theorywatch

Since somebody else has now taken over the entertaining but entirely thankless job of creating fun fantasy questions that will never be asked in our comprehensive exams, that obviously frees me up to post other things that may be a bit more prosaic but potentially useful: such as a link to Tim Spalding of LibraryThing’s recent post on the ngc4lib listserv about the new Google Booksearch API.

For people in my Digital Collections class, this is well worth reading (and trying the tester Tim Spalding has set up at LibraryThing). In fact, those people in the class who take all of this (especially the use, re-use, and non-use of library metadata) seriously (and I hope they do!) should already be among the 2,000 subscribers that ngc4lib has. After all, this metadata is not only our intellectual infrastructure: it’s our intellectual capital.

classification, collections, discovery tools