LISNews Librarian And Information Science News

New York Times: MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Ben Zimmer, executive producer of a Web site and software package called the Visual Thesaurus, was seeking the earliest use of the phrase “you’re not the boss of me.” (ed-my husband and I were just discussing use of that particular phrase with our son yesterday). Using a newspaper database, he had found a reference from 1953.

But while using Google’s book search recently, he found the phrase in a short story contained in “The Church,” a periodical published in 1883 and scanned from the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

Google’s book search “allows you to look for things that would be very difficult to search for otherwise,” said Zimmer. But ...do we really care when the phrase was first used? Don't most little children think of the phrase on their own anyway?

So then; should Google be be the only worthwhile place to search for content in old books? If not Google, then who? Post your opinion if you'd like.

My thanks to Walt for editorial assistance.

My New Year's resolution progress. Most people don't keep them, but I'm determined. Suggestions welcomed.
http://collectingmythoughts.blogspot.com/2009/01/floor-lamp-saga-regular-readers-know.html

Could book lovers finally be willing to switch from paper to pixels? Some could...but others, to quote the Times, "maintain an almost fetishistic devotion to the physical book".

According to the New York Times "the ebook is starting to take hold". Many Kindle buyers appear to be outside the usual gadget-hound demographic. Almost as many women as men are buying it, Mr. Hildick-Smith, president of the Codex group said, and the device is most popular among 55- to 64-year-olds. Codex is a book market research company.

Nobody knows how much consumer habits will shift. But the technology may have more appeal for particular kinds of people, like those who are the heaviest readers.

Perhaps the most overlooked boost to e-books this year — and a challenge to some of the standard thinking about them — came from Apple’s do-it-all gadget, the iPhone. Several e-book-reading programs have been created for the device, and at least two of them, Stanza from LexCycle and the eReader from Fictionwise, have been downloaded more than 600,000 times. Another company, Scroll Motion, announced this week that it would begin selling e-books for the iPhone from major publishers like Simon & Schuster, Random House and Penguin.

All of these companies say they are now tailoring their software for other kinds of smartphones, including BlackBerrys.

The American Booksellers Association is encouraging its membership to increase sales by going live on a new Drupal platform (à la LISNews).

The three stores with live beta-test Drupal sites are Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena, California; Literary Bookpost in Salisbury, North Carolina; and RiverRead Books in Binghamton, New York.

A demo store is set up at Cascade o' Books--"not a real bookstore"--where "booksellers can see how easy it is to change the color scheme and layout by choosing a theme using the drop down menu on the homepage," said Ricky Leung, director of ABA's E-Commerce Solution. Anyone can test out themes and the shopping cart.

First Brain Age and now ebooks. The Nintendo DS expands beyond games according to this London timesonline article:

"Nintendo, the Japanese video games company that brought us Donkey Kong and Mario the Plumber, is to announce a deal with the publisher HarperCollins today to make literary classics available to read on its DS portable games consoles.

The 100 Classic Book Collection ranges from Shakespeare and Dickens to Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters. It will cost about £20 and will be available initially only in Britain. "

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales joins journalist Christopher Lydon to address the direction of web 2.0 and how Objectivist philosophy guides his vision.Across the globe we are building, editing, and contributing to a growing body of knowledge and tools at everyone's fingertips. Volunteers in leaderless organizations contribute to online initiatives and articles. Software developers spend their free time collaborating with complete strangers.Amazingly, these efforts are creating products of extraordinary quality, sometimes better than that of large for-profit organizations.Why do we do it? Why does it work?

Video at FORA.tv

New technology promises to make computer displays more flexible. Could this lead to a better electronic newspaper?

Full story in the NYT

Silicon Alley Insider reports that Google is getting set to scale back. Following up on a report by The Wall Street Journal, Silicon Alley Insider detailed some areas that Google might cut back on first. As they noted:

Shutting off services. Search sandbox SearchMash, virtual world Lively and Google Page Creator will soon be gone. Google Audio Indexing and Google Notebook could follow.

For those of you interested in the metadata production and use in web technologies:

Creative Commons will hold its second technology summit on December 12, 2008, in Cambridge, MA. The summit will focus on the application of Semantic Web technologies to Creative Commons', Science Commons' and ccLearn's missions. Topics covered will include ccREL/RDFa, the Neurocommons project and an update on the Universal Education Search (metadata-enhanced search) project.

Full program information and registration available here

"The Technology Summits are about connecting the larger developer and technical community that’s sprung up around Creative Commons licenses and technology, so we want to provide a venue where people doing interesting work can share it." - Nathan Yergler, CTO

In this 1936 Modern Mechanix article, a fantasy about shrinking the Library of Congress to fit "in a few small filing cabinets" on microfiche/film. Once this is done, copies of the great library will be distributed to worthy institutions all over the world.

"Each volume so reduced in size is housed in a sealed cartridge not much larger than a 12-gauge shotgun shell. When desired for reading, it is inserted in a small cabinet, the light turned on, and the copy is projected upon a screen, enlarged to comfortable reading size and unaccompanied by glare."