Google Voice coming soon

Just read the New York Times write up on GrandCentral ("One Number to Ring them All", and meandered over to the site to see just how cool it is.

Impact for libraries?
Upside: You'll have a better chance of actually reaching people, to prompt returns, ILL requests available, things like this. Free conference calls mean you may be able to save some telecom expenses, possibly.

Downside: Local users may not have local phone numbers.

Other thoughts?

The big picture, as I see it: Innovation, helped along by Google, is not limited strictly to libraries. Now the phone company (along with the media, news and advertising industries) is getting in on the action. Hey, suddenly being in the library field makes us look as cutting-edge as we feel somedays. We've already experienced the Googlization learning curve and are on the optimistic upswing from it.

Google working on images

Today I was randomly looking for chamber of commerce signs online. You know--the decal ones that people used to put on their storefront windows. Maybe they still do. But they aren't taking photos of them...at least from my 2 minute search. But what did come up was interesting--the Google Image Labeler.
It's basically a game that you can play, to tag images with a random other person who happens to be online. You get points for all your tags. I don't know what you do with your points...maybe redeem in the Google merchandise store?

This Image Labeler game, plus the article in the NYTimes about the Automated Image search, makes me think that Google has the hots for images right now.

Of course, the two efforts are probably not related at all, except by proximity in my own mind...the automated image search is geared for products. The labeler might be for something else entirely. And they're going about it completely different ways.

Distributed cataloging, anyone? Maybe we should add some gaming aspects to Connexion for all the Gen Y'ers coming up through the ranks.

Banning Google and other ideas

There's a lively debate about information literacy and critical evaluation skills over at The Wired Campus today. Apparently a British professor is expected to ban students from using Google or Wikipedia in her course.
The post compares Google to "white bread for the mind."

What does everyone think about that statement? I loathe the idea that I'm feeding my brain white bread. (Who eats white bread anymore, anyhow?) But I also usually turn to Google/Yahoo for my first attempt at solving an information need. Now, I am almost never doing academic research, and perhaps there is the difference. I guess it is simply a question of using the right tool for the right use. Because surely these search engines/wikis are simply tools to be used at appropriate times, I agree with eFoundations.

At the risk of sounding like Andy Rooney here (who is forever on my black list because he dissed librarians), it reminds me of my theory that people who shop exclusively at Wal-Mart are statistically predisposed to have a lower quality of life. I have this theory because almost nothing in Wal-Mart seems to be made with attention to detail, design or beauty. It is all about function and price. And sometimes as a consumer, all you care about is function and price.

But other times you are willing to spend the money for high-style Italian leather sofas. But if you only shop at Wal-Mart to the exclusion of all else, you have no hope of ever even seeing the beautiful sofa because you mistakenly think the only universe available to you is what is on aisle 10.

As a shopper, you need to know there are times for Wal-Mart and there are times for Roche Bobois. And plenty of times for something in between. The same might go for information literacy? Or is it too crass a comparison.

Surely in Doubt

“I feel rich,
I feel poor,
I'm in doubt,
I feel sure.”
“I Must Be In Love” – The Rutles (Web site ; WCid ; Wikipedia) (Song composed by Neil Innes)

Dateline: 1 April 2007

Well, it looks like we’ve been scooped!

Rumors of OCLC’s pending sale to a certain search appliance company have made a full round on the Web, and we at OCLC didn’t even get a memo! (N.B. Google did have an announcement today, but it wasn’t really OCLC-related...) Hrrmph!

I direct you to the following posts:
Google Buys OCLC, Announces New Products
Google Acquires OCLC, World Domination Near Total
Google Buying OCLC: An Early Analysis

This news represents a significant speed-up of the calendar for such a merger as rumored earlier by Ed Valauskas (as reported here) which gave us till at least 2014.

Frankly, we were hoping for the additional time to allow us to try and clean up those pesky ending-marks-of-punctuation* shortfalls in WorldCat (there is company lore that OCLC Research has a full-stop recycling bin in its office area – they take some full-stops out of the records, put the full-stops back in the records ; there have even been persistent rumors that our Dewey Services colleagues once thought about approaching ALA Editions to sell the surplus as micro-Dots (for those who remember poor Dot, a cheerful Dewey icon now relegated to a screensaver, sniff. ;( but ALA chose to offer other options instead (search "Dewey").)

“News” indeed! (Chuckle!)

Well in the spirit of things then, watch this space for the announcement of the availability of the Google WorldCat deluxe card catalog – 100M+ card sets and counting... ;)

(*For you non-catalogers, library cataloging rules provide simple-yet-difficult-to-follow rules regarding the correct marks of punctuation to separate different parts of a catalog entry. And yes, Alice, I can sense your eyes starting to glaze over now... ;)

[Image courtesty of Ben Ostrowsky]