Do you know what they know about you?

“The average economically active individual in the developed world is on about 700 databases,” said Niamh Gallagher, a researcher at think tank Demos who has spent six months researching the spread of personal data.

Koha Evaluation – Conclusion

After reviewing the features and issues in the potential implementation of Koha, its adoption by the five libraries would be favourable. It presents all of the features they would require to maintain shared resources for all potential users across the country. It also meets six important criteria in accordance with Boss’ evaluation. The amalgam also has experienced IT staff to establish and maintain the catalogue – this, together with a number of dedicated volunteers to help migrate the records. This would take a fair amount of coordination between the library and IT staff of the five ASOs, but that would likely be the case regardless of the solution.

That said, a new system for such an important program should not be implemented without some amount of caution. It would be advisable to set up a pilot program in which the resources of two libraries be migrated into Koha for a period of three months, while the libraries maintain their in-house catalogues. This would allow staff to grow accustomed to the program (so they can educate their colleagues later), and technical difficulties to be worked through. If successful, libraries could be added incrementally until all five collections function successfully within the framework. At this point, they could discard their individual systems in favour of a fully functional and integrated library system using the Koha ILS.

Schoolyard taunts 2010

NO to the Microsoft Office format as an ISO standard

Sign the petition here.

Net Neutrality Petition

Sign the Canadian Net Neutrality petition. Keep the Net in Canada a single-tiered medium out of the control of the Telcoms.

It is our belief that the Internet is more than just the physical infrastructure over which it operates. It is a vibrant marketplace and an entirely new format for free expression, even a political landscape and a tool for free organization. Some ISPs in Canada however, are overstepping their role and cannot separate their participation in this network from their component ownership and commercial interests.

The machine is us/ing us

We watched this video in 1210. It’s Fascinating and powerful (and fun) little clip on the Internet as a democratic medium.

“Do libraries matter?” Review (Conclusion)

Chad and Miller (and Talis) present a broad vision of the future of libraries that is as exciting as it is unsupported.  Indeed, compelling ideas are presented with very little supporting evidence, relying, instead, on readers’ intuition or desire to find the proof in alternate sources.  This tendency towards vagueness continues with powerful sounding ideas that run into problems on further reflection until one begins to suspect that the lack of substance is due to commercial motives.  This weakens the authors’ aims significantly and obscures the credible vision and solutions they do present.  This paper gives no reason for library management teams to immediately access Talis’ services, but it does give a few hints as to where library management might begin to consider orienting themselves.

Bad week for year 1 FIS students

Product placement

Internet literacy kills spam dead

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg have come up with an innovative way to weed out comment spam while helping to preserve old books and manuscripts. Using an application they developed called reCAPTCHA, webmasters (and blog owners) can install a small program on their sites that commenters must fill out in order to leave a comment. Potential commenters are presented with two, almost illegible words that they must decipher in order to post their comment.

This is much like the spam guard that Blogger offers where commenters must correctly type distorted letters to leave a comment. Spam comments from spambots cannot read the distortions and so comment spam cannot be posted. Humans can decipher these figures, and also the distorted manuscript items, and are permitted to leave their comments.

The interesting part is where the words are from and what they do. Many libraries and archives opt to digitize their older books and manuscripts in order to preserve them. Some scan them as image files, while others attempt go a step further and scan these images using text recognition programs. Unfortunately these programs are unable to recognize words distorted by older printing practices or age. That’s where reCAPTCHA comes in.

The distorted words are placed in the comment spam guard in order to be deciphered. As users type them in the information is plugged into the documents they came from. Little by little the files are completed and older items are ready for public use. This a very imaginative and practical use of technology in the archive and library setting.

References
BBC – “Spam weapon helps preserve books”
reCAPTCHA
Carnegie Mellon University
Images from BBC – “Spam weapon helps preserve books”