I _Really_ Don't Know

Wendy Grossman, in The Guardian, covers the difficulties of libraries publishing their catalogue data online.

Despite the internet's origins as an academic network, when it comes to finding a book, e-commerce rules. Put any book title into your favourite search engine, and the hits will be dominated by commercial sites run by retailers, publishers, even authors. But even with your postcode, you won't find the nearest library where you can borrow that book. (The exception is Google Books, and even that is limited.) via Why you can't find a library book in your search engine | Technology | The Guardian.

I get a namecheck and a quote at the end:

Alex blogs over at Adaptive Blue about their use of Amazon's SimpleDB to power their browser add-on Glue.

The post is interesting, and the comments useful. What I noticed, though, is that they're using natural keys...

Warning, Patent Rant follows. Sure, everyone knows about high profile patents like Amazon One-Click, but what about the effect of less prominent cases?

A patent is a monopoly over an invention - in order to encourage innovation, patents are granted to inventors so they are assured of an income from the invention. Inventions usually make money either through the sale or licensing of the patent or through production of a product that makes use of the invention. The patent prevents others from simply copying the idea. Unlike Copyright, however, patents cover the idea even if the second person came up with the idea completely independently.

It's like a big iPhone, but not a phone, so more like a big 'i' then...

TechCrunch Tablet Update: Prototype B.

Some of the work I've been doing over the past few months has been on a resource lists product that helps lecturers and students make best use of the educational material for their courses.

One of the problems we hoped to address really well was the editing of lists. Historically products that do this have been deemed cumbersome and difficult by academic staff who will often produce lists as simple documents in Word or the like.

Further to my previous posts on OCLC's record use policy:

OCLC, Record Usage, Copyright, Contracts and the Law

dev8D - Developer Happiness Days. 9-13 February 2009, London

JISC is running a Developer Happiness Days meet, sort of like a 4 day hackfest, come code4lib type thing.

In a shameless attempt to keep your attention, and get some people to comment, during this period of limited blogging I pose you the following scruple...

You stumble across some photographs, online, of a colleague. The photographs are of them naked. It is not clear from the context if the person in the photographs knows they have been posted online or not. What do you do?

I wrote a little while back about Pages, Screens and MVC. The motivation for the post was to help me explain why my thoughts around software and the web had changed over time. It also tied in nicely with Ian's first post on Paget. The second round of Paget makes substantial changes and improves on the original design in many ways.

Following that Ian points us at Paul James's post, Introducing the RMR Web Architecture. Ian says The Web is RMR not MVC and in the comments on that post we see some discussion about RMR being simply MVC using other names. We had a similar discussion over email internally.

I'm very proud to announce that Library Services at the University of Huddersfield has just done something that would have perhaps been unthinkable a few years ago: we've just released a major portion of our book circulation and recommendation data under an Open Data Commons/CC0 licence. In total, there's data for over 80,000 titles derived from a pool of just under 3 million circulation transactions spanning a 13 year period. Free book usage data from the University of Huddersfield.

This is great to see from my POV on two levels, first a great set of data that has the potential to be really useful and secondly a clear statement of the terms under which it's released.