I envision a Firefox plug-in that can decipher the publisher and other
information, such as "bibliography and indexes" from a GBS record, and in a
separate screen, gives some advice as to whether this is a scholarly work or
not.
I've also played with crawling our catalog records in GBS to collect
"citation" information as a way to rank them, which would be the analog to
selection in the GBS world -
http://lisv06.colgate.edu/GBScites/default.aspx(I apologize to those
who have tried this link before my IT service opened
the firewall for off-campus).
There was a Firefox add-in that I looked at some years ago called "Site
Says", that allowed users to rank the website they were looking at. I looked
at reproducing something like that for librarians to rank websites, and then
those ratings would appear when they Googled in our library labs. that idea
ran up against concerns about the privacy of what users were searching, and
I never pursued it more. But what about something like that that only
allowed editing by users deemed "authoritative" (librarians, scholars, etc.)
and would give ratings of books in GBS?
On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 7:05 AM, Jan Szczepanski
<jan.szczepanski_at_ub.gu.se>wrote:
> Weinheimer Jim wrote:
>
>> Jan Szczepanski wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>> > What do you do?
>>> I will make a small part of these titles part of my catalog
>>> > How do you select from that?
>>> As I said. As usual, just the most important and just what my customers
>>> needs.
>>> > How do you "get control" of that?
>>> What do you mean by control?
>>> > Do you look at item #1 somehow, make a decision, go to #2, make a
>>> decision, then send the selected items on to cataloging?
>>> The same procedure as usual, yes.
>>> > It seems to me that everyone is swamped already, and in any
>>> case, *nobody* will wait for us to make a selection from 8,000,000
>>> items,
>>> catalog them and organize them in some way. Everybody (including me)
>>> will start
>>> in with Google Books, using whatever tools are there, and they will
>>> refuse to
>>> wait several lifetimes while we do our work.
>>> >
>>> It will be hard work. But the marc-records are there and the selection
>>> will not take much time if we work together.
>>> > So, while I agree that people want and need selection, the old methods
>>> for
>>> doing it break down completely in this new environment.
>>> I can't see that. I have collected and cataloged nearly 35.000 free
>>> e-books and collected more thant 10.000 free e-journals. With a couple
>>> of friends using the old methods we can make it. Maybe it will take a
>>> couple of years but we can.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> I don't know how long it took you to select the 35,000 e-books, but let's
>> just say that you were able to select those 35,000 books in one year. With
>> 8,000,000 books, that comes out to 228.5 years. If you could select 350,000
>> books in one year, it would only take 22.8 years. Selecting from 8,000,000
>> items in a couple of years means 4,000,000 items selected in each year, and
>> even with 100 selectors, each selector would have to deal with 40000, or
>> about 110 items per day, every day.
>>
>>
> We shouldn't forget that the collection is growing very fast as well. And
> what about the poor catalogers? Let's say that you can select at that rate
> and you would only select say, 15% of the total, but that comes out to
> 1,200,000 items. The catalogers will be jumping out the windows, screaming!
>
> Neither was Rome built in one day. Of course it will take time and of
> course people will use The Big Google Deal. We have an enormous task before
> us.I may be just one but how many are we together? In Europe there are more
> than 350.000 and I think there are some in US also. Shall we say 500.000?.
> How many minutes would it take for say 1.000.000 librarians?
>
>> In spite of all of that, I don't think our users will wait 228 years, 22
>> years or even 2 years. They will use it from the beginning, and then, why do
>> we expect users will stop using those tools for our "better" ones? I don't
>> see this as having the slightest chance of success.
>>
>>
> Of course it will take time and of course people will use The Big Google
> Deal but that will not stop us from building collections that will be
> valuable for our users. We can give them one correct answer to many
> questions while the machine will give them a choice of at least 144.000.
>
>> Much better would be to work with Google to construct useful queries into
>> the database, perhaps being able to tag certain items in specific ways.
>> Plus, the task of selection today is too vast to remain only in the hands of
>> librarians. Lots of other partners need to be involved including faculty,
>> and today, I think it can be done.
>>
>>
> Faculty? They are not paid for that! They are no experts! Of course they
> will build big private libraries but that is for their own use but I
> wouldn't say no if they donated these pdfs to the library.
>
>> Jim Weinheimer
>>
>>
>>
>
> --
> De åsikter som framförs här är mina personliga och inte ett uttryck för
> Göteborgs universitets-
> biblioteks hållning
>
>
> Opinions expressed here are my own and not
> those of the Gothenburg University Library
>
>
> Jan Szczepanski
> Förste bibliotekarie Goteborgs universitetsbibliotek Box 222
> SE 405 30 Goteborg, SWEDEN Tel: +46 31 7861164 Fax: +46 31 163797 E-mail:
> Jan.Szczepanski_at_ub.gu.se
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
--
Cindy Harper, Systems Librarian
Colgate University Libraries
charper_at_colgate.edu
315-228-7363
Received on Wed Sep 16 2009 - 08:57:12 EDT