Thursday, November 03, 2005

Preserving Public Domain Books--Google Print This is a persuasive short statement about the valuable contribution to scholarship and public access that is being made by the Google Print project (with instructive links about how to start exploring this resource). _____JH _____________ Preserving public domain books Posted by Adam Mathes, Associate Product Manager The world's libraries are a tremendous source of knowledge, much of which has never been available online. One of our goals for Google Print is to change that, and today we've taken an exciting step toward meeting it: making available a number of public domain books that were never subject to copyright or whose copyright has expired. We can show every page because these books are in the public domain. (For books not in the public domain we only show small snippets of the work unless the publisher or copyright holder has given us permission to show more.) Our partner libraries –- the University of Michigan, Stanford, Harvard, the New York Public Library, and Oxford –- have preserved and nurtured these books through decades of wear and tear, and we're excited to play a part in ensuring that they, and the knowledge they contain, will be more accessible than ever for decades to come. Every page of these books is fully available online, so you can study, for instance, an illustrated version of Henry James' Daisy Miller (see page one, above) from Harvard's Henry James collection, or read how Private Joseph Taylor got his medal of honor in style, in The Seventh Regiment Rhode Island Volunteers in the Civil War, 1862-1865, from the University of Michigan. And since every word is searchable, as you are browsing The Wealth and Biography of the Wealthy Citizens of the City of New York -- from the New York Public Library's collection -- you can find that there were more grocers than bankers listed in 1855. From Stanford's collection, there are government documents detailing what the Fiftieth U.S. Congress spent money on in 1888, or the results of investigations into the fur-seal and other fisheries in Alaska. See for yourself what some of these libraries have -- using the date operator, and searching for the phrase [steam engine], you'll find different results in books no longer under copyright in the U.S. and books in the public domain internationally. And all that you can find today is still just a small taste -- call it part 1 -- of what you'll be able to find tomorrow, as Google Print helps users discover, search and access the world's rich literary history in ways that were previously impossible. - A Googler [Official Google Blog] 11:52:38 AM    COMMENT []

World Usability Day I'd not heard about World Usability Day until I spotted this item in Seblogging News. Certainly seems like a good idea to emphasize the usability of technology--perhaps for 365 days a year rather than just one day. ______JH World Usability Day. “Why doesn’t this work right? What am I supposed to do with this now?" World Usability Day, November 3, 2005, is for everyone who’s ever asked these questions. This Earth-Day-style event, focused on easy-to-use technology, currently involves plans in more than 70 cities in 30 countries. World Usability Day promotes the value of usability engineering, user-centered design,and every user's responsibility to ask for things that work better. The Usabililty Professionals' Association is doing that by encouraging, organizing, and sponsoring 36 hours of activities at the local level around the globe, all occurring on November 3, 2005... [World Usability Day Website] Have a look at the list of events around the world... there might be something interesting happening right around the corner... [Sebastian Fiedler] [Seblogging News] 11:46:52 AM    COMMENT []

More Reflections--from David Warlick and Jenny Levine These comments from David Warlick's 2 Cents Worth blog and Jenny Levine's The Shifted Librarian add another dimension to my earlier posting about Avram Miller's comment that computers are too hard to use.  Many people don't get enough access to computers to really learn how to use them, especially good computers with fast connections, and many don't get to use computers for more than consuming content rather than creating content. There are a number of digital divides. _____JH ___________ So Many Digital Divides to Bridge, So Little Time (and Resources and Money and Staff and....). Digital Divide Multiplied “One thing that did occur to me yesterday, that I think is important, is the nature of our digital divide. There are lots of digital divides, each with its own seeds for danger. What I was thinking about was the digital divide between tech-savvy students and students with little or no access to networked digital information outside the classroom — and to some extent, the digital divide between tech-savvy students and less-savvy teachers. The literacy divide of the 20th century distinguished between people who could functionally read and those who could not. Democracy was certainly at stake, but to no small degree, so was commerce. The literate could consume the messages of content producers. Today, the divide has multiplied, because people with contemporary (digital/21st century) literacy skills not only consume content, but they are the content. Being literate means being part of the network. The difference is not merely the individual who can read and individual who can not. It’s the difference between networked communities of power, and individuals who are cut off. This is a distinction too broad to ignore or postpone. Consider IM Speak, the abbreviations that students use in their instant message conversations. It is, in no small way, a new grammar, and these students invented it spontaneously in collaboration. The industrial literacy way would have been to assign a standards committee to establish a new grammar, and then spend years teaching it in our classrooms. We should be amazed and in awe of this accomplishment. It happened not because these kids were digitally literate, but because being digitally literate meant being part of a network — a community of power. Where is our community of power?” [2 Cents Worth] David Warlick posted these thoughts in regards to education, but I think they’re very relevant for librarians, too. After all, we’re supposed to be the safety net for the digital divide(s), right, whether it’s access or information literacy? I’m becoming more and more convinced that libraries will have to find a way to help fill the coming divide of content-creators (those who think of themselves as creators with the skills necessary to actually create) versus strictly consumers (the old model in which the person simply ingests everything as one-way media and doesn’t participate in these new networks and resources because they can’t or didn’t even know they could). On the one side, you have great models like Lane and Matthew, but on the other side you have millions of kids I can’t even point to because they’re left out of this community. One model to combat this: Bloomington Public Library. [The Shifted Librarian] 8:32:58 AM    COMMENT []