I am a HUGE fan of our library system here in Birmingham. They are great and very rarely do I feel let down. I’m betting the folks in Boston feel the same way about their library system too. Especially with the launch of their Open Library Scan-on-Demand program.
Here are the directions from their site:
…if it’s at the Boston Public Library and hasn’t been scanned yet, there will be a “Scan This Book” button… …we’ll have a librarian go and get the book from the stacks, bring it to our scanning center, and have our team of scanners digitize it page-by-page. Within 3-5 days, you should receive an email follow-up with a link to the newly-digitized copy, complete with PDF, online flip book, full text (using OCR technology) and more, all thanks to your request!
How cool is that? You can tell these people have put a ton of thought into their library system. if you go the site, you can even see which titles are in the process of being scanned. Kudos Boston!
There is a new search engine being developed, Reference Extract. It’s a search engine that gives preference to results tagged by librarians. So where Google and others are trying to remove the human part of the search equation, the folks at Reference Extract are trying to harness the expertise of all the card carrying MLS people out there.
This trained “professional filter” is exactly why I will always watch the network news and read newspapers. There is just too much bunk out there that I want to know that some sort of professional has done the leg work and sorted it for me. But I’m not sure how successful Reference Extract will be…
Continue reading Librarian Powered Search →
This story is like an onion. I have no idea what kind of code, guidelines, rules, laws, etc. that librarians follow, but this story has to fall in every grey area out there. Are there librarians that say the patron who was arrested here, should not have been reported?
I’m all for privacy and protected speech, but surely these bastions of knowledge aren’t supposed to be havens for criminals?
Books, Publishing and Birmingham
