Tomorrow a group of librarians and library enthusiast from around the world will try to make the hashtag #biblioteca one of the Trending Topics on Twitter. The event will take place August 10, 2010 and will last an hour (10-11am EST). This experiment was conducted exactly a year ago, and they almost achieve their goal, [...]

Radical Cataloging: Essays at the Front by K. R. Roberto My rating: 4 of 5 stars The collection of essays in Radical Cataloging cover a wide range of issue in the cataloging world, and it’s not the boring book most non-catalogers might assume it is – but be warned that unless you already understand LCSH, [...]

With some financial help from the National Endowment for the Humanities, digital-humanities professor Mary Flanagan is developing a game that will help add tags to some of Dartmouth College’s archival collections. Flanagan expects that students will be interested in the game which presents a player with an image for which they have to create “labels” [...]

President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton speak together sitting at a picnic table April 9, 2009, on the South Lawn of the White House. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza. El presidente Barack Obama y la Secretaria de Estado Hillary Rodham Clinton hablan, mientras sentado en una mesa de picnic [...]

A couple weeks ago Google come out with one more impressive online collection. This time it’s the LIFE Photo Archive. Most of us have probably seen the powerful images that have been printed in LIFE Magazine over the decades. Google’s press release explains that only a small percentage of this archive has been made public, [...]

Memory Archive is an online project that is gathering memoirs from everyday people. The site allows you to search for memoirs indexed for particular words (either in the title or in the text), or you can brows various collections through category pages (here is an examples of the category page for “places“). Another good way [...]

I started out being hesitant to go down the road that is making OPACs and other library related tools look more like Google, Amazon.com and the like, but the more I learn about what these new tools can achieve the more I’m growing to like them. One of the latest examples of these new initiatives [...]

During the same Hot Topics Discussion mentioned below I also heard a presentation about the implementation and use of LibraryThing at a public library by Kate Sheehan, Coordinator of Library Automation at the Danbury Public Library. Sheehan described how the library has integrated LibraryThing, a site which allows users to create bibliographies, plus rate and [...]

During ALA Midwinter I attended a Hot Topics Discussion Group titled “Tag You’re It: A revolution in patron-library interaction”. The first presenter was Jennifer Sweda, cataloging librarian at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, who talked about PennTags, the ongoing project in social tagging in their library catalog. PennTags is a social bookmaking tool developed at [...]

Open Library is a new project starting out in San Francisco, CA, but global in scope. It aims at creating a single database for all book ever published! This massive project expects to function in wiki format and hopes to gather help from enthusiast all around the globe, much like Wikipedia has done in recent [...]