Category Archives: sharing

As living arrows sent forth

Posted on August 31, 2010 by John Mark Ockerbloom

It’s that time of year when offspring start to leave home and strike out on their own.  Young children may be starting kindergarten.  Older ones may be heading off to university.  And in between, children slowly gain a little more … Continue reading →

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Keeping subjects up to date with open data

Posted on July 31, 2010 by John Mark Ockerbloom

In an earlier post, I discussed how I was using the open data from the Library of Congress’ Authorities and Vocabularies service to enhance subject browsing on The Online Books Page.  More recently, I’ve used the same data to make … Continue reading →

Posted in data, discovery, online books, open access, sharing, subjects | 4 Comments

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 →

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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