I arrived on the red-eye flight from London>Turin just in time to catch the end of Bonaria Biancu’s workshop at Elisad, Do It Ourselves: Social Technologies for Information Retrieval, so I’m really pleased to see that she has posted a brief synopsis on her blog, The Geek Librarian (Google English translation here, with all the ...

When I worked full-time as a taxonomy designer for a big international database company, one of my key learning experiences from our user testing was that, no matter how good the browse options you offer, the majority of people will always prefer to search rather than to browse. I was, therefore, unsurprised but very interested by this finding ...

Thanks to Pamela Ben-Eliezer for pointing out Richard Horton’s opinion piece on libraries in this week’s Lancet In it, he provides an entertaining tour of the library’s historical purpose as custodian of knowledge and argues that today’s medical libraries should band together to provide a global digital storehouse of ...

Yesterday Tim O'Reilly blogged at unusual length about the attack by Microsoft on Google at the Association of American Publishers (AAP). What he had to say is unsurprising to those who have been following the protracted debate on copyright and the right of Google to scan books from libraries. AAP is suing Google for scanning books from libraries. ...

Earlier this week, The British Library announced the launch of its new web site, and I looked at it and was not immediately impressed. It took a posting from Lorcan Dempsey to make me look again, and realise why their new look had not inspired me! This is ''BL does Google''; this is an attempt to woo the masses by emulating what the masses know, ...