Digital Reference Services

This is a 19 minute interview with Peter Brantley, new Executive Director of the Digital Library Federation.

The collective expertise of digital libraries in making available the diverse literatures of science and artistic expression, in concert with the increasing sophistication of commercial partners and the development of distributed, interactive forms of publishing, require libraries to chart the engineering of new architectures for teaching, learning, and research. Digital Libraries must work to forge the new collaborations required to enable and build these services. Peter Brantley talk about the digital library landscape and the challenges that lie ahead.

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2007 Spring Task Force Meeting.  The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative pr

More grist for the Wikipedia trashers: a report in a Massachusetts newspaper disclosing the fact that congressional staffers have been editing entries to "correct" unfavorable information. Not much of a surprise there (though Nature did recently publish the results of a study showing Wikipedia to be about as accurate as Encyclopaedia Britannica, so I'm not giving up on Wikipedia yet).

But I wonder if Wikipedia's open-editing process can be used to more openly track historical revision?

First Bowker buys Syndetics and now they're working closely with Source Interlink/Alliance Entertainment/All Music Guide.  What is interesting about this move to me is that I'm guess that it is probably just one step removed from even more consolidation in this increasingly commoditized space ... Source Interlink/AENT seems to have removed any reference to AMG/RedDotNet on their site.  Perhaps a sale to Bowker is in the wings?  What will this mean for Muze, Baker & Taylor, Ingram and the rest?  Who knows, but I'm guessing that we can expect more considation in the future.  Perhaps some international consolidation is next on the horizon?  Maybe something with Bookscan/VNU?  The next few years should definately be interesting.

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ITConversations.com has an interesting podcast on Universal Access to All Knowledge by Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive. On the heels of my earlier blog entries on On Socially Assisted Information Discovery, Google Suggest/Folksonomies and Questia, Social Captial Metrics, etc., I'm even more encouraged with the potential for the future of knowledge in society.

A new add-in to Mozilla/FireFox provides easy access to bioinformatic databases ...

The tool allows a biologist to browse and retrieve data from almost 30 sources, including Genomic, Proteomic, Functional, Literature, Taxonomic, Structural, Plant and Animal-specific databases. It also provides links to major data deposition sites for nucleotide, protein and 3D-structure data. Finally, the menu also contains links to many Sequence, Structure alignment and analysis tools.

• http://biobar.mozdev.org/