Monthly Archives: November 2005

Plugging in

A year into it, about 11% of browsing is now being done with Firefox; it’s been downloaded over 100 million times. Though not impervious to security problems, Firefox is a safer bet than wretched old IE. Besides, fear isn’t the only reason to pay attention to differences between browsers. Faith and serendipity still count: open-source …

November 29, 2005 – 6:51 pm | By Mark Phillipson | Posted in Libraryworld | Comments (2)

So we gather

Fresh outta Norway, here’s an intriguing marriage of wikis, folksonomy, and metadata harvesting: meet Collib, an experiment launched by a student at the University of Tromsø. The idea here: records are harvested from OAI-PMH-compliant repositories and brought into the wiki. Users – now end-users of these records – then ‘tag’ them in the wiki. Presumably, …

November 17, 2005 – 11:51 am | By Mark Phillipson | Posted in Libraryworld, Metawriting, Wikiwatch | Comments (0)

What an undergrad wants

The attempt to present services to students is a matter of much hand-wringing in academic libraries. “They want Google!” “They need databases!” “Convenience!” “Depth!” “Hopeless!” “Infinite!” & etc. In my informal tour of various library interfaces today, one presentation has really stood out: The University of Minnesota’s Undergraduate Virtual Library. Take a look: We have …

November 14, 2005 – 6:07 pm | By Mark Phillipson | Posted in Libraryworld | Comments (1)