The less common reader

Some thoughts about egos, objects and social networks

The two ways of web 2.0

Social tools and science
In her report on Open science at webscale, I was interested to see Liz Lyon give the following list of tools used to share their work by researchers. Currently, researchers are using open science tools such as: Connotea for reference management Mendeley (which applies LastFM principles associated with music selections to journal articles) Friendfeed (for threaded discussion and aggregation) Scivee and YouTube (for sharing experimental methodologies and protocols) SciLink and Nature Networks (for social networking) myExperiment (for sharing workflows) eyeLIMS (an open source Laboratory Informat

Libraries and e-science
Emerging data-intensive e-science presents many support challenges for institutions, disciplines and national bodies to work through. The role of the academic library in this multiscale world is also an open question. Two recent reports discuss e-science (or 'cyberinfrastructure' or 'e-research') in general terms and repay reading. Liz Lyon, the Director of UKOLN, and also a principal in the Digital Curation Centre, has focused on this area for several years now and has produced an interesting synthesising report for the JISC: Open science at web-scale: optimising participation and predictive potential: consultative report [

Reputation enhancement redux
I wrote recently about the growing interesting in reputation management on the web. Reputation management on the web - individual and institutional - has become a more conscious activity for many, as ranking, assessment and other reputational measures are increasingly influenced by network visibility. In particular, it raises for academic institutions an issue that has become a part of many service decisions: what is it appropriate to do locally? What should be sourced externally? And what should be left to others to do? [Reputation enhancement] This is a wide-ranging issue, pulling together in

QOTD: protocol-based time travel for the web
We are pleased that Herbert Van de Sompel will be talking about Memento, a joint project of Los Alamos National Laboratory and Old Dominion University, at OCLC later this month. We will make a webcast available; see the details here. If you are in Central Ohio, come by .... Here is a recent paper describing the work: The Web is ephemeral. Many resources have representa- tions that change over time, and many of those represen- tations are lost forever. A lucky few manage to reappear as archived resources that carry their own URIs. For ex- ample, some content management systems maintain version pages th

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