BiblioTech Web

Yesterday Michael Stephens linked to a very thought-provoking video about students today and how they relate with technology. The main emphasis is on how that relates to how they’re being taught in school. Much of the content in the video is students communicating their answers (or parts of their answers) to the question “What is it like being a student today?” This question was asked on a Google Doc and 200 students collaborated in creating the document that led to this video.

Web 2.0, social networking, the social web… all different terms for the Internet phenomenon that is promoting greater interactivity and connectivity between people of similar interests. It’s also my term for what’s going on in Lake Tawakoni State Park in Texas. With SPIDERS!

Tonight on the way home from work I was listening to NPR’s All Things Considered and heard this story about spiders in a Texas state park. The spiders have teamed up to build a huge communal web that covers some very large trees and stretches for several hundred yards.

Instead of relying on what could be caught in their individual webs, these spiders have created what amounts to one gigantic web. The main trees in question form a curve around a pond which is a breeding ground for mosquitoes. They said that when you walked by these spiderwebs, you could hear this buzzing sound from the mosquitoes trapped in the webs. The spiders were eating so well that they weren’t getting to all the new mosquitoes getting caught in their webs.

Testimonial to the benefits of the Social Web!

I was recently told about a study reported in ScienceDaily (taken from a news release by the American Academy of Neurology) that showed that the damage to parts of the brain that results from exposure to lead (whether through occupational exposure, etc.) was significantly lower in people who read more. Reading helps build synapses and connections within the brain that help offset the effects of some kinds of brain damage.

As I was talking to my fellow librarians, we came to the humorous conclusion that reading books can help prevent damaged brain cells resulting from excessive drinking. Or at least you know you’re safer if you read. We envisioned a “Beer for Books” program to help promote reading!

So… want to justify those beers/martinis/orange spiced meads? Read more books!

You’ve probably heard that the Simpsons Movie is coming out this summer. Specifically, this Friday. The website has lots of fun things, including making your own Simpsons-style avatar and, of course, games. Seems like every movie has a website where you can play games related to the movie.

Anyway, there’s also a related website where you can upload a photo and “simpsonize” it. The website is pretty busy and often slow. I had to try several times just to get the page to load. Also, I haven’t been successful in saving the image I created or even emailing it to myself. I had to to a PrintScreen and paste the image into MS Paint and cut out just the image. Anyway, that’s what’s displayed here. I had to work hard to find a picture that would work. It has to be a closeup of the head and shoulders, with decent contrast and a big enough size. They tell you all that on the site, though.

If you Simpsonize a photo of yourself, please comment on my post here with a link to your new picture.

How cool is THIS? Apparently Art Garfunkel has kept a list of the books that he has read over the last 30 years. Listing what someone has read over an extended period of time provides an interesting profile of a person, letting you see what has influenced them over time. Kind of like getting a peek into their minds at various stages of their life. With the technologies we have available today, it should be easy for us to keep a similar list. And whenever you start keeping that list, you’ll wish you’d started earlier.

Check it out Art Garfunkel’s library. It’s quite interesting and inspiring.

Thanks to Steven Cohen at Library Stuff who got it from Jessa Crispin at Bookslut who got it from David at Largehearted Boy.

There’s a new search engine out. This one’s different in that it attempts to be a virtual librarian or reference service, except she’s not your stereotypical librarian!

It’s called Ms. Dewey and she’s a real person. Well, okay, she’s a virtual person in that you’re not interacting with a live person, but they did record a live person to create Ms. Dewey. When you type in your search, she has a smart remark to say before your results come up. They’ve done a great job of creating a huge bank of responses, so they often match up with whatever your search terms were.

It’s almost like asking a real person! Oh, and I have to say that they picked someone who is pretty hard to pin down ethnically. Turns out she from Indian and Dutch parents. She sort of has a look like the people from The Time Machine who represented many thousands of years of interbreeding. It’s the look that keeps people from saying, “She’s not my type,” since she sort of every type. Pan-ethnic, I guess.

Anyway, then you get your results in a list with summaries and links. Pretty normal results, overall. I was able to find relevant results when I used enough search terms at one time. But what will keep people coming back to this site is the cute girl with the awesome smile who teases and insults you based on your search terms. The results aren’t that easy to work with, since you can only view about 3 or 4 items with scrolling, and you have to wait 5-10 seconds while Ms. Dewey makes a (usually sarcastic) comment about you or your search topic. The only thing this search engine can offer that other, more established search engines can’t is the “virtual human” element.

I predict that it will get a lot of hits for its novelty factor, but it will wear off and people will still keep using their normal search engines. At least until the interface for Ms. Dewey is updated. Now if they promoted that the first few hits were somehow going to be by far the most relevant for you, then it wouldn’t be so bad. But you can’t customize or create advanced searches, they don’t even have any tips on doing that, and you can’t tell what search engine is driving your results. Then again, I suppose that defeats the purpose.

Envision a futuristic Star-Trek style computer. You ask it questions, it gives you answers. I think that’s how this Ms. Dewey was designed to act. No frills or complications. Just ask and I’ll tell you. And no more “advanced searches” and dealing with terminology. Just a natural-language interface. Eventually I can foresee a system that allows you to pick your own personal avatar and interact with them to find the information you need.

Summary: interesting and novel. The search engine of the future. Just not yet. But at least SOMEbody took the first step heading down this road.