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Pegasus Librarian Posts

What Are You Up To These Days?

Published by Iris on Monday, October 2nd, 2006

The Carleton College reference & instruction librarians are exploring information literacy instruction and student research needs, and we would love to hear about your experiences and perspectives on these topics. So we’ve created a short survey (only 8 questions) to try to get a sense of what’s being done in other libraries and of the current state of student research. The survey is anonymous unless you choose otherwise.

This is my first survey, so I’ll be crushed if we don’t get any responses (hint, hint).

[Update: Public librarians, you can respond, too, if you work with college-age patrons or do a lot of instruction. When you get to the question that asks what type of school you work at, just indicate “Other” and tell us that you’re at a public library.]

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Is "Pod" proprietary?

Published by Iris on Sunday, October 1st, 2006

Apple is mad at a company called Podcast Ready for using the term “pod” in connection with a “portable listening device” (citing the letter sent to Podcast Ready, as reported and displayed by Wired). And this is apparently not the first time in recent history that Apple has tried to lay claim to the word. Apple also claims to have applied for a word mark for “pod,” though this doesn’t appear in the USPTO’s searchable online database.

In all fairness, though, just because I can’t find it doesn’t mean they haven’t applied. What’s more, if they want to be taken seriously by the USPTO, they have to send these letters to people to prove that they’re defending their mark.

I also notice that several other corporations have applied (as recently as yesterday) for the rights to the word “pod.” Just search for “pod” or for the serial number 78964910 to see examples.

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Of Brand Loyalty and Brainwashing

Published by Iris on Sunday, October 1st, 2006

The Librarian in Black wrote a very compelling piece about Ask.com a couple of weeks ago (see, I am working through all the exciting stuff I’ve been meaning to read for weeks and weeks). The comments got to be a little battle-of-the-search-engines-ish, but the original post really got me thinking about my search engine use at home, at the library, and especially at the reference desk..

I’ve played around with Ask.com quite a bit, and for the most part I love it… lots. There are a couple of things I don’t like: the ads, for instance, and the knock-you-out-of-your-shoes red color. (Google has ads, but maybe my eyes have learned to jump down precisely to the first “real” result, and I’d be the first to admit that choosing a search engine based on accent color is less than ideal.) But for the most part I absolutely love Ask. Why? Because of the thought that goes into leading users from a broad search right down to what they actually were looking for via right-hand-margin menus for narrowing and expanding searches, and those nifty drop-down boxes for help clarifying ambiguous searches. Their driving/walking directions are also wonderful, mostly because it’s so easy to add a new point and re-order the points in a trip. But I digress. The point is that I hardly ever use this thing that I like so much, and I don’t think it has anything to do with brand loyalty.

I think it has something to do with being brainwashed by Google, and with using so many of my other Google products all the time. And as we all know, Google generally does a very good job. Not only that, but I feel like I “know” it better because so much has been surmised about its ranking algorithms, particularly PageRank. These things were taught to me in library school. Ask.com’s ranking behavior wasn’t mentioned in library school. Somehow knowing everything I do about all that I don’t know about Google’s ranking rules is somehow more comforting than not knowing what I don’t know about Ask’s ranking (called “ExpertRank” I just found out). I don’t think this is Ask’s fault. I haven’t done a whole lot of sleuthing, and the service is relatively new, but it’s also not as easy to come by information on ExpertRank as it is on PageRank.

And like one of the commenters said in response to the Librarian in Black’s post, Googling is such a convenient word, while “ask-dot-comming” will take a bit of getting used to.

Still, I’m resolved to make more informed and less habit-driven choices when I do my searching. Wish me luck. Battling brainwashing is kind of an up-hill process.

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Woohoo!

Published by Iris on Saturday, September 30th, 2006

By finessing the export from Furl a little bit I was finally able to get del.icio.us to recognize the bookmarks. Over the next few days I’ll describe them, share them, and tag them according to my new tag structure.

p.s. For anyone who wants to do this, you have to change the default name of the file to something like “furl.html” rather than the default of “blah_blah_blah.jsp.htm” and then change the default file type from “Web Page, Complete” to “Web Page, HTML only.” Then everything works just fine.

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