jastirn: RT @edsu help uncouple #code4lib from needing (well meaning) corporate sponsors http://bit.ly/i4CktF thanks @ksclarke and @dchud

edsu: help uncouple #code4lib from needing (well meaning) corporate sponsors http://bit.ly/i4CktF thanks @ksclarke and @dchud

Considering the huge kerfuffle on the JISC-REPOSITORIES mailing list over copyright and whether would-be self-archivers need to respect when publishers own it (hint: yes), I thought the video following of librarians gettin’ down on copyright seemed apropos: The single best response to the kerfuffle, by the way, was Bill Hubbard’s. Ignore the rest of it; [...]

I haven’t been checking each incremental release so it’s possible this landed earlier, but the current version of Apple Pages has improved the semantics of their EPUB export.

The original template now produces <p> elements instead of <div>s, an important update:

<h1 class="s7">Introduction to ePub</h1> <p class="s6">This document will show you how to use paragraph styles to create a publication that looks great and is easy to navigate in ePub readers like iBooks... </p>

Presumably this affects the degree to which Pages-outputted styles are visible in iBooks (as user preferences may override), but it’s great to see more semantically-correct output. This corrects my earlier reservation about using Pages for EPUB creation.

Mads Villadsen and I are fortunate enough to be attending code4lib 2011 in early February. Last year our plane was stopped by a snow drift. This year we’re going full paranoia with a planned US-arrival 2 days before the main conference starts.

code4lib 2009 was the best library-oriented conference we’ve been to, so our hopes for 2011 are high. The program certainly looks interesting and one common theme – merging of search results from different sources – is perfectly timed to our current project on merging of Summa and Summon search results. Hopefully we’ll have enough experience by then to do a lightning talk about it.

We will also be attending the pre-conference on Solr and since hierarchical-like faceting seems to be a fairly hot topic this year, we plan to hack together a Solr-based proof of concept of our take on the problem before the conference.

 

Such is the judgment of one scholarly habitue of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, according to Daniel Mendelsohn, author of a profile of the Vat, in the January 3rd issue of the New Yorker.  The social and technological history of one of the world's great repositories of print, replete with scandal, human foibles, Curial arbitrariness, and unexpected vision.  All in seven pages. Don't miss it.

-----

The Savannah Cathedral, from my mother's bedroom window.

I am honored to be one of the speakers at "WikiLeaks & the Archives & Records Profession," a panel discussion organized by the Archivists Roundtable of Metropolitan New York and the Metropolitan New York City Chapter of ARMA International. The panel will be on January 25, 2011 at the Center for Jewish History. From the announcement:

Do WikiLeaks and its complex, attendant issues shift our conceptualization of our roles as information professionals?  How might WikiLeaks change the public's views on usage of and access to archives and records?  To what extent is the most recent release of diplomatic cables a product of information mismanagement?

Addressing these and many more questions, our confirmed speakers include Trudy Peterson, former Acting Archivist of the United States (1993-1995) and current representative for the Society of American Archivists on the Department of State's Historical Advisory Committee; Fred Pulzello, Solutions Architect in the Information Governance practice at MicroLink LLC; Jim Fortmuller, Manager of Systems Security at Kelley Drye & Warren LLP in Washington, DC; Mark Matienzo, Digital Archivist in Manuscripts and Archives at Yale University Library; and Derek Bambauer, Associate Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School.  The panel will be moderated by Peter Wosh, Director of the Archives/Public History Program and Clinical Associate Professor of History at New York University.

Advance registration is required by January 17 for security reasons and because space is limited. Admission for ART and ARMA members is $5.  Admission for all others is $10. For more information, including registration details, please see the announcement on the ART site.

Nicole Henning suggests that academic libraries and scholarly presses work together to create the ultimate mobile app for scholarly ereading. I think about the requirements a bit differently, in terms of the functional requirements.

The main functions are obtaining materials, reading them, organizing them, keeping them, and sharing them.

For obtaining materials, the key new requirement is to simplify authentication: handle campus authentication systems and personal subscriptions. Multiple credentialed identities should be supported. A secondary consideration is that RSS feeds (e.g. for journal tables of contents) should be supported.

For reading materials, the key requirement is to support multiple formats in the same application. I don’t know of a web app or mobile app that supports PDF, EPUB, and HTML. Reading interfaces matter: look to Stanza and Ibis Reader for best-in-class examples.

For organizing materials, the key is synergy between the user’s data and existing data. Allow tags, folders, and multiple collections. But also leverage existing publisher and library metadata. Keep it flexible, allowing the user to modify metadata for personal use (e.g. for consistency or personal terminology) and to optionally submit corrections.

For keeping materials, import, export, and sync content from the user’s chosen cloud-based storage and WebDAV servers. No other device (e.g. laptop or desktop) should be needed.

For sharing materials, support lightweight micropublishing on social networks and email; networks should be extensible and user-customizable. Sync to or integrate with citation managers and social cataloging/reading list management systems.

Regardless of the ultimate system, I’d stress that device independence is important, meaning that an HTML5 website would probably the place to start: look to Ibis Reader as a model.

From time to time, I hear an argument that goes something like this: "Our users won't deal with angle brackets, therefore we can't use TEI, or if we do, it has to be hidden from them." It's an assumption I've encountered again quite recently. Since it's such a common trope, I wonder how true it is. Of course, I can't speak for anyone's user communities other than the ones I serve. And mine are perhaps not the usual run of scholars. But they haven't tended to throw their hands up in horror at the sight of angle brackets. Indeed, some of them have become quite expert at editing documents in TEI.
The problems with TEI (and XML in general) are manifold, but its shortcomings often center around its not being expressive *enough* to easily deal with certain classes of problem. And the TEI evolves. You can get involved and change it for the better.
The IWNNETAAB objection seems grounded in fear. But fear of what? As I mentioned at the start, IWNNETAAB isn't usually an expression of personal revulsion, it's not just Luddism, it's IWNNETAAB by proxy: my users/clients/stakeholders won't stand for it. Or they'll mess it up. TEI is hard. It has *hundreds* of elements. How can they/why should they learn something so complex just to be able to digitize texts?! What we want to do is simple, can't we have something simple that produces TEI in the end?
The problem with simplified editing interfaces is easy to understand: they are simple. Complexities have been removed, and along with them, the ability to express complex things. To put it another way, if you aren't dealing with the tags, you're dealing with something in which a bunch of decisions have already been made for you. My argument in the recent discussion was that in fact, these decisions tend to be extremely project-specific. You can't set it up once and expect it to work again in different circumstances; you (or someone) will have to do it over and over again. So, for a single project, the cost/benefit equation may look like it leans toward the "simpler" option. But taken over many projects, you're looking either at learning a reasonably complex thing or building a long series of tools that each produce a different version of that thing. Seen in this light, I think learning TEI makes a lot of sense. On the learning TEI side, the costs go down over time, on the GUI interface side, they keep going up.
Moreover, knowing TEI means that you (or your stakeholders) aren't shackled to an interface that imposes decisions that were made before you ever looked at the text you're encoding, instead, you are actually engaging with the text, in the form in which it will be used. You're seeing behind the curtain. I can't really fathom why that would be a bad thing.
(Inspiration for the title comes from a book my 2-year-old is very fond of)

Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: short stories, prose, and diary excerpts Sylvia Plath; HarperPerennial 2008 WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder

Short review: A few decent stories and essays, but really only for the Plath aficionado or completist.

I became interested in this book of stories, essays and excerpts from Plath’s notebooks, due to the several references I came across to the title story while looking into Plath’s background as an aid in understanding her poetry for my Madwomen Poets class last fall.

I got a copy via ILL but it was in such bad shape that the book was received rubber banded together.  Also, the pages were highly yellowed and brittle and my allergies were not excited about even attempting reading the primary story for which I ordered it.  Noticing it was quite affordable brand new from amazon I added it to my wish list and my son got it for me for Christmas.  I read it in December 2010.

My first issue with this collection comes from its ordering.  In the Introduction, Ted Hughes (her husband) writes “All items have approximate dates of composition and are roughly in reverse chronological order, insofar as that is possible” (7) [see the table of contents below].  No justification or reasoning is presented for this decision at all.  What is it with this kind of arrangement?  We have several works of collected poems by assorted single authors that are organized like this.  It seems to me that if one wants to watch the development of an author as a writer then reverse chronological order is assbackwards.  This upset me, so I resolved to read this collection in reverse order.

Thus I began with “P.S. Insights, Interviews & More …” which contains a very short biography of Plath, “Poet’s Prose” an essay by Margaret Atwood, and some marketing materials for Plath’s other works.

Atwood ends her essay with the following:

“The stories are arranged chronologically but in reverse order. This creates an archeological effect: the reader is made to dig backward in time, downward into remarkable mind, so that the last, earliest story, “Among the Bumble-bees” (a wistful story about a little girl’s worship of her father who dies mysteriously), emerges like the final gold-crowned skeleton at the bottom of the tomb—the king all those others were killed to protect. Which it is” ([11]).

While I found Atwood’s explanation overly artsy, I did decide to accept it as an explanation and read the book normally.

A perhaps larger issue is that many of these had been rejected by Plath herself (7).  Another is that, while “her reputation rests on the poems of her last six months,” most of the contents of this collection predates the poems of The Colossus which was completed 3 years before her death (9).  The only parts contemporary with Ariel are “three brief journalistic pieces, “America! America!” “Snow Blitz,” and “Ocean 1212-W”" (9).

Some of these stories serve as the material for several of the Ariel poems.  “The Bee Meeting,” “Berck Plage,” “Among the Narcissi,” and “The Moon and the Yew Tree” are all presaged or mentioned.

Seeing as I don’t have a lot to say about most of these, I think I’ll just add my comments behind each entry in the TOC and maybe a few slightly longer excerpts at the end.

Table of Contents

• Introduction by Ted Hughes
• Mothers (Story, 1962) – highly autobiographical.
• Ocean 1212-W (Essay, 1962) – her grandmother’s phone number, autobiographical.
• Snow blitz (Essay, 1963) – Jeebus! The last few months of her life; some of her last written words. The ending is terrifyingly ironic considering how she killed herself.
• The Smiths: George, Marjorie (50), Claire (16) (From Notebooks, Spring 1962)
• America! America! (Essay, 1963)
• Charlie Pollard and the beekeepers (From Notebooks, June 1962) – Bees are one of Sylvia’s major thematic images.
• A comparison (Essay, 1962) – compares novels to poems; mentions the yew tree of “The Moon and the Yew Tree.”
• “Context” (Essay, 1962) – about the context for her poems. Mentions the yew tree again, and other poems by image.
• Rose and Percy B. (From Notebooks, 1961/62)
• Day of success (Story, 1960)
• The fifteen-dollar eagle (Story, November 1959)
• The fifty-ninth bear (Story, September 1959)
• The daughters of Blossom Street (Story, 1959)
• Sweetie pie and the gutter men (Story, May 1959)
• The shadow (Story, January 1959)
• Johnny Panic and the Bible of dreams (Story, December 1958) – the poetic element of dreams; electroshock.
• Above the oxbow (Story, 1958)
• Stone boy with dolphin (Story, 1957/58) – the Cambridge party where Sylvia meets and bites Ted; brushing snow from the stone boy; “And asteroids innumerable, a buzz of gilded bees” (189) [drunk].
• All the dead dears (Story, 1957/58)
• The wishing box (Story, 1956)
• The day Mr. Prescott died (Story, 1956)
• Widow Mangada (From Notebooks, Summer 1956)
• That widow Mangada (Story, Autumn 1956) – this was a bit redundant after reading the previous notebook entries on which it is based, although I preferred the ending in the story.
• Cambridge notes (From Notebooks, February 1956) – “With masks down, I walk, talking to the moon, to the neutral impersonal force that does not hear, but merely accepts my being” (261). The moon is a major image, especially in her later poetry. The moon is declared neutral here, and the surrounding writing supports that view, but her view will shift more to the negative in her later poetry.
• Tongues of stone (Story, 1955)
• Superman and Paula Brown’s new snowsuit (Story, 1955)
• In the mountains (Story, 1954)
• Initiation (Story, July 1952)
• Sunday at the Mintons’ (Story, Spring 1952)
• Among the bumblebees (Story, Early 1950s)
• P.S. Insights, Interviews & More …

Taken out of context, I love the quote about the moon from “Cambridge notes.” “With masks down,” defenseless, naked, exposed, one is implacably accepted, but not judged, by an all-seeing, but non-hearing, moon that “merely accepts my being.”

Several of these pieces were quite good and a few of the stories have twisted, yet delightful (good and bad) endings. How well any of them stand up outside of the context of Sylvia’s internally tortured life, though, is hard to say.

Springer’s LaTeX search service (example results) allow searching for LaTeX strings or finding the LaTeX equations in an article. Since LaTeX is used to markup equations in many scientific publications this could be an interesting way to find related work or view an equation-centric summary of a paper.

You can provide a LaTeX string, and Springer says that besides exact matches they can return similar LaTeX strings:

Or, you can search by DOI or title to get all the equations in a given publication:

Under each equation in the search results you can click “show LaTeX code”:

Right now it just searches Springer’s publications; Springer would like to add open access databases and preprint servers. Coverage even in Springer journals seems spotty: I couldn’t find two particular discrete math articles papers, so I’ve written Springer for clarification. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to get from SpringerLink to this LaTeX search yet: it’s a shame, because “show all equations in this article” would be useful, even with the proviso that only LaTeX equations were shown.

A nice touch is their sandbox where you can test LaTeX code, with a LaTeX dictionary conveniently below.

via Eric Hellman

Wikipedia is turning ten years old on January 15th, and celebratory gatherings are going around the globe, including one in my area (Washington DC) on January 22 at the National Archives.

Like you, I’ve been an accidental user of Wikipedia when searching for a topic to learn more about. Over time I have started actively searching on Wikipedia for things, linking to Wikipedia articles (in email and HTML), and even saying thank you with a small donation. I’ve only attended one of the local DC chapter events before, but am definitely planning on attending the DC event to meet other people who value Wikipedia as a resource.

Perhaps also like you (since you are reading this blog) I also work in a cultural heritage organization, well a library to be precise. I wasn’t able to attend the recent Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums & Wikimedia conference at the British Museum last November. But I have been listening to the audio that they kindly provided recently with great interest. If you are interested in the role that cultural heritage organizations can play on Wikipedia, and the Web in general definitely check it out if you’ve got a long commute (or time to kill) and a audio device of some kind. There are lots of museums, galleries, archives and libraries in the DC area, so I’m hoping that this event on the 22nd will be an opportunity for folks to get together across institutional lines to talk about how they are engaging with the Wikipedia community. Who knows maybe it could be a precursor to a similar to GLAM-WIKI here in DC?

I’m planning on doing a lightning talk about this side/experimental project I’ve been working on called linkypedia. The basic idea is to give web publishers (and specifically cultural heritage organizations like libraries, museums, archives, etc) an idea of how their content is being used as primary resource material on Wikipedia. The goal is to validate the work that these institutions have done to make this content available, and for them to do more…and also to engage with the Wikipedia community. Version 1 of the (opensource) software is running at here on my minimal Linode VPS. But I’m also working on version 2, which will hopefully scale a bit better, and provide a more global (not just English Wikipedia) and real time picture of how your stuff is being used on Wikipedia. Part of the challenge is figuring out how to pay for it, given the volume of external links in the major language Wikipedias. I’m hoping a tip-jar and thoughtful use of Amazon EC2 will be enough.

If you are interested in learning more about the event on the 22nd check out Katie Filbert’s recent post to the Sunlight Labs Discussion List, and the (ahem) wiki page to sign up! Thanks Mark for letting me know about the birthday celebration last week in IRC. Sometimes with all the discussion lists, tweets, and blogs things like this slip by without me noticing them. So a direct prod in IRC helps :-)

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The turn of the year brings commentary on the past 12 months and thoughts on the future. This edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads looks at the relationship between libraries and electronic books with an offer by Sony to explain e-reader hardware to libraries and an opinion piece that libraries need to get their act together on the adoption of e-books. Then there is a look forward at possible trends for the new year; I try to pick out the ones that I think will have an impact on libraries. One trend that does seem to be emerging is the migration of libraries from proprietary software to open source software for their integrated library systems. Lastly, we’ll wrap up with a look at Public Domain Day.

If you find these threads interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my FriendFeed stream (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

The Changing Role of Libraries in the Digital Age

At Sony, we believe there is a place for public/private partnerships. That’s why we’re so excited to be working closely with libraries and librarians across the country as part of our Reader Library Program. While there are several different views on the future of libraries, we believe that digital reading will be at the core of libraries, regardless of how they grow and evolve.

Sony’s Reader Library Program is designed to help libraries overcome the challenges of adopting eBooks and educating their constituencies on how to borrow, read and make the most of digital reading content. eBooks, like traditional paper books, will play an important role in our civic and cultural life, but only if they are made broadly available and people understand how to access and use them.

Steve Haber, President of Sony’s Digital Reading Business, publishes this piece in the Huffington Post about the Sony Reader Library Program. The program offers a 2-3 hour training session for library staff, donation of four models of Sony e-reader devices for library staff use, promotional materials for patrons and “bi-annual update sessions designed to keep libraries and their staff current with the latest developments in digital reading content, format and devices.” Although I found out about this via a tweet from the ALA PLA account, I don’t see anything in the program description that limits it to public libraries. The only requirement is that the “library must have eBooks available through a third party such as www.overdrive.com in order to be considered for our program.”

I also can’t help but be a bit cynical that “The Changing Role of Libraries in the Digital Age” is just a front to promote Sony products. But if it gets more libraries thinking about the role of libraries in a digital age, then it seems to be, on balance, a positive thing.

2010 Summary: Libraries are Still Screwed

In mathematics, catastrophe theory is the study of nonlinear dynamical systems which exhibit points or curves of singularity. The behavior of systems near such points is characterized by sudden and dramatic changes resulting from even very small perturbations. The simplest sort of catastrophe is the fold catastrophe.

When a fold catastrophe occurs, a system that was formerly characterized by a single stable point evolves to a system with no stability. The point where stability disappears is known as the tipping point.

One of my goals for this past year was to raise awareness of the tipping point for libraries that will accompany the obsolescence of the print book.

Eric Hellman, serial entrepreneur with an altruistic bent to make libraries stay relevant, create this end-of-2010 summary of the library/ebook tensions. The title comes from a presentation (20 minute recording part 1, part 2) by Eli Neiburger at the Library Journal / School Library Journal eBook Summit who bluntly states, “Libraries are Screwed.”

Does the libraries’ historic reliance on the physical codex doom us to obsolescence? (The “library memorial”, as Eli puts it early in his presentation.) Is the time, as Eric suggests at the end of his post, “for raising awareness about the catastrophic future of libraries” over, to be replaced by “build[ing] things that change the system dynamics”?

100 Things to Watch in 2011

JWT: 100 Things to Watch in 2011

As part of our annual forecast, JWT presents 100 Things to Watch in 2011. Some of the items on our list reflect broader shifts we’ve been following:

• Mobile as the Everything Hub: More consumers and brands are embracing a trend we outlined two years ago, one that will manifest in a multitude of ways next year—from mobile memes to “moblogging” to waning interest in point-and-shoot cameras.
• The evolution of media as content becomes digitized over various platforms: Books will take new forms, entertainment will go transmedia, and journalists will get more entrepreneurial.

Some reflect counter-trends to broad shifts in consumer behavior:

• To balance out our increasing immersion in the digital world, people will embrace face-to-face gatherings and digital downtime, and come to fetishize physical objects once considered humdrum.
• The trend toward Radical Transparency will see a growing backlash (Ignorance Is Bliss).

As always, new technology is a theme.

• We’ll see smart infrastructure ramping up, tablets for tots as this platform gets widely adopted and some truly futuristic-seeming developments (3D printing, virtual mirrors, electronic profiling).

While some of our Things to Watch may not yet reflect a broader trend, we believe they eventually will ladder up to one. Retail as the Third Space, one of our Things to Watch from last year, and De-Teching, one of our Things to Watch for 2008, both gained momentum since we first spotlighted them. This year we included them among our “10 Trends for 2011.”

The people on our list—from pop culture, sports, architecture, fashion and other realms—have the potential to drive or shape trends in the near future.

THE TRENDS: 3D Printing; Deforestation Awareness; Ignorance Is Bliss; Odyssey Trackers; Social Objects; Africa’s Middle Class; In the Flesh; Older Workforce; Space Travel Goes Private; Apps Beyond Mobile; Detroit; Jennifer Lawrence; The Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN); Art.sy; Digital Downtime; London Tourism; Storied Products; Auto Apps; Digital Etiquette; Long-Form Content; Pedro Lourenço; Stricter Green Building Standards; Digital Indoor Maps; Personal Taste Graphs; Automatic Check-Ins; Matcha; Digital Interventions; Piers Morgan; Tablets for Tots; Bamboo; mHealth; East London Tech City; Pogo; Tap-to-Pay; Banks Branch Out; Michael Jackson Lives On; E-Book Sharing; P-to-P Car Sharing; Tech Liaisons; Banner Ads Do More; Electronic Profiling; Micro-Businesses; Rooney Mara; Tech-Enabled; Beer Sommeliers Throwbacks; Biomimicry; Entrepreneurial Journalism; Mobile Blogging; Rum; Temporary Tattoos Go High-End; Bjarke Ingels; Mobile Memes; Rye Rye; Facebook Alternatives; The Nail Polish; Ryo Ishikawa; Brazil as E-Leader; Tintin the Movie; Fashion Fast-Forward Economy; Scanning Everything; Breaking the Book; Transmedia Producers; F-Commerce; Nanobrewers; Self-Powering Devices; Brigadeiro; Tube-Free Toilet Paper; Food, Ph.D.; Near Field Communication; Smart Lunchrooms; “Buy One, Give One Away”; Ukraine; Gay-Centric Hotels; Smart-Infrastructure Investment; The New Mobility Industry; Urban Industrial Parks; CAPTCHA Advertising; Global Disease, Refocused; Video Calling; Children’s E-Books; Smartphone Cameras Take Over; Green Luxury Cars; New Nordic Cuisine; Virtual Mirrors; Coming Clean with Green; Next-Generation Documentarians; Voice-Activated Apps; Group-Manipulated Pricing; Smoking on the Fringe; Costlier Cotton; YouTube the Broadcaster; Social Browsers Go Mainstream; Culinary Calling Cards; Heirloom Apples; Neymar; Decline of the Cash Register; Home Energy Monitors; NKOTBSB; Social Networking Surveillance; Objectifying Objects

This things-to-watch list comes in the form of presentation slides from JWT Intelligence. It is a general list with a few things that libraries should be aware of: #14 – Breaking the Book (selling smaller segments of monographs); #18 – Children’s E-books (interactive story designs); #23 – Deforestation Awareness (a document file format that cannot be printed); #25 – Digital Downtime (take a break from technology); #27 – Digital Indoor Maps (maps of library stacks, anyone?); #30 – E-book Sharing (mentions Bluefire Reader to read library-loaned e-books); #47 – Long-form Content (journalism and other forms); #56 – Near Field Communications (RFID-like patron card?); #67 – Personal Taste Graphs (“helping the right information find you”); #75 – Scanning Anything (proliferation of QR codes); and #87 – Tablets for Tots (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to sell a tablet preloaded with childrens titles).

Koha and Evergreen Shine in Breeding ILS Survey Results

According the Breeding’s data, 150 libraries migrated to Evergreen (I say migrated but his stats often reflect a “contract” not necessarily a migration) and 133 migrated to Koha. In contrast, only 53 libraries migrated to a SirsiDynix product, 48 to Agent Verso, and 28 to Millennium.

Lori Bowen Ayre summarizes ILS migration trends from Marshall Breeding’s annual ILS survey. The data on migrations is available in the forward and reverse directions. Does this mark a shift in acceptance of integrated library systems based on open source software?

Update: Somehow I missed Ed Corrado’s review of the report and his follow-up focused on the Koha numbers. Both posts have a number of helpful and insightful comments from other readers as well.

Public Domain Day 2011: Will the tide be turned?

This year’s Public Domain Day, the day on which a year’s worth of copyrights expire in many countries, is getting particular attention in Europe, where events in various European cities commemorate authors who died in 1940, and whose works are now in the public domain there.

Many commented on Public Domain Day — a watershed day each year when copyrights terms are up and works enter the public domain — but I found John Mark Ockerbloom brief review of the state of copyright extensions in North America and Europe the most interesting. He also briefly mentions the desires by some to return to a more simple model of copyright terms and registration.

News from the Network Development and MARC Standards Office at the Library of Congress.
The source codes listed below have been recently approved. The codes will be added to the applicable Source Codes for Vocabularies, Rules, and Schemes lists. See the specific source code list for current usage in MARC fields and MODS/MADS elements.

The codes should not be used in exchange records until 60 days after the date of this notice to provide implementers time to include newly-defined codes in any validation tables.

Subject Heading and Term Source Codes

The following source codes have been added to the Subject Heading and Term Source Codes list for usage in appropriate fields and elements.

Additions:

ccsa

Catalogue collectif suisse des affiches (Berne: Bibliotheque nationale suisse)

jurivoc

JURIVOC (Lausanne: Tribunal federal)

solstad

Solstad: emneord for Solstadbibliografien (Oslo: Nasjonalbiblioteket)

shsples

Subject headings for school and public libraries = Encabezamientos de materia para bibliotecas escolares y p£blicas (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Libraries Unlimited)

My father was obsessed with units of measurement and fundamental constants. He got his engineering degree at the Royal Institute of Technology (Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan) in Stockholm, Sweden. His favorite professor there was Erik Hallén, who was famous for his work on antenna theory and for laying groundwork for the world's most widely used system of measurement, the SI system.

My dad nearly failed Hallén's class, which could be one reason for his lifelong obsession with units. The other reason was that Dad was convinced that he could explain some of physics' deepest questions about the nature of matter by applying the electromagnetic theory he learned in Hallén's class. Dad   explained the structure of the electron by modeling it as a circulating charge wave in a resonant cavity formed by general relativistic warping of space. In his notes, he wrote
To me it looks like all the puzzle is defined and ripe to be put together and the extension to other particles will not be difficult- only time consuming.Dad used these insights to come up with a relationship between the gravitational constant and the mass and charge of the electron. Here's his equation:
                     G = 6/? 10-44 Z0 c (e/m)2
where G = the gravitational constant (which defines the force that holds the universe together), Z0 is the impedance of free space, c is the speed of light, and e and m are the charge and mass of the electron.

Here's a prettier version of that equation, made using Roger's Equation Editor from the following TeX code:
                      G = \frac{6}{\pi} 10^{-44} Z_0 c (\frac{e}{m})^2
(TeX is the most commonly used formatting language for mathematics.)


A derivation of this equation would easily have earned my dad a Nobel Prize, but without a derivation and explanation of the underlying physics, it was just numerology. If you plug in the numbers, Dad's equation is within 0.025% off of the consensus value for the gravitational constant, whose experimental uncertainty is about 0.01%. Dad understood that his equation was worthless without an explanation, so he spent endless hours studying Bessel equations and all sort of obscure mathematics. He was sure that somehow, somewhere, there existed a solution to Maxwell's equations combined with general relativity to explain the 6/? and confirm his resonant cavity. (He said the 10-44 was just using the right units- I never understood that!)

My dad was not alone in physics numerology. The fine structure constant, which is very close to 1/137, has attracted all sorts of numerological explanations. (Dick Lipton calls it a "miracle number") Arthur Eddington, one of the most famous physicists of his time, had an explanation for why the fine structure constant should be exactly 1/137 involving the number of protons in the universe. A more modern numerological result is that of James Gilson, whose suggested value for the fine structure constant is only 30 parts per trillion off.

While fundamental constant numerology has deservedly been on the fringes of science, new internet search technologies may soon change that. Last year, scientific publisher Springer introduced a beta service called LaTeX Search that allows researchers to search for LaTeX formatted equations in all of Springer's journals. (LaTex is a dialect of TeX most widely used for scientific publishing.) That's something you can't do with Google, or any other search engine. The ability to connect obscure mathematical discoveries from disparate fields of science could soon be facilitating new avenues of research, perhaps even new methodologies.

For example, I can search for a fragment of my dad's equation and get at least one result that seems relevant. I don't know of any meaningful discoveries that have been made so far with LaTeX search, but if my dad had been able to search all of the mathematical literature to connect his numerological result with a mathematical solution, perhaps he would have explained the gravitational constant and structure of the electron and would have won his Nobel Prize.

He would have been 83 today. Happy Birthday, Dad! We miss you.

My brother Abe just started a LinkedIn discussion in the Enterprise Search Engine Professionals group. Here’s the post.

Happy New Year, Everyone!

I’m interested to know who is doing real-time federated search in the enterprise. By “real-time” I mean searching sources live, not building nor searching an index. Have you implemented such a beast? Has it been successful? What have the challenges been? Access security and policy issues come to mind. What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of federated search in the enterprise?

By way of disclosure, I co-founded Verity, and I founded and run the federated search company, Deep Web Technologies.

Here are a few links that might be of interest to participants in this discussion:

• Federated Search: True Enterprise Search
• Federated search by any other name …
• What’s in a name: Federated Search
• Federated search in the enterprise

What are your thoughts?

That last link refers to a New Idea Engineering article that discusses a number of important features of federated search in the enterprise.

• Flexible rules for combining results from all of the engines searched
• Maintaining Users Security Credentials
• Mapping User Security Credentials to other security domains
• Advanced Duplicate Detection and Removal
• Combining results list Navigators, such as Faceted Search links and Taxonomy Nodes.
• Handling other results list links such as “next page” and sort order.
• Translating user searches into the different search syntaxes used by the disparate engines.
• Extracting hits from HTML results, AKA “scraping”, hopefully without the need to custom code.

If you know of any activity in the enterprise search world that intersects with federated search and that doesn’t involve building and maintaining indices Abe and I would love it if you would join the conversation.

For those of you new to this blog, federated search vendor Deep Web Technologies is the sponsor.

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