Skip to content

Month: July 2007

Wikipedia Could Help Search Engines Understand Names?

Published by Iris on Monday, July 9th, 2007

The Search Engine Watch Blog just pointed me to a post that pointed me to a paper entitled “Large-Scale Named Entity Disambituation Based on Wikipedia Data” (PDF) by Silviu Cucerzan of Microsoft. Most of the paper is technical and algorithmic greek to me, but this one sentence makes perfect sense to me (or rather, the first half of the sentence makes sense to me and the rest should have been its own sentence).

The application on a large scale of such an entity extraction and disambiguation system could result in a move from the current space of words to a space of concepts, which enables several paradigm shifts and opens new research directions, which we are currently investigating, from entity-based indexing and searching of document collections to personalized views of the Web through entity-based user bookmarks. (page 9, my emphasis)

One of the main gripes about web search has been that it can’t benefit (at least not very well) from human knowledge of the relationships between words. It matches letters in a row while directories gather pages based on concepts. But then, directories got out of hand and people couldn’t keep up with them, and then they all turned into search engines no matter how much they still tried to look like directories… Well, if this thing gets off the ground, we could have the best of both worlds. We could have the scale of search with the power of directories.

Another source of this conceptual linking that’s so powerful and so difficult to teach to computers may be the Google Book Project. Think of all of those indexes to all of those books. Surely we could harness the power of generations of indexers to map concepts. How hard could it be? ;)

3 Comments

Keeping Up, Progress, Change, and All That Jazz

Published by Iris on Friday, July 6th, 2007

While I was on vacation last week, I marked a bunch of posts to “keep new” until I’d have time to go back and read them in a way that would do them justice, and this week I’ve been slowly chipping away at my marked list. I’m not done yet, but so far I’ve been really impressed by the amount and quality of the writing that happened that week. Apparently librarians think and write well on the last week of June.

Anyway, one of the posts that I marked to read later was Mark’s post about keeping up. “Why does keeping up always mean looking forward?” he asks. Why can’t it also include looking back to learn from our past.

I’ve always been a big fan of looking back and figuring out why people think/thought the way they do. As a new professional, a large part of my “keeping up” time is spent “catching up” so that I can understand the world in which I’m making my home. In fact, it’s such a big part of my subconscious work (and I think also that of the other new professionals I work with), that I’d argue it’s lack of face time in the library literature does not, in fact, mirror the reality of professional activity. Instead, I think catching up happens in the background, and I think it stays there for a couple of reasons.

First, for those of us that aren’t new, a lot of this stuff is old news, so the newbies among us tend to catch up in private so we don’t bore our colleagues with information we think they already know. (Notice, they may not actually already know, or remember, but who wants to run the risk?) This is precisely the reason I was shy about an essay I wrote responding to a two-year-old article on blogging. It was new to me and I had a strong reaction to it, so I blogged my reaction, but I was pretty sure everyone would be bored by it or annoyed with me for wasting their time with old news.

Both keeping and catching up both take time, too, so prioritizing becomes an issue.

And then there’s the less-functional reason for keeping history in the background: it’s uncool, unshiny. People don’t get speaking invitations for explicating extinct library theories.

I’m not saying that these are good reasons for not emphasizing the library lit of yore. They’re just reasons. And I’m not quite sure why I felt the need to come up with those reasons, but I guess I was intrigued by Mark’s observation and wondered what might explain it. I’m often discouraged with how little “keeping up” I can do in a week/month/year, and I’m naturally disinclined to like change (I know, I know… I deserve 40 lashes with a wet noodle for saying that, please wait while I administer them and explain that I’m not against progress, just against change…) so conversations about these ideas pique my interest.

2 Comments

Licensing Permissions from the CCC

Published by Iris on Friday, July 6th, 2007

For the two or three of you that haven’t heard, the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) has decided to license permissions to copyrighted material (note that on the left-hand side of that screen you can read an overview of the license itself in PDF). They say that this will be convenient (well yeah, you’ve already paid) and that you’ll gain “confidence” and “peace of mind.”

As much as I hate to say it, I think they’ll gain a lot of customers on those last two points alone. Nothing makes people squirm as much as copyright permissions. Everyone always doubts their fair use analysis and forgets that “multiple copies for classroom use” is written right into the fair use clause of the law.

But why might you not want to sign up for that license? James Boyle of the Financial Times has a great piece on that, as does Peter Hirtle of the LibraryLaw blog (his analysis is here). In short, here are the key issues as I see them (both of which figure large in Hirtle’s post):

  • Paying for permission when you don’t have to erodes fair use arguments in the future by increasing the market value of the work.
  • Permissions come in many shapes and sizes. What is the use of licensing permissions from the CCC when we already pay licensing fees from databases, for example?

I would hate to see my library go this route, especially since I imaging that the CCC fee structures are based on a fairly -er- “optimistic” interpretation of fair use. And yet I feel sympathy for libraries that either don’t have the staff to go through the permissions process, or don’t have the training to determine fair use on their own.

At the same time, just writing that last sentence makes me feel like I’ve just said, “It’s just too bad some kids don’t have the wherewithal to learn to read…” I recognize that licensing will be an attractive option, but I think it’ll cripple us.

Comments closed

Thinking about the Future of the Catalog: MnObe Moving Forward

Published by Iris on Friday, July 6th, 2007

For the last year and a half, the five liberal arts colleges known as MnObe (pronounced min-OH-bee and derived from Minnesota Oberlin Group Libraries) have been thinking collectively about our library catalogs. We started at very different points (ranging from “what we’ve got works pretty well” to “what is this thing we’re using and where are the punch-card computers it seems to match?”). Then Roy Tennant came and talked to us and everybody got pretty excited about the idea of a next generation catalog. And I was pretty sure we’d stay that way… excited about the idea of change.

But then we held a “debate” between five teams of librarians each proposing an alternative to our current systems. Our biggest surprise that day was the amount of agreement between groups and audience members about a) the need for change and b) the types of things that need to change. (Here’s a quick list of features and functions we liked, none of which are surprising.) At the conclusion of that meeting, the directors of our libraries charged a group of volunteers to actually map out our movement forward.

Well, a couple of weeks ago, this group of volunteers met, thought, discussed, and drafted a report. You can read it on the wiki if you want, or the PDF (which is prettier). It’s definitely a first step, but the group felt that we needed to clear up the first step first. You’ll notice, though, that we clearly and explicitly state that we want some kind of drastic change in the near future, and we map out a few key actions that will start us moving toward that change.

Now it’s been delivered to the MnObe directors. We’ll see what happens. I’m having to work a lot harder to keep from getting too excited now that we’ve actually formally recommended action.

3 Comments