Library Blogs

Our recent article in D-Lib Magazine is a follow-up to the McCown et al. article in IEEE Internet Computing two years ago, in which the researchers investigated the percentage of URLs from OAI records in Google, Yahoo and MSN search indexes. We were interested in whether Google in particular had increased the number of OAI-based resources in its search index.

Three weeks after it was launched, we can say a little bit about MBooks collection builder usage. Right now, there are 47 public collections (more than half were created by LIT staff) and 170 personal collections.

Interface design librarian extraordinaire Suz sent me a link to this awesome Game Console Controller Family Tree, where you can see how controllers for game consoles have evolved over the years.

Managed to accomplish a few things for the game archive over the past couple of days.

A few more things we've had donated recently.

Not much to report this week. Electrical work has started again in the game room. I should soon have an actual budget account so I can start ordering things.One of the things I have to make a decision on is a large flat panel display. We'll be wall-mounting it so that people can play the latest generation games in a group setting.I've read that for gaming purposes, plasma screens are preferable to LCDs, due to the potential of greater lag time with LCD.

As previously mentioned, we've been working on expanding the functionality of our MBooks system. The new interface now allows users to create their own collections of MBooks items and view public collections created by others. Users can also do full text searching across all items within a collection.

Things are still going slow with the game collection, but they should start to pick up in July as I'll finally be able to start purchasing games and systems and hardware and stuff. No worries, everything is still on track for an opening in mid to late August. In the meanwhile we've received a couple of classic game systems as donations. These are the games from my own childhood!

We're in a bit of a lull on activity for the game collection: Waiting for the fiscal year to kick over so that we have a budget to buy things; waiting for various dominoes to fall in the room renovation; waiting to interview applicants for the manager position; etc. Monday morning I'm meeting with one of the managers from the electronic cataloging unit to discuss how exactly we're going to catalog these things. Should be interesting! She asked me to give her a list of the donated games we've received, so I figured I'd share.

Last month I attended the annual Digital Library Federation spring meeting and David Rumsey, renowned for his collection of historical maps, was one of the keynote speakers. Prompted by David Rumsey’s map ticker and what he said in passing about "moving among the maps" in Second Life, I’ve been brooding about the perceived lack of browsability in the digital library context. How would we "move among the books" in MBooks?