Welcome to the first edition of the Google Librarian Newsletter.
This newsletter was conceived at the 2005 ALA conference in Chicago, where Google hosted a booth in the exhibit hall. We spent three days chatting with librarians about Google: what you liked, what you didn't like, and where you saw opportunities to work together to help people find useful, relevant information.
In an effort to keep those conversations going, we're launching this newsletter. Consider it a first step toward what we hope will be a long and mutually beneficial relationship. We anticipate sending it out quarterly, with the occasional special feature as appropriate.
This introductory issue features an article written to address one of the most frequent questions we've heard from librarians: How does Google index the web, and, more important, how does it rank the results? Matt Cutts, an engineer in our Quality group, explains the basics of indexing and sheds some light on some of the algorithms we use to determine where a site should appear on results pages. He also suggests exercises school librarians can do to help students better understand how Google works.
But this newsletter wouldn't be much of a conversation if it were written solely by folks at Google. Future issues will feature articles contributed by librarians and library supporters, links to library-related web sites, and updates on Google products and services that can help you in your work. We invite you to send us your thoughts: your questions about Google, your suggestions for articles, and your stories of how librarians use and keep up with technology on the job. We'll do our best to use your feedback to make each issue more relevant and useful to the library community.
Thanks for reading, and stay tuned.
Jodi Healy
Manager, Library Partnership Team
The 21st Century Library is an interesting commentary with reference to the ALA keynote address by Andrei Codrescu and in preparation for a NPR Talk of the Nation topic on libraries.
Talk of the Nation is supposed to discuss the "Bookless Library." The blurb states: "Information technology changes as soon we think we understand it. We look at how libraries keep up and redefine their role. How would you design a library for the 21st century?"
I was unable to locate the program or blurb on their site. It may have been postponed or something but should be worth listening to or reading over the transcript if or when it becomes available.
Update:"This program has been postponed
due to the unavailability of a key guest."
Recently I’ve been working with libraries on something we’re excited to announce for Google Scholar users. Libraries are fantastic repositories of scholarship, and we want to make them as visible and accessible as possible. We’ve just expanded our Library Search program in Google Scholar to help people around the world find works of their interest in local libraries. That program now includes links to libraries in Hungary, Iceland, Israel, Portugal, Sweden, and Switzerland.
If for example you're a student in Sweden searching Google Scholar for [chemistry], you can click the “Library Search (Sweden)” link underneath the book titled "Principles of polymer chemistry" to see the list of Swedish libraries that hold the book. Then just pay a visit to one of those libraries to reserve it. If you’re outside Sweden, you can activate the Swedish library catalog links from the "Library Links" box in the "Scholar preferences" by searching for Sweden.
If you are a library patron and can't find the books from your library, ask your local library to participate in this program. If you are a librarian and would like to work with us to help users find scholarly literature in your library, please contact us.
We'd like to thank our union catalog partners for helping to make this happen. Here's hoping researchers worldwide will use it to find and build on the amazing collections in the world's libraries.
Wikibooks are coming. They likely will confront the homogenization, the slow publication and adoption processes, and the need for political correctness in textbook publishing. Wikibooks also could ease the costs of buying, distributing, and replacing textbooks.
Wikis are editable, collaborative, freely licensed online projects.
Imagine your textbook in a new way. Imagine a book that grows as knowledge grows. Imagine teachers teaching the same content contributing their collective knowledge as well as their best strategies and resources to keep the book fresh. Imagine scholars outside the education field contributing their research. Imagine textbooks customized to meet the needs of different locations with different standards or, more important, the needs of different learners.
Wikitexts may provide an equitable solution for the millions of students around the world with some access to computers but limited access to print texts.
And it'll be free to anyone with a Denver library card and a speedy Internet connection.
"It makes it convenient, because you don't have to come to the library," Michelle Jeske, the library's manager of Web Information Services, said Thursday. "As long as you have a library card, you can have the library come to you."
More at link.
In recent years, Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive Jeff Bezos has explained his company's deliberately paced approach to the digital-music business by saying he wants to avoid simply imitating the dominant player in the field, Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes Music Store.
Now Amazon, the world's No. 1 online retailer, is in advanced talks with the four global music companies about a digital-music service with a range of features designed to set it apart. Among them: Amazon-branded portable music players, designed and built for the retailer, and a subscription service that would deeply discount and preload those devices with songs, not unlike mobile phones that are included with subscription plans as part of the deal.
Instead of a plastic card for a bank, we could have a plastic card with a bank. The stone-pillared edifices that used to house banks are full of nightclubs and gyms now; people bank electronically, they use ATMs. An ATM is merely a device to spit paper. Why not make every card an ATM? Tomorrow's microchips won't lack for capacity. A cell phone is like yesterday's switching station, a laptop is yesterday's supercomputer. Why settle for a bank account when you could buy a cheap bank-on-a-chip?
Instead of price tags, we could have radio frequency identification tags that calculate price as you touch the item. Once they're stamped with an inked price, objects have to settle for that value, but why don’t prices change instantaneously in response to demand?
Instead of credit ratings to acquire capital, credit records could become capital. If I'm superb at shopping, a super-user whose word is law for those who trust me for recommendations, how come I'm not paid to shop? Maybe Mr. A minds his p's and q's and never touches his capital--while Mr. B is a player who plunges into debt and escapes it repeatedly.
Instead of "socially responsible investment," we might be confronted with money that refuses to let itself be spent. Electronic funds might double check themselves against a blacklist before they move from one chip to another. Touch a terrorist bank account, and you might find yourself with not just a refusal of funds but also with instant taps on your phone and e-mail.
Just as the iPod transformed the way individuals connect with their personal media collections, so too is it changing the way libraries help the public connect with mass media collections. Both iPods and iTunes enable libraries to provide new distribution methods for digital collections of books, music, and now, video. Yet with these digital collections come issues of copyright and access that pose new challenges for modern librarians.
I think there are 6 trends in technology which all have something to do with physical objects and they all end up to a new kind of cultural sensibility for objects:
- Interactive Chips: We now have objects can be labeled with interactive chips, that can be labelled with unique identity - RFID, electronic barcoding, arphids (rf-i-d for french)
- Geolocation: positioning systems for physical objects in the cartesian environment
- Powerful Search Engines: we can actually find things digitally, it’s not a project for google, we will end up googling objects pretty soon
- 3D modeling for objects, virtual design, computer-aided design, computer aided manufacturing
- Rapid Prototyping of objects: fabricators, computer fabricators, moving making objects from virtual design in a single manufacturing step: fabjects, blogjects
- Cradle-to-Cradle Recycling: Transparent production, watching objects move digitally from the moment to which the design to the moment when they’re torn apart and recycled.
These are 6 big trends, all put in one bag. The outcome is that people will interact with objects in an unprecedented way; essentially we will end up with manufactured objects those information support system will be so extensive that there will be regarded as material extension of immaterial systems (we see them as hard copies of data-support systems). This would take 30 years away. I tend to try to describe what it would be like to live in these circumstances.
Investigations by Google found that BMW's German website influenced search results to ensure top ranking when users searched for "used car."
Google has now reduced BMW's page rank to zero, ensuring the company no longer appears at the top.
BMW admitted using so-called "doorway pages" to boost search rankings, but denied any attempt to mislead users.
Just as powerful as the preservation aspect of Google Book Search is the fact our venture will result in a magnitude of discovery that seems almost incomprehensible. I could not have imagined that in my lifetime so much diffuse information literally would be at my fingertips.
It is an educator’s dream, knowing that the vast body of information held in the libraries of Michigan, Stanford, Harvard, Oxford and the New York Public Library will be universally searchable and, in the case of public domain works, accessible.
My parents were both teachers. My mother would take me and my two sisters to the public library in Cedar Falls, Iowa, and I remember it was like opening the doors to a different world with each trip we made. I was forever discovering entire new veins of titles, books that were simply enchanting to impressionable young girls.
Later on, as an undergraduate in college, I all but lived in the library. If I wasn’t holed up and reading in a carrel, I was simply roaming the stacks and uncovering new subjects and ideas.
I cannot tell you how exhilarating – and how humbling – it is to know that this digital enterprise, with our university’s books, will provide that same joy of discovery for people everywhere, from Iowa to Indonesia.
Check out this cool new open source browser (and tagger, and favorites manager, and search results manager, and blog poster) called Flock. It's still in development, but you can download a beta version and play around with it. You can do a bunch of things with it (at least thirteen different things)...I uploaded this blog post using it, for example*.
1. Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)...and 97 more!
2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
3. A screaming comes across the sky. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
We already know, of course, that politicians live primarily for re-election and typically view the truth as an impediment to the higher purpose of unfettered self-aggrandizement.
Still, we can be excused for feeling mildly nauseated when fresh confirmation of this distasteful aspect of modern politicking surfaces.
The latest episode appeared last week in the form of a report that aides to Rep. Marty Meehan, a Massachusetts Democrat, deleted references to his broken term-limits pledge and massive campaign war chest on Wikipedia.
Then the trusty editors at Wikipedia got together and compiled a list of over 1,000 edits made by Internet addresses allocated to the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. The IP address subsequently was blocked and unblocked.
An extensive analysis reveals how juvenile official Washington secretly is, behind the mind-numbingly serious talk of public policy.
The inpiration for Elf came about because my friend started to receive a lot of overdue fines -- he and his wife were having a hard time keeping track of their library books and videos at their local library. They have three kids and the library is a big part of their lives (everyone has a library card). At first they tried a manual system where each kid took out exactly five items. That helped a bit but it forced a fixed reading diet on the kids and the kids weren't particularly keen on being limited this way. So he asked if some software I was working on at time could be adapted to help him and his family keep track of their library borrowings."
Long before the Internet was commonly available - and certainly before the concept of a "Wikki" - Debbie had the idea that it would be useful to have a reference work suggesting which book of an unfamiliar author would be best to read first. Start reading an author with a poor or atypical example of his work, she observed, and you would likely never read that writer again—perhaps losing in the process a world of pleasure and knowledge. On the other hand, since there would seldom be one right book to read first, the resource would have to be a compendium of opinions.
Recommendations are based on the collective intelligence (meaning: anyone can add anything to any author page). It needs a lot of care and, obviously, more users, but it could be a useful tool.
Debbie died in 2004, at the age of ninety. The website has been created in loving memory of her and her very good idea.
The search company still reported a profit of $372.2 million for the quarter, nearly double the year-ago period. But thanks in part to higher-than-expected tax rates, that number fell far short of what analysts were looking for.
While the company's share price plunged (down $34 at this post), bloggers weren't ready to throw in the towel just yet. However there were concerns that the company may be coming off the "do no wrong" era and settling down for more modest gains, at least financially.
