an efficient, standards-based model that other universities may emulate to publish their own course materials. We expect MIT OCW to reach a steady—though never static—state by summer 2007. Between now and then we will be publishing more MIT courses, adding features such as extensive metadata tagging, launching a comprehensive ongoing evaluation process, developing and enhancing our content management and publishing technologies, and evolving our internal staffing and workflow. " 3:37:34 PM    comment [] STANDARDIZATION AND ITS UNSEEN IRONIES -- Education Week "Who in their right educational mind would want to create a 21st-century system of learning based on the mismeasurement of young children? What is the underlying theory of social improvement that justifies labeling children before they have even had the chance to learn to think for themselves? Is it credible to believe that we can prepare children for the 21st century by having them spend endless hours completing standardized tests? On the face of it, it seems preposterous. But, of course, that's just it. You cannot take the standardization and testing movement at face value. Testing isn't really about student achievement; it's about something else." 3:29:42 PM    comment [] High School Hub "The High School Hub is a noncommercial learning portal to high-quality free online educational resources for high school students. It features interactive learning games, puzzles, and quizzes. It also includes subject guides for English, foreign languages, math, science, and social studies. " 2:28:03 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2003 Jon Phipps. Last update: 7/10/2003; 5:20:01 PM.