World Digital Library Debuts Online…04.20.09

The Washington Post reported today:

“A globe-spanning U.N. digital library seeking to display and explain the relics of all human cultures has gone into operation on the Internet for the first time, serving up mankind’s accumulated knowledge in seven languages for students around the world.

U.S. Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, who launched the project four years ago, said the ambition was to make available on an easy-to-navigate site, free for scholars and other curious people anywhere, a collection of primary documents on all subjects and authoritative explanations from the planet’s leading libraries.

The site (www.wdl.org) has put up the Japanese work that is considered the first novel in history, for instance, along with the Aztecs’ first mention of the Christ child in the New World and the works of ancient Arab scholars piercing the mysteries of algebra, each entry flanked by learned commentary. ‘There are many one-of-a-kind documents,’ Billington said in an interview.

The World Digital Library, which will be officially inaugurated Tuesday at the Paris headquarters of UNESCO, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, has started small, with about 1,200 documents and their explanations from scholars in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian. But it is designed to accommodate an unlimited number of such texts, charts and illustrations from as many countries and libraries as want to contribute…”

Twitter Q & A Library Reference Service Potential…03.15.09

(Image: quartz.syr.edu/Symposium/agenda.html)

This is interesting and potentially helpful excerpt from the Digital Reference blog with a post from Stephen Francoeur titled Twitter as a Q&A Service:

“Thanks to a Twitter message from Dana Longley (aka disobedientlibon Twitter) I learned today about an interesting attempt to turn a subset of Twitter messages into a Q&A service. 

AskOnTwitter searches for any tweet with the phrase ‘Does anyone know’ and displays them on its home page. Typically, those messages are questions in which someone is using Twitter to query a broad audience. AskOnTwitter aggregates all those tweets and gives you a way to reply to them using your own Twitter account…

This seems like another opportunity for librarians to publicly offer their assistance in the tradition of the Slam the Boards project that was launched a year and a half ago.”

“New Concepts in Digital Reference”…02.25.09

Virtual Dave (R.David Lankes), who is involved with Reference Extract, points out what appears to be a very interesting, 64 pg. lecture titled New Concepts in Digital Reference that is now available (Synthesis lectures are available online to all users at licensing institutions or by individual purchase and download from the Morgan & Claypool site)- a portion of the abstract is related here:

“…Digital reference is a deceptively simple concept on its face: ‘the incorporation of human expertise into the information system.‘ This lecture seeks to explore the question of how human expertise is incorporated into a variety of information systems, from libraries, to digital libraries, to information retrieval engines, to knowledge bases. What we learn through this endeavor, begun primarily in the library context, is that the models, methods, standards, and experiments in digital reference have wide applicability. We also catch a glimpse of an unfolding future in which ubiquitous computing makes the identification, interaction, and capture of expertise increasingly important. It is a future that is much more complex than we had anticipated. It is a future in which documents and artifacts are less important than the contexts of their creation and use…”

Digital Reference Trends…02.09.09

The Digital Reference blog post Trends in Digital Reference today  listed the following overview of  ”notable things going on in digital reference in the last few years” so I am “noting” them here:

“New IM/chat software options

• Library H3lp (allows for collaborative IM reference service)
• Open access software used by L-net’s statewide service in Oregon and KnowItNow’s statewide service in Ohio
• Increased use of widgets for chat/IM (QuestionPoint’s Qwidget, Meebo, Chatango, etc.)

Public sharing of reference interactions

• L-net’s Conversation Archive
• Reference Extract
• QuestionPoint’s KnowledgeBase (see also related posts on QuestionPoint blog)

Outreach by reference librarians on answer boards

• Answer Board Librarians

Growing interest in SMS reference (text message reference)

• Mosio’s Text A Librarian service
• Southeastern University of Louisiana (a long-running service)
• Yale University’s Txt a Science Librarian and Maui Community College’s Ask Ellen (related slide presentation)

Increase in collaborative/cooperative reference services

• Collaborative Virtual Reference Symposium 2007
• Library H3lp finally making it possible for IM software to be used for collaborative reference services
• QuestionPoint service adds University of California libraries, New York Public Library, Brooklyn Public Library, and Queens Library to its cooperative reference service”