LISZEN e Google Co-op

Durante una autocelebrativa rassegna dei siti che linkano il mio blog ;-), ho scoperto Library Zen & LISZEN, wiki creato da Garrett Hungerford da un lato per documentare  lo scenario della blogosfera internazionale di ambito LIS (più di 500 blog elencati, mutuati però da LISWIKI), e dall’altro per fornire un supporto logistico al blog Library Zen.

L’intreccio di media adoperati da Hungerford si completa con Library Blogs, un motore di ricerca personalizzato dedicato ai blog di/per bibliotecari sviluppato sulla base di Google Co-op (vedi il mio post Cooperation by Google). Naturalmente the Geek Lib ha subito colto il sapore innovativo dell’iniziativa ;-) e, anche se ormai ha all’attivo ben 3 motori personalizzati, ha deciso di implementarne uno dedicato ai social software nelle biblioteche: So:Lib (Social sOftware 4 LIBraries).

Lo trovate linkato nel menu di destra, sotto la nuova categoria TGL Search Engines. Per ora contiene solo pochi siti, ma crescerà… Annotazione sbrigativa di una funzionalità decisiva: a differenza degli altri motori offerti da provider come Rollyo o Swiki, Google Co-op offre Google Marker, un javascript da inserire nella barra del browser, che permette di aggiungere ed identificare on the fly nuovi siti da includere nell’elenco sul quale lancia le query il proprio motore di ricerca.

Collective intelligence in a (MIT) wiki

MIT Collective Intelligence Laboratory launches the first wiki project to publish a book. The book will be written and published by a community of users. Here are the goals from the wiki itself:

“This Handbook provides a survey of the field of collective intelligence, summarizing what is known, providing references to sources for further information, and suggesting possibilities for future research.

Unlike Wikipedia (an encyclopedia created by many people editing a wiki), this handbook is not structured as a “flat” collection of interlinked, but conceptually independent, short articles. Instead, this handbook is intended to provide a conceptual framework for the whole field of collective intelligence.

We hope that the top level of this framework will be written in a way that is understandable to a very broad general audience. At many points in this framework, however, we expect to have links to separate pages that elaborate on specific points or issues. Often, these separate pages will include specialized material and references for one or more of the many different fields related to collective intelligence. Even though some of this specialized material may be understandable only by specialists, it should be introduced so that other readers will at least be able to understand the basic issues involved.”

The table of contents (by now):

• Why study collective intelligence now?
• What is collective intelligence?
• Examples of collective intelligence
• What factors facilitate collective intelligence?
• What factors inhibit collective intelligence?
• Measuring collective intelligence and the factors that affect it
• Perspectives on collective intelligence
• Techniques for enhancing collective intelligence

Next-gen opac in the Melvyl Recommender Project

The Melvyl Recommender Project, which explored next-generation services for library catalogs, has reached its conclusion. This project was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Popular commercial services such as Google, e-Bay, Amazon, and Netflix have evolved quickly over the last decade to help people find what they want, developing information retrieval strategies such as usefully ranked results, spelling correction, and recommendations. Library catalogs, in contrast, have changed little and are not well equipped to meet changing needs and expectations. The Melvyl Recommender Project explored methods and feasibility of closing this gap.

Overall findings of the project include:

• The text-based discovery application, the eXtensible Text Framework (XTF) that was the backbone of the project’s system (known as “Relvyl”) proved capable of scaling to millions of records and hundreds of concurrent users
• Use of an index based single word spelling correction algorithm addressed 90 percent of misspelled single words
• Initial examination of faceted browsing and FRBR-like document groups indicated that each of these features could substantially improve the patron’s experience of working with large result sets
• User assessment confirmed that users prefer relevance ranked results over unranked results
• Two types of recommendation strategies were explored: circulation-based (“patrons who checked this out also checked out…”) and text-similarity (“More like this…”). User assessment was conducted against the first type and showed that users like getting recommendations, which are useful for performing academic tasks, and they can also serve a unique query expansion function
• Adjustments to keyword searching strategies, document scoring and the index-based spelling correction dictionary allowed for an effective combination of full-text and metadata only records into one system, in which neither type of record was privileged

The more you ask, the more I know!

Ancora un Cult impossibile da rinviare. Attraverso la ML Web4LIB, scopro il link all’ineffabile Ms Dewey: un’avvenente ragazza americana (west coast) in carne ed ossa, molto trendy, elegante ed assertiva che risponde alle domande poste dagli utenti in maniera non sempre pertinente ma con un sense of humor godibilissimo…

Per capire il personaggio basta collegarsi ed aspettare qualche minuto senza chiedere nulla: la vedrete indispettirsi e dirvi annoiata: Halloooo!! Type something here!!, indicando spazientita il box nel quale vanno inserite le domande, per concludere poi – a mo’ di incitazione? – The more you ask, the more I know (and soon I will rule the world!)

Da leggere il post su LibraryThing che svela un po’ di (sorprendenti) retroscena del personaggio e dei suoi sponsor…

Adopt a book for special occasions…

The British Library has the world’s greatest collection of books, manuscripts, newspapers, maps, music, pictures and stamps. However, many of these items are deteriorating from age and overuse. Right now it would take us over 100 years just to cope with present conservation needs and each year this need grows. We must do something now to prevent our literary heritage from vanishing before our eyes.

A novel gift idea
You can help the Library conserve the nation’s written treasures for future generations, by adopting a book for a loved one.

What can you do
For as little as £25, you can play an important role in the conservation of our national treasures. The books available for adoption have been recently conserved and your donation will go towards the conservation of more books in need. Adopting a book couldn’t be easier. Follow these three simple steps:

1. Step 1: Choose a title from our lists
   Full book list
   Categorised lists
2. Step 2: Decide on the level of donation
3. Step 3: Complete our simple and secure form

Adopt a book as a a gift
Adopt a Book is the perfect gift idea for those special occasions. From our extensive list, you can select a friend’s favourite book for their birthday, a romantic title to celebrate a wedding, or even a children’s book to mark the birth of a new baby.

MAB: estensione Firefox per l’acquisto dei libri online

Il grande Phauly mi segnala MAB, fantastico tool per la valutazione comparativa di prezzi e prodotti nell’acquisto di libri online. MAB è un’interfaccia scaricabile come estensione di Firefox (ma anche navigabile in remoto) nella quale ricercare (a scelta) titoli da database Amazon di diverse nazioni, visualizzare review, informazioni bibliografiche, costi, e quindi effettuare un confronto tra gli eventuali item selezionati.

Le keyfeatures di MAB :

• MAB can be either installed (Mozilla Extension) or run as a remote application (Zero Install)
• Show products description, reviews, images, tracks list, ISBN, sales rank and all useful information about the selected product
• Compare price between different Amazon store showing the results on the same list
• Get similar products
• Save results on hard disk (installed version only)
• Optimized for slow modem connection
• Crossed researches will be always precise because duplicated products are automatically skipped
• Direct link to Amazon for the selected product
• Search with Google for retrieving more info about the item selected
• Add selected product to shopping cart
• Export result lists in HTML or XML to easily import them in Access or Excel
• Use label to categorize your results

Insomma…per i bibliotecari e i lettori in genere un ottimo strumento per risparmiare tempo ed avere una panoramica completa dell’offerta commerciale…