Google now lets you peek inside image-only PDFs, searching any text they happen to contain. This opens up a whole new class of documents to searching. For example, try this search: steady success in a volatile world. Check out the “view as HTML.” Download the PDF and try to select the text.

Now, imagine Google starts doing this to all image files. License plates? Business cards? Name tags? Sites like EverNote already offer this functionality. How long before it is part of search as well?

Today we begin to see the business model behind Google Book Search. Google announced a settlement in the lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers, some individual authors against Google Book Search. Amazingly enough, it not only leaves Google Book Search intact, but to my eye it seems to expand its offerings substantially. It almost appears that Google used the suit as an educational opportunity and convinced authors and publishers that the service Google could offer would be a win/win for all. Of course, they also paid $125M for the scans they made without permission (but that money goes toward setting up a Book Rights Registry which will try to determine who owns the copyright to out-of-print books so that they can be paid for any sales).

If this works, then the “snippets” will disappear from the out of print results; instead we will see full page results. Furthermore, for a (yet to be determined) price, we will be able to license access to the full books and put them on our Google “bookshelf.” That price is a key to the business model and the agreement, I’m sure. Suddenly authors and publishers have a way to “monetize” the “long tail” of the out of print catalog. That’s pretty revolutionary.

Now the urgency of Google’s effort to scan every work in some major libraries begins to make sense. With the competing Microsoft-led effort already hitting the skids it looks like Google will have some time to polish this model before the competition gets tough.

Of course, this agreement still has to be ratified by the court, so it may not be the shape of what is to come. Keep an eye on this space.

UPDATE: Harvard University Libraries opt out of the deal for many interesting reasons.

Ever since agreeing to participate in the Google book scan project, John Wilkin and the University of Michigan have been looking for a way to provide access to the vast digital resources they get from the project. They have today announced the HathiTrust, which includes partners from across the country (including Minnesota). This is a great site and a great start on a tough problem: can we, together, maintain free and open access to materials from our library collections? A nice story at ArsTechnica too.

The Library of Congress adopts handles to provide persistent links to federal legislation. As FGI states, though,

Well, it is certainly nice to be able to link to legislation with a persistent link! But it would be much better if one could click to create a link rather than following a 600 word description of how to link on another page.

That’s in the nature of handles and other persistent link via redirect schemes. They are a step in the right direction, anyway. (hat tip to Slashdot)

Thompson owns Endnote and has decided to sue the developers of Zotero (George Mason University) for (they claim) violating the EULA (end user license agreement) for Endnote by reverse engineering the Endnote style file format (.ens). This is fascinating on so many levels. (1) Thompson really thinks the way to build a customer base for reference manager software is to sue an academically produced, open source, Firefox plugin? (2) The case seems awfully weak given that the Zotero team has shipped nothing at all derived from .ens files. (3) Just how enforceable will EULAs (those contract terms attached to ripping open a software box or clicking “I read it” on a computer program) turn out to be?

I hope Thompson rots for this kind of behavior. Between this and suing to prevent others from citing law based on the page numbers they add to legal proceedings, I have pretty much decided they are on the wrong side of the IP issues I care about.

Librarians keep trying to encourage people to look beyond Google for answers. How many people do you think talk to librarians and how many read David Pouge. Today, David sent out an email telling people to “Use Google search for everything.”

When I want to search my own blog, I type “pogue blog tivo” and click “I’m Feeling Lucky.” Presto! I’m reading the post. Two steps.

In other words, there’s very little point in using the Search box within your favorite sites. Use Google to take you to that site and to the page you want within it. Works for Amazon (”amazon freakonomics”), ebay (”ebay delft figurine”), Define.com (”define ersatz”), Facebok (”facebook amy pomeroy”), any newspaper or magazine, and hundreds of other kinds of sites.

He does not even mention the built in calculator, package tracker, reverse phone directory, or mapping available via Google searches. How do we motivate people to go beyond this one stop shop?

An email exchange got me rolling this morning and I thought I’d share it here. It started when Mary quoted the Wikipedia to illuminate Barak Obama’s community organizing accomplishments.

After four years in New York City, Obama moved to Chicago to work as a community organizer for three years from June 1985 to May 1988 as director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Greater Roseland (Roseland, West Pullman, and Riverdale) on Chicago’s far South Side.[12][14] During his three years as the DCP’s director, its staff grew from 1 to 13 and its annual budget grew from $70,000 to $400,000, with accomplishments including helping set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants’ rights organization in Altgeld Gardens.[15]

Her respondent replied…

Thank you for your response by sending the info from Wikipedia. I will make an attempt to look into it. As you know, Wikipedia, is kind of a community organized “encyclopedia” is not the last word on anything because anybody who reads it can make changes in its content. There is no final word in Wikipedia. I’m sure that you have other more reliable sources that you could send me. In the meantime I will assume that what you sent me is accurate.

As far as your other remark about “executive experience” is concerned, perhaps we should have an understanding of the definition of terms. An executive is someone who makes decisions and is ultimately responsible for those decisions which effect numerous people. The ultimate executive in the country is the president; in a state is the governor; in a city is the mayor. Every executive has a sign on his desk, whether he or she likes it or not, THE BUCK STOPS HERE. Obama has not had that kind of experience yet. Obama has a public voting record of what he did as a state senator. We all know how he voted on 130 occasions. An executive does not have that luxury.

The commander of a large air wing does have to make executive decisions on a daily basis.

Actually, I’d suggest that the Wikipedia is one of the most reliable sources you can reference. It is well “policed” by it’s community and has strict rules on citation. Especially controversial articles, like the Obama article, get especially good attention.

The passage Mary quoted includes citations for all its facts from Who’s Who in America, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the New Republic, the Boston Globe, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, to name just a few. You are welcome to indulge in “data free research” (as my mom calls it) to form your opinions, but if you want a bit of data, the Wikipedia is not a bad place to start, as long as you don’t allow it to become your exclusive source.

As to executive ability: I’d agree, the good executives have a sign like “the buck stops here” on there desks. The better execs even mean it. But I’d say that one of the most “experienced” execs in the country would be George Bush, and he is anything but a buck-stops-here kind of guy. He’s more a blame-the-other-guy kind of executive. His excuses range from “poor intelligence” to “evil left wing media” and he wriggles out of any blame for any mistake. No decent exec is going to avoid making mistakes, but the best seek out strong insight into the reality of the situation around them and own their errors when they make them, adjusting strategy as required. “Experience” does not tell you much about how one will perform in an office like the presidency. Besides which, McCain has no more executive “experience” than Obama, so the point is rather moot. In fact, in the one executive role we can compare side by side, how they run their presidential campaigns, it is pretty clear that Obama is by far the more gifted executive.

I believe the more urgent point is which candidate is really willing to look at the world as it really is and find the best course for America in that world. The Bush administration has operated as though the lies it tells itself and us will become truth through repetition. Then they make decisions based on those lies which end up being incredibly wrong-headed. Fiction does not become truth through repetition. McCain seems happy to do the same, and his latest decision (Palin) is just more of the same. He can repeat as often as he like that she is qualified to be president, but you have to have pretty big blinders on to buy that fiction. If you like living in a fairy tale world where America is always number one and the rest of the world always bends to our will even if the message is being carried by a gifted hockey-mom who believes we are on a mission from God, by all means, vote McCain, he’s your man.

But if you think we need to adjust our world-view a bit, to consult real experts in foreign policy, to be nimble on our feet when dealing with real foreign power, ready to adjust strategy and consider alternatives, then you should be considering the qualities Obama has displayed during this long campaign and career. He is not afraid to face the real world, he is not afraid to draw the “best and brightest” around him, he is not even afraid to change is mind and choose the best path that presents itself at a given time. He will build a real “administration” not just a White House desperately managing a message. He will bring new blood to Washington that will help guide our government to a wiser course. He does not propose to do this alone, this campaign is not about him or McCain: it is about us and how ready we are to roll up our sleeves, face the real world, and work to change the course of our country.

We can start by facing facts, like those in the Wikipedia.

James Evans reports in Science magazine that electronic access to the science literature may be speeding consensus yet narrowing the range of ideas. As summarized at ArsTechnica:

The conclusion of all this statistical work was that, as more and more articles are readily available online, researchers, on average, cite fewer articles. The articles that are cited are newer, and fewer distinct articles receive attention. The results of the explosion of easily available articles, according to Evans, is that “researchers can more easily find prevailing opinion, they are more likely to follow it, leading to more citations referencing fewer articles.” As a side effect of this, a scientific consensus will typically form more rapidly. The other side of this is that papers containing ideas that don’t catch quickly will be forgotten by the scientific world much faster.

That does not seem like a wholly desirable effect. Unfortunately, being outside the bounds of a subscribing institution, the full text of the article is hidden from me for now.

I was creating a simple mosaic at my mother’s house on Kelley’s Island this past week. I have not worked with tile in over a year. I miss it and was really happy to be getting my hands dirty again.

Tile is fairly unforgiving. Hard to shape. Easy to break. While learning to make curves with the wet saw I got to thinking:

The perfect is not the enemy of the good,
it is the enemy of the beautiful!
Embrace the happy accident.

We spend a lot of time trying to perfect things, especially in libraries. We are fond of order and authority. We insist that systems perform flawlessly. We are perfectionists. Technology for libraries is hard, at least as hard as cutting tile. Developing services for faculty and students is an ever-evolving challenge. We don’t have time to perfect, in fact, when we try we miss the boat.

But we all want to be proud of our work, to feel we have done our best. Beauty is often born of the “happy accidents” of brush stroke, blade, or muse. If we are awake to those accidents, open to them, ready to flow with them rather than against them, to find out where they lead. Accidents often lead to interesting resolutions we might not have thought of. They can point the way to simpler solutions, exciting opportunities. They can provide a natural spontaneity that elicits wonder from the viewer or users. They can be delightful.

Insisting on perfection makes little room for this sort of beauty. I think we should work on being open to the happy accident, embracing its beauty in our work, bringing some wonder to the eyes of our community.

Tim Spauling of Librarything has put out a call for an open classification system for public libraries.

The Dewey Decimal System® was great for its time, but it’s outlived that. Libraries today should not be constrained by the mental models of the 1870s, doomed to tinker with an increasingly irrelevant system. Nor should they be forced into a proprietary system—copyrighted, trademarked and licensed by a single entity—expensive to adopt and encumbered by restrictions on publishing detailed schedules or coordinating necessary changes.

He notes that the effort is focused on publics because academics would have a much harder time moving large collections to a new scheme and the LC system already widely in use by academics is already in the public domain.

Check out Build the Open Shelves Classification if you are interested in helping out. Is OCLC really doing such a poor job with DDC?