Lexis Nexis, an indispensable resource for the more-than-casual web researcher, announced it will be adding video to its news and archive database, as part of its pay-as-you-go AlaCarte service. Clips will cost a few bucks a piece, more or less what a text article does now, and can be emailed to other readers for an extra fee.
The service will be powered by Critical Mention, a Manhattan start-up with a growing video database and several big licensing agreements already under its belt. The move into video parallels recent developments at Google, and particularly Yahoo!, whose video search engine makes it easier to track down clips across the web. But Lexis Nexis will be aimed at more rigorous researchers, primarily businesses, universities, and government agencies.
This brings a broadcast medium into what has traditionally been textual territory, underscoring some of the big questions: what does it mean to “write” with video? What does it mean to “quote” video?
(image: Critical Mention)
Category Archives: Libraries, Search and the Web
the librarian in the techno-spa
The uncritical embrace of technology plagues American universities and consumers alike, whose credo is “adopt first, ask questions later.” An assistant professor of english from an unnamed Midwestern liberal arts college, writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education of his dismay at the changes underway in American university libraries, where traditional stacks are left to deteriorate while money is lavished on fancy “techno-spas,” transforming research sanctuaries into digital rec centers. The article is written in response to a very a real trend, brought to wider public attention in a NY Times article in May about an initiative at the University of Texas, Austin library in which approximately 90,000 books are to be relocated from the Flawn Academic Center to other libraries around campus to make way for a “24-hour information commons.”
Benton’s rhapsodizing on the pleasures of the stacks can be trying:
I once had a useful, relevant book fall on my head like Newton’s apple. Perhaps it was pushed there by some ghostly scholar, one of my forebears whom I might consider myself privileged to join in the posthumous academy of spectral stack walkers.
But his overall criticism is correct. Many universities have adopted a servile stance, catering to what they perceive to be a new breed of restless, multi-tasking student. But the “customer is always right” philosophy probably isn’t doing the students any favors in the long run. A generation is coming of age lost somewhere between the old print-based hierarchies of knowledge and the new Googlesque. And they aren’t receiving much in the way of guidance. A university president needs shiny groves of sleek new computers to wow the funders and alumnae, just as he needs a winning football team. The business of universities and the business of technology march ahead together without much thought for what kind of citizen they might be producing.
From Benton:
Library administrators have had to make hard choices as costs have risen, their missions have expanded, and their budgets have failed to keep pace. But I am not so sure that the techno-spa model should be adopted so uncritically. Who will profit most from the transformation now and in the future, as fees and updates for new technologies continue indefinitely? Is that transformation really about the demands of students? If so, should we conform to their expectations, or make an effort to reshape them against the grain of the culture?
Alas, at many institutions, there is no longer much room for books on our central campuses. But we do have room for coffee bars, sports facilities, and a collection of other expensive, space-consuming amenities.
For that reason, I find it hard to accept that digitization is motivated primarily by constrained budgets and limited space. The money is there, and so is the space. It’s just that colleges want to spend the money and use the space for something else that, presumably, will make them more competitive among students who are, perhaps, more interested in amenities than education.
One purpose of universities is to provide insulation from the world at large for the cultivation of sensitive minds. Universities might consider extending this principle to technology, applying the brakes on what could be a runaway train. The Amish, who, to say the least, are loathe to adopt new technologies, ask first, when confronted with a new invention, how it might change them. We could learn something from that. The answer isn’t to hold candlelight vigils for the death of the card catalogue or the scribbled margin note, but rather to ask at each step how this is changing us, and whether we think it is a good thing.
(image by kendrak, via Flickr)
publishers fire another volley at google library
Last week, the Association for Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) joined the escalating chorus of concern over the legality of Google’s library project, echoing a letter from the Association of American University Presses in May warning that by digitizing library collections without the consent of publishers, Google was about to perpetrate a massive violation of copyright law. The library project has been a troublesome issue for the search king ever since it was announced last December. Resistance first came from across the Atlantic where French outrage led a unified European response to Google’s perceived anglo-imperialism, resulting in plans to establish a European digital library. More recently, it has come from the anglos themselves, namely publishers, who, in the case of the ALPSP, “absolutely dispute” Google’s claim that the project falls within the “fair use” section of the US Copyright Act. From the ALPSP statement (download PDF):
The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers calls on Google to cease unlicensed digitisation of copyright materials with immediate effect, and to enter into urgent discussions with representatives of the publishing industry in order to arrive at an appropriate licensing solution for ‘Google Print for Libraries’. We cannot believe that a business which prides itself on its cooperation with publishers could seriously wish to build part of its business on a basis of copyright infringement.
In the relatively brief history of intellectual property, libraries have functioned as a fair use zone – a haven for the cultivation of minds, insulated from the marketplace of ideas. As the web breaks down boundaries separating readers from remote collections, with Google stepping in as chief wrecking ball, the idea of fair use is being severely tested.
vimeo open to the public – new constellations in the sky
In February, I stumbled upon a wonderful new site for storing and sharing video clips, which, until recently, was being tested on closed beta. Now fully open to the public, Vimeo aims to do for short form video what Flickr does for photos, openly citing the photo-sharing phenom as inspiration. Right now, it’s pretty basic. Create a free account and you can start uploading compressed clips (8MB weekly limit), adding tags, and browsing what other users have put up. Over time, I expect they’ll start adding some Flickr-esque features (like in-house email, groups, video sets, calendar, favorites and who knows what else). When Vimeo first came onto my radar, they had an interesting feature that allowed you to string several clips together within a single tag, creating an ad hoc montage. They still say on their “about” page that “several clips can be played together to create a movie,” but I could no longer figure out how to do that.
All in all, given how troublesome it can be to get video working on the web, Vimeo seems to be off to a very smooth start. Something I hope they figure out is how to make it easy for users to post video to blogs. If they could rig up a basic form that automatically embeds a clip into a blog post, it would be a tremendous boon to the incipient video blogging community. And if they could provide basic video editing tools, then they might have something really big on their hands. (I’ve posted here my inaugural upload to Vimeo – a column from the ruins at Caesaria, from my recent trip to Israel.)
Though just barely off the ground, I have a feeling that Vimeo could evolve into something serious. Another exciting launch is Odeo, the podcast hub. Taken together as a constellation, these three ventures – Flickr, Vimeo, and Odeo – are constructing the beginnings of a vast media commons, tiny when compared with the giant 20th century media industries, but maybe not for long (see post on the London bombings). Another recently launched site, ourmedia, seeks to create a similar kind of homebrew media repository, offering (through a partnership with the Internet Archive) to “host your media forever — for free.” But so far, I’ve been much more impressed with the the afore-mentioned image/video/sound trio. Different media present different challenges, and there’s something to be said for doing one thing really well rather than trying to do everything sort of well. I’ve found ourmedia’s interface frustrating. It’s difficult to browse for media, and sometimes hard to open an item once you’ve found it. Flickr, Vimeo and Odeo all provide a dynamic tagging system, making it much easier for users to dig and explore. ourmedia has no such system. What ourmedia is exploring more intensively (and Odeo too) is the need for an editorial voice, maintaining a rotating roster of volunteer editors, whose duties, among other things, include constructing the site’s homepage. Odeo, on the other hand, is more clearly descended from traditional broadcast media, namely radio. The site is organized into channels, each with its own signature mix of programming. But unlike a radio station, an Odeo channel has fluid boundaries. Listener’s can pick and choose programs, constructing their own broadcast.
But ultimately, we can’t leave it up to these sites to make selections for us. Flickr has its own blog where the site’s creators draw attention to noteworthy material. But more interesting is Flickrzen, a blog posting regular “reportages” of the most compelling photos turning up on Flickr. Flickr Pix Photo Magazine is on a similar mission. Of course, with millions of photographs already on Flickr, and thousands pouring in as I write, it would be impossible for any single editorial body to exhaustively survey the whole repository. So there’s definitely room for more of these curatorial ventures. They are the next step.
the internet public library turns ten
The Internet Public Library was created in 1995 by a group of graduate students led by Prof. Joseph James at the University of Michigan to “ask interesting and important questions about interconnections of libraries, librarians, and librarianship with a distributed networked environment.”
Over the last ten years, the IPL has expanded their mission to create a public service organization and a learning/teaching environment. According to a 2003 press release:
Through the IPL, librarians and library students learn to integrate the use of the Internet into their professional practice. Internet users get help in navigating the sea of information on the Internet in order to find information they actually need and can use. By training librarians, students, and to some extent users, in using, searching, and evaluating the Internet, the IPL improves information literacy, a much-needed skill in the 21st century. Librarians and library students learn from IPL’s examples, thus relieving them of the need to constantly “reinvent the wheel.” Internet users spend less time wading through garbage and more time getting their real work done.
american libraries are wired, with doors wide open
From today’s NY Times: “Almost All Libraries Offer Free Web Access”:
The study, which was conducted by researchers at Florida State University, found that 98.9 percent of libraries offer free public Internet access, up from 21 percent in 1994 and 95 percent in 2002. It also found that 18 percent of libraries have wireless Internet access and 21 percent plan to get it within the next year.
Even in an age of online reading, the library still has tremendous significance as a physical commons. When wi-fi coverage in cities becomes comprehensive, we should still be able to get free access at our local library. Another way that public libraries can stay relevant is to offer free on-site access to pay services: things like Lexis-Nexis, subscription-only web periodicals, and even web-delivered movies and television.
weaving libraries into the web
A great feature of the Firefox web browser is the little search window built right into the toolbar next to the address field. It’s set to Google as a default, but you can add other common search engines or knowledge bases like Yahoo, IMDB, Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia, dictionaries and others – a customized reference suite right in your browser. What if you could put a card catalogue in there too? John Wohlers, of the Todd Library at Waubonsee Community College in Sugar Grove, Illinois has built a searchlet that effectively does this. It’s not like Google Print, where you can actually browse scanned copies of the book, but it takes a step toward integrating libraries with the web – an important move if they are to remain relevant in a world where browsers and search engines are the primary research tools.
Wohlers is also working on building library search into desktop tools. Windows users can find instructions here for putting the Todd Library catalogue into your Microsoft Office 2003 Research Pane.
(via The Shifted Librarian)
Gataga – social bookmark search and exploration engine
We came across this the other day – an engine for searching the social bookmarking commons. Gataga allows you to search by tag across several popular web-clipping services including del.icio.us, furl, and others. Gataga’s simple interface looks a lot like Google’s, but the similarity ends there. The only ranking system is time – the most recent links come up at the top. So Gataga is a nice tool for the moment’s glimpse of the links people are saving, but that’s about all.
Bit by bit, the web is being catalogued by its users. But at the moment, Gataga (and the rest of these bookmarking tools) works more like a wire service than a library. Tags are sort of like a reporter’s “beat” and Gataga provides RSS feeds for all possible queries, so you can track areas of interest. But if you want to use it as an archive, you’ll have some pretty serious digging to do.
In the early days of the web, sites sprung up like Voice of the Shuttle (VOS) that thoughtfully catalogued interesting links. The fact that there was a single editor ensured that things stayed fairly organized, that broken links were repaired, and dead ones pruned. But as the web grew, the model quickly became unmanageable. Alan Liu, who single-handedly managed VOS from 1994-1999, said it came to the point where he was spending 2-3 hours per night simply combing for dead links. VOS allowed the community to suggest sites, but the burden of organizing, annotating, and “weeding” fell solely on Liu. The rise of blogs made it easier and less stressful to gather links, but ensured that it was a casual affair – a kind of day-to-day grazing. Of course, all blogs have archives, but they are not terribly useful (Dan talks about this here).
With social bookmarking, we seem to be laying the foundation for something more sustainable – “the only group that can organize everything is everybody.” The next step is for librarians, archivists, and new kinds of editors and curators to start making sense of this wilderness of tags.
book returned to library 78 years late
The Oakland Public Library announced Friday that a man returned an overdue book — 78 years after his now-deceased aunt checked it out of the Melrose Branch.
serendipity
the pinpoint accuracy of computer-searches, leaves those of us lucky enough to have spent time in library stacks, nostalgic for the unexpected discovery of something we didn’t know we were looking for but which just happened, serendipitously, to be on a nearby shelf. George Legrady, artist and prof at UC Santa Barbara, just showed a project he is working on for the new public library in Seattle that gave the first glimpse of serendipity in online library searching which lets you see all the books that have recently been checked out on a particular subject. Beautiful and Exciting.