The less common reader

Some thoughts about egos, objects and social networks

The two ways of web 2.0

Libraries and the long tail: intro
Discussing grades of availability in my last post, I mention an article I wrote a few years ago on libraries and the long tail. Here is how it starts: Discussions of the long tail that I have seen or heard in the library community strike me as somewhat partial. Much of that discussion is about how libraries contain deep and rich collections, and about how their system-wide aggregation represents a very long tail of scholarly and cultural materials (a system may be at the level of a consortium, or a state, or a country). However, I am not sure that we have absorbed the real relevance of the long tail argument, wh

On the discriminations of availability ...
Seamus Heaney famously - and in poetry - complained about being included in an anthology of 'British' poetry. In the course of his poem he invokes Miroslav Holub's 'On the necessity of truth' where a man creates a disturbance in a cinema when he sees a beaver mistakenly called a muskrat on the screen. The man wants to set the record straight. I don't have a copy of Heaney's work as I write this, but I can point to a

Community bibliography
I prefer 'crowdsourced' to 'user contributed' but neither works very well for me. In particular 'user contributed' does not seem a good term at all for a variety of reasons. Anyway, I was looking at the new catalogue at Ottawa Public Library powered by Bibliocommons earlier (following a mention by Stephen Abram).

Research support services
I am pleased to note a collaboration between OCLC Research and the Research Information Network in the UK to explore changing research support needs in universities. We tend to focus on how technology changes library practices, but the impact of technology on libraries will be less important in the long term than the impact of technology on research practices, which in turn the library must be well-placed to support. The project will investigate researchers' needs and desires in a small sample of UK and US universities to identify the significant patterns, intersections, gaps and issues from researchers' points of view, whateve

Untangling the library systems environment
NISO organized a meeting on library resource management a couple of weeks ago: I notice that the presentations are now available on the web. They make an interesting collection, and I return to them in a moment. I have written about the library systems environment in these pages from time to time. A blog entry from Summer 2007 formed the basis of a Portal article [pdf] of the same name (Reconfiguring the libr