I was wondering who yoyology was over at Memepool after seeing a couple of library-related posts there from this author. It turns out it's Karl Siewert, and he's doing so well at spreading the word that Memepool is adding a category just for libraries! Watch for it here.

Laura Bush Announces $20 Million to Help Offset National Shortage of Librarians

"Laura Bush announced today that the President's Bush's 2004 budget will include a proposal for increased funding for the nation's libraries and museums. The President's 2004 proposed budget will be sent to Congress on February 3, 2003.
'Along with our homes and schools, libraries and museums provide the strongest foundation for learning in our communities,' Mrs. Bush said. 'Museum directors and librarians educate and inform the public, and and by doing so, by doing so, strengthen our great democracy.'
Over the next 16 years, America's libraries are projected to lose 58 percent of their professional librarians. The President's budget proposal addresses this loss with a special focus on recruiting and training the next generation of librarians. Last year, the President's budget included $10 million for this initiative. This year, the budget requests $20 million for this initiative." [via Library Link of the Day]

Is It Time To Get Blogging?

"A blog allows you to edit a web page without worrying about programming and design issues. People inexperienced in web development can use blogging software to create, update, and maintain web pages. Also, multiple users can post stories to a blog, at any time, from anywhere.
At their most elemental, blogs represent a new way to add content to a web site. The blogging tools are flexible enough to allow large parts of any web site to be maintained via the blog interface. Most blogging software is now as easy to use as a word processor, with the programming and HTML formatting done for you. Updating a web page can be as easy as writing a quick letter, allowing a standard web page to become a personal web publishing wizard. The standard web form widgets enable the blogger to control text size and fonts and even facilitate hyperlinks by simply highlighting words and clicking a button....
Adding a blog to your library's web site can add currency and freshness. It can also encourage patrons to return. At its best, a blog can transform your site into a dynamic learning community where everyone shares knowledge." [Library Journal, via Resourceshelf]
A great introduction to the topic by Blake Carver, the man behind the curtain over at LISNews. I make some of these same points in my own presentations about blogging. There's the big debate in the blogging community - is it the format,  the author's voice, or the software running the site that makes it a blog?
I'm realizing that it's d) all of the above, with a built-in innovation engine that never seems to stop. If a library adds a blog to its site today, it gets all of the benefits of blogging that Blake mentions, plus (potentially):

An RSS feed that is generated automatically;
Easy posting tools from within news aggregators (either through a built-in aggregator like Radio's, NewIsFree's premium service, or NewzCrawler);
The ability to track, post, and follow blog conversations about books the library may own;
Trackback, Comeback, and other coming-soon-backs I can't even imagine.
There's all this stuff out there that comes built-in (or plugged-in) to blogging software these days. Then throw in ancillary services like Friend of a Friend, GeoURL, and the like, and it starts to get interesting how a library could interact with its patrons. A blog would immediately give most public libraries a more dynamic web site without a major investment in software or programming knowledge while distributing the workload of maintaining the site's currency. How often have we been able to say that?!

Sorry for the lack of updates, but my grandma died last night and I just don't feel like blogging right now. More later.
However, I don't want the efforts of Floridians and their newspapers to go unnoticed in their bid to save the Florida State Library from Jeb Bush's budget cuts. FlaBlog is doing a great job of catching the various editorials and articles, including one from the Pensacola News Journal that compares the propposed fate of the FSL to the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark: "it is crated up and stuck on an anonymous shelf deep in the bowels of a humongus government warehouse, presumably never to be seen again."
Start with FlaBlogs January 28th post and scroll down.

Breaking Through the Invisible Web

"More and more web content, including library content, never sees the light of day. It is hidden behind proprietary database interfaces where it can't be found by popular Internet search engines. Librarians must bring the deep, invisible web to the surface so that our public can discover our resources through a query on a popular search engine....
Our students would be better served by library content on persistent pages that continue to exist beyond the end of a database search. This would help them find information where they look for it—online. We can accomplish this by using web site development products that allow for publishing web sites and database packages that enable data export. We can update, change, and maintain content in background databases and still offer a persistent presence for our content on the web server....
There are many initiatives today to bring library content to the surface web. Projects such as the Open Archives Initiative and products such as SFX seek to harvest and mine information from the depths of myriad databases. At the University at Buffalo (UB), State University of New York, we have concluded experiments that show millions of web pages can be extracted from databases—such as the catalog—and stored persistently on the web. This allows libraries to have the best of both worlds: database control and bookmarkable persistent documents. It will also allow students to use their interface of choice—that of a web search engine—to find authoritative materials....
At UB, we wondered if a web server could handle an unlimited number of persistent web pages. Many web sites contain tens of thousands of pages, but could a web site handle millions of pages? Modern disks certainly have the required capacity....
As a proof of concept test, and to meet the practical needs of conversion testing, we made a file for each of our 2.2 million MARC records. We extracted exactly one MARC record in each file and named the files in a consistent way that included the unchanging, unique record number from the mainframe system. Not only did the web server handle this without a problem, but with the help of a free program called MarcEdit, we could download any record at will and display or edit it on a desktop computer....
In short order we had 4.4 million files, 2.2 million MARC records, and a corresponding HTML page for each record that contained a link to the MARC record. Then we decided to index the HTML pages. Would Google crawl through the web site and make us a free catalog?
After several weeks, a Google spider found our site and crawled away. Unfortunately, Google only picked up our 80,000 directory entries, crawled about 20,000 of our HTML MARC pages, and then stopped crawling. Apparently, too much content from one site is to be feared. We did get to see what a Google library catalog might look like. More importantly, we proved that it is possible to create many catalog pages, index them, and search them with an Internet search engine. This can be done without an ILS and without a relational database....
Further experiments with web spidering engines confirmed that it is possible to index two million XML catalog pages. There are scalability problems, however. We found one free engine that handled XML beautifully but was memory bound while building the index and thus limited to about 100,000 of our pages. Another free engine successfully indexed the whole two million–record site but exhibited slow response time when searching....
Librarians working closely on the design of the NetCatalog have already pointed out some benefits. These stem from the fundamental design model. Because all of the metadata is tagged and included on a results document, any and all information can be combined in a search. Novel combinations of search criteria allow slicing and dicing that was formerly impossible in NOTIS. For example, location-based searching and call number searching can be combined with author, title, and other bibliographic selection. Limits by language, material type, and even physical attributes like book cover color are now possible. Searches and results pages can be easily saved and rerun. Web servers run 24/7, unlike mainframe systems, so for the first time we have round-the-clock operation of the catalog." [Library Journal, via Catalogablog]
Emphasis above is mine. This idea is really blowing me away, although I can't see every library doing this. It could certainly be an interesting route for VIC, though.

Lori Bell, who really needs to get her own blog now that she's abdicated her Handheld Librarian title, had told me that NOLA (the folks behind the ListenOhio Audible program) were launching a new initiative in February. All of a sudden, it's February (I'm still working on catching up to that one), so Lori forwarded to me the following announcement.
The Performer's Showcase

"The Performers Showcase has been an exciting project to coordinate at NOLA. NOLA has taken the State Library's list of performers and created a database that is searchable and has video clips of many different performers. We have sent letters to over 120 performers and have received over 35 responses including performers that have sent us videos and others who have come to NOLA to have their performances captured.
This project was started so that no one needs to travel to Columbus to the Performers Showcase. Instead of a trip south you can simply turn your computer on and go to www.showcaseohio.org and view at your leisure a storyteller, magician, and many other performers. NOLA will roll out the first website for performers in Ohio with video clips of their programs."
I can't seem to get to the site yet, but I really like this idea. We're heading in a slightly different direction for video at SLS because we plan to use Flash instead of MPEG-4 for video, but there's no reason we couldn't add this type of functionality to the existing Parade of Programs database of performers recommended by Illinois librarians. A most interesting idea!
On a side note, if any of my SLS colleagues are reading this, check out the NOLA newsletter from which the above blurb is taken. I really like the way the second page highlights their accomplishments and teamwork. We don't do enough of this, and I think we need to change that. Our members don't understand everything we do (and can do) for them because we don't do a good job of telling them.

The proposal to cut the University of Arizona's School of Information Resources and Library Science made the Arizona Daily Star. Rightly so, since we've seen far too many LIS schools close over the last decade.
Students Defend UA Programs

"The school is one of 16 programs Likins and Provost George Davis have proposed eliminating....
Lisa Bunker, a recent graduate of the School of Information Resources and Library Science, told Likins its supporters have been "working feverishly" in the past week since he challenged them to find a way to save their program.
Supporters want to appeal to the school's 1,900 alumni, and could ask for more time from an accreditation agency that said it must add faculty to its master's program and keep building.
The library school is one of the largest graduate schools on campus with more than 200 students.
On Monday, Likins announced he would ask the regents to approve a special program fee of $100 per credit hour for resident students and $400 per credit hour for non-resident students, beginning this fall if the school survives." [Thanks for the pointer, p.e.!]

Get Answers From Kansas

"The state of Kansas has started KANAnswer, an online reference service for the residents of Kansas and for non-residents who have questions about Kansas. It's accessible at http://skyways.lib.ks.us/KSL/KLNB/KANAnswerWeb/index.htm .  The service operates during bank hours basically -- M-F 9-5, with some weekend and evening hours. It's not available during national and state holidays. Down at the bottom of the front page there's a 'LiveHelp' button which will indicate whether anyone's available or not....
Remember, only residents of Kansas may ask general reference questions; non-residents are restricted to questions about Kansas itself. It'll be interesting to see how this goes." [ResearchBuzz]
Excellent - the land of the Jayhawks implements statewide virtual reference! Next step - 24/7 (I hope). My brother should love this since he's still in Kansas City ("more boulevards than Paris and more working fountains (200) than any city but Rome.").

Great Free Legal Resources in Washington State

"I got an E-mail from David Goodson, who pointed out the following after reading a recent post here:

"I too am an attorney and your blog about internet legal research caught my eye - particularly your reference to state law research. ...what I really want to tell you about is that here in WA you can send an email query to a the state law librarian in Olympia and they will send you back an answer. I had [a] case where I needed legislative history for a law I was challenging. I spent hours and hours looking for it the conventional way without much luck so I sent them an email and within ten minutes I had a response with copies of everything I needed. and best of all it was free."
Now that sounds like a good system, and hopefully it will be the norm for other states in the coming years. [Ernie the Attorney]
The lesson here is to think about contacting a librarian when you find yourself spending too much time researching something, whether it's for work or personal knowledge! The minute you feel the first hint of frustration, contact a librarian! (The Illinois Compiled Statutes and more have been available online for some time now, too.) Illinois residents can Ask the Illinois State Library questions via email or telephone. A statewide online chat service should be up and running later this year, but of course you can always start with your local public library, as well.
Unfortunately, it looks like someone has removed the Illinois State Library from the list of Illinois State Agencies. This is shameful. If state governments continue burying library resources on their sites and cutting funding for them altogether, the bigger shame will be that the type of service Ernie highlights won't even be available, let alone the norm. You need to let your legislators know that you value library services at every level - local, state, and federal. These things matter.

It's all in the WebPaths, baby...

"From blogdex to Veen to del.icio.us to this wonderful search plug-in for IE – mahvelous!" [jenett.radio]
Give me a moment to think of a word to write other than "WOW!"
Click on the last link in Joe's post if you are a Windows + Internet Explorer user and you like searching library catalogs. While there are several pre-configured search engines available at the site, the Searchy plug-in turns out to be another pipeline into online catalogs that sits completely outside the library world. Like LibraryLookup, anyone can configure the plug-in to work with any OPAC that allows the appropriate type of search strings, and the site even provides a Plug-in Generator.
For example, I played around with SWAN's keyword search and created a registry plug-in that allows me to type searches directly into the address bar in IE. After installing it, I can now type "sk celtic music" and the results of the search in SWAN load in the browser window. In fact, I just tested "sk pirates of the caribbean" and after a few clicks I'm now the 47th hold for the DVD!
I can also configure similar searches for title, author, subject, etc. ("st" for title, "sa" for author, "ss" for subject). I think the keyword plug-in should be visible to you on the Searchy page if you scroll down to "SWAN" - give it a whirl! The installation instructions really are as simple as they sound. (Do note that this installs into the Windows registry, though, so play at your own risk.)
SWAN runs Innovative Interfaces software, so I know III catalogs will work with this. We'll have to test others. I'm no Windows expert (not even close), but theoretically a library should be able to make plug-ins pre-configured for its catalog available from its own web site, right?
Very cool!