The Janis Ian solution
Everyone's linking to it, and with good reason -- Janis Ian's proposal for breaking out of the online music logjam: "All the record companies get together and build a single giant website, with everything in their catalogues that's currently out of print available on it, and agree to experiment for one year." Charge a reasonable fee per download. See what happens. Of course, it's hard to imagine the record companies collaborating like this. But if even two got together and started down this road it could snowball. Somehow antitrust objections would have to be overcome. Still, it's a great dream. Maybe there are still some dreamers in the music industry. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]

I'm so glad that Janis Ian has spoken out about this. It makes it clear that the interests of most musicians (all but a small proportion of the big names) are not aligned with the record companies. Yet the RIAA continues its attempt to litigate/legislate away the possibilities of the internet which it don't appeal to its tunnel-vision. I'm interested in this issue both as a librarian and an aspiring author.

5:11:44 PM    Comments []  

College Students' Research Habits Studied by OCLC. College Students' Research Habits Studied by OCLC (This from NewsIsFree) Here is the report:Information Habits of College Students(in PDF) and here are the students' responses to what the library coudl change(in PDF) 8/5/2002 [Library Techlog]

I wonder if law students would have similar results? The big difference is that during semester time law students have almost unlimited access to Lexis and Westlaw. Still, if I can take anything positive from this, it's that some students do rely on the library's web site for their research.

2:20:25 PM    Comments []  

BlogStreet looks interesting. [Scripting News]

I just tested it with the Shifted Librarian - it seems to work well enough.

11:50:00 AM    Comments []  

The case against stealth PDF links

A link on a web page most often brings up a page written in HTML, but it may bring up one of several other kinds of file instead.  Very often, particularly on legal sites, the link is to a PDF file, perhaps a judicial opinion or another official government document, and the browser's Acrobat plug-in will then have to go through the time-consuming process of starting either Acrobat or the Acrobat Reader before the document will display.  On my relatively quick system, connected via cable modem, it takes about 20-25 seconds for Acrobat to load and display the chosen file.  For those with slower processor speed or those who have no better than a dialup connection, the time it takes the system to load the document is often extremely long, particularly if the PDF file is very large.  What's worse, after the PDF-within-the-browser is closed, the user has to go through the same process again if another unmarked PDF link is followed.

When I am wandering from link to link, I simply do not want to bother with that process in the majority of cases.  Very often, if I wish to peruse it, I will choose to download the PDF file to disk so that I can look at it later. 

In order to have that flexibility of choice, we believe that links to PDF files should be clearly marked as such (as we have done on this site) so that the user can choose whether and how to view it. 

We call an unmarked link to a PDF file a "stealth PDF link".  We encourage all web authors to clearly mark PDF links, and to forever foreswear the use of stealth PDF links.  If you agree, send a polite reminder of this preference to webmasters of sites displaying the offending links.

[The LitiGator]

I both like & dislike pdf files. It's good that they display (and usually print) documents according to their original formatting. It's also good that they are a de facto standard in the web. But whenever I'm searching for pure text-based information on the web, I can't help but groan whenever I encounter a pdf file. There is the delay in loading the file and it's clumsy to search within the pdf file. If I'm using Google, I'll almost invariably use their "display as text" (or something to that effect) option. It looks very ugly and the OCR has errors in it, but on the whole it's a lot easier and faster than working with a pdf file. But as a webmaster do I need to warn everybody about all links to pdf files? For me it would depend on the size of the pdf file that I'm linking to.

11:26:09 AM    Comments []  

More lawyer bloggers captured - this time when I reeled in the net there was a law librarian...and with a Radio blog no less (and we all know what that means - XML feed).  So let's hear it for Morgan Wilson - Law Librarian with Hamline Univ. School of Law in St. Paul, MN, who attended law school in Australia (Univ of Tasmania).  Morgan, I assume you've seen Jenny 's site.

Jenny is the one who started this whole lawyer blog scavenger hunt, when she asked if anyone "knew of any great lawyer-ly blogs."  That was back in March.  Remember?

[Ernie the Attorney]

Thanks Ernie! I have seen Jennny's great site. I'm still learning the basics right now, but aspire towards the high standard set by the Shifted Librarian - in my own way, of course.

10:13:36 AM    Comments []