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May 31, 2007
Down with Dewey?
The Arizona Republic reports that the Perry Branch of the Maricopa County Library System will drop the Dewey Decimal system of organizing books and instead organize by topic just like book stores do.
It's an interesting experiment and one that could prove to be quite successful. What's lost here, though, is the fact that Dewey Decimal does organize materials by topic. If you take a look at the image at the top of this page, you'll see some books with labels having Dewey Decimal numbers of 320-point-something-or-other. The 320 indicates that these materials focus on topics relevant to political science. The number after the decimal point (the something-or-other) provides some focus -- perhaps a specific theory, event, etc....
The numbers also serve as physical addresses -- exact locations where you will find any given item. It works a lot like house addresses. Imagine a world in which we didn't have house addresses, but instead said things like, "They live in the Hilltop section of town", or "She lives near the hospital." This, I think, is where the shelve-by-topic experiment falls short. It's great for making generalizations, but not so great for locating specific items. It'll be interesting to see how this works out.
Posted by AnthonyMcMullen at 2:45 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
May 25, 2007
Stop spam. Read books
That's the tagline of reCAPTCHA, an ingenious piece of software that takes an exisiting application and makes it better. Anybody who's spent more than a few hours online has run into a CAPTCHA, short for Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart. CAPTCHAs are used to prevent spam and other undesirable activity. The image near the top of this entry is an example of a basic CAPTCHA.
The creators of reCAPTCHA estimate that about 60 million of these CAPTCHAs are solved every day. At 10 seconds per CAPTCHA, that translates to about 150,000 hours of wasted work each day. Why not put this wasted work to use?
reCAPTCHA does just that. In a joint effort with the Internet Archiveand their massive book-scanning project, reCAPTCHA takes pieces of text that can't be read by scanning software and uses them in a traditional CAPTCHA interface. Once the person on the user side keys in the text, the "translated" data is sent back to the Internet Archive.
Posted by AnthonyMcMullen at 1:59 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 10, 2007
Cool web tools: part 3
[Part three in a series of entries on cool web tools]
I haven't contibuted to the "cool web tools" continuing series in a couple of weeks. It's not for a lack of material, though.... I have my own perosnal favorites and also enjoy reading others' top lists. For instance, Read/Write Web recently published their "Top 17 innovations outside of Google". And Information Week Magazine included in their May 7 issue an article on the greatest web software ever written. Fun stuff!
Here are the latest entries to my growing list:
- YourDraft.com : You don't even need to register for this service. Simply create your document in the WYSIWYG editor, enter your email address, and save the document. YourDraft will email two links to you; one is a link to a "read only" copy of your doc, and the other links to a "read / write" copy of the doc.
- PDF Filler : PDF Filler allows you to upload from a file or URL any PDF-based form so that you can fill it out online and then print it. Perfect for those of us with sloppy penmanship.
- WorldCat Identities : Here's OCLC's latest cool release... WorldCat Identities draws upon information in OCLC's WorldCat database (the same service Reeves uses to full interlibrary loans) to compile interesting profiles of authors. Here's a link to the page for Larry McMurtry. I'm particularly drawn to the Publication Timeline graph.
- NameVoyager : This is fun. Simply enter a name, and NameVoyager will create a graphical display of that name's popularity over time [see graphic at top of this entry].
That's all for now.
Posted by AnthonyMcMullen at 1:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack