Category Archives: sharing

How we talk about the president: A quick exploration in Google Books

Posted on June 20, 2010 by John Mark Ockerbloom

On The Online Books Page, I’ve been indexing a collection of memorial sermons on President Abraham Lincoln, all published shortly after his assassination, and digitized by Emory University.  Looking through them, I was struck by how often Lincoln was referred … Continue reading →

Posted in data, online books, sharing | Comments Off on How we talk about the president: A quick exploration in Google Books

Journal liberation: A primer

Posted on June 11, 2010 by John Mark Ockerbloom

As Dorothea Salo recently noted, the problem of limited access to high-priced scholarly journals may be reaching a crisis point.  Researchers that are not at a university, or are at a not-so-wealthy one, have long been frustrated by journals that … Continue reading →

Posted in copyright, libraries, open access, publishing, sharing | 5 Comments

Making discovery smarter with open data

Posted on May 6, 2010 by John Mark Ockerbloom

I’ve just made a significant data enhancement to subject browsing on The Online Books Page.  It improves the concept-oriented browsing of my catalog of online books via subject maps, where users explore a subject along multiple dimensions from a starting … Continue reading →

Posted in architecture, discovery, online books, open access, sharing, subjects | 3 Comments

Copyright information is busting out all over

Posted on April 7, 2010 by John Mark Ockerbloom

Like the crocuses and daffodils now coming up all over our front garden, new copyright registration information has been popping up all over the net lately.  As I’ve described in various previous posts, this information can be extremely useful for … Continue reading →

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Lots of conversation keeps stuff sustainable

Posted on March 23, 2010 by John Mark Ockerbloom

Among the hats I wear at my place of work is that of LOCKSS cache administrator. LOCKSS is a useful distributed preservation system built around the principle “Lots of copies keep stuff safe” (whose initials give the system its name).  … Continue reading →

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Shedding light on images in the public domain

Posted on February 8, 2010 by John Mark Ockerbloom

For years, I’ve regularly gotten requests from authors and publishers for licenses to reproduce images in books listed on The Online Books Page, or included in the local collection of A Celebration of Women Writers.  Sometimes these requests relate to … Continue reading →

Posted in copyright, sharing | 3 Comments

Every book its libraries: or, Taking care in withdrawal

Posted on January 28, 2010 by John Mark Ockerbloom

The question of when to withdraw materials from libraries has gotten heightened attention lately.  Everyday readers may not always realize it, but most libraries get rid of books and other materials on a regular basis.  Libraries typically have limited space, … Continue reading →

Posted in preservation, sharing | 9 Comments

Concepts in catalogs: Where the data comes from

Posted on January 15, 2010 by John Mark Ockerbloom

I’ve now made a few posts about concept-oriented catalogs, describing the basic idea, showing some examples, and talking about the kinds of context they should provide for users.  As I mentioned in my first post, concepts in such catalogs are … Continue reading →

Posted in architecture, discovery, formats, metadata, sharing, subjects | Comments Off on Concepts in catalogs: Where the data comes from

Remember this

Posted on October 5, 2009 by John Mark Ockerbloom

I am eating a sandwich at the end of Pier 14 in San Francisco.  The sun has set behind the downtown skyscrapers, and the colors in the sky are slowly fading to grey.  I’m not the only diner out here.  … Continue reading →

Posted in people, preservation, sharing | 2 Comments

Free Decimal Correspondence: Now with more detail and CC0 goodness

Posted on May 16, 2009 by John Mark Ockerbloom

I’ve just released a new version of the Free Decimal Correspondence (FDC).  FDC is a set of associations between numbers and subject terms that can be used as the basis for linear shelving or subject browsing of a simple library … Continue reading →

Posted in libraries, metadata, open access, repositories, sharing | Comments Off on Free Decimal Correspondence: Now with more detail and CC0 goodness