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April 13, 2005
Two CNI project briefings
On Monday, April 4, at the CNI meeting after the opening plenary session I attended two small group "project briefings" where libraries and other organizations give reports on specific activities.
The first was about a project Stanford University Library is doing with the software developer Grokker. Stanford has been collaborating with Grokker to develop the software's federated searching capabilities and the presentation of search results, which purports to return search results in a way that is more useful and much easier to navigate than the usual list format. Grokker groups results topically and presents them in an interactive visual map. Stanford has done a fair amount of marketing of the Grokker project on their campus. It is clearly still in the realm of research project, although it was possible to see the potential, especially for students who think more visually than verbally.
The second session of the afternoon that I attended (out of a choice of 7 or 8 possibilities) was devoted to a project that the library of the University of Minnesota has started to provide personal, class-related and departmental blogs for the students, faculty and staff of the university. Anyone with a university network ID and password can create a library-hosted blog. They are using the Movable Type platform, as is Case. They have not yet, however, upgraded to the version 3 of Movable Type that Case uses.
Several interesting facts:
- ~65% of blogs are abandoned within the first month.
- ~50% of blogs have one post or fewer (ie, people sign up, but never post anything.
- FERPA regulations have come into play, because several faculty members have required students to participate in class blogs, but FERPA prohibits the requirement that students divulge their private information. U of Minnesota has gotten around this by creating group blogs where all of the authors are anonymous.
- The University of Minnesota libraries plan in the long run to archive and preserve the content of the blogs as part of the "cultural memory" of the institution, in much the same way that the student newspaper is a formalized cultural memory. (The question was raised as to whom the blog data belongs to. University of Minnesota is considering a "click through" license that will require bloggers to grant the library the right to preserve the postings. Bloggers can now delete any or all of their blogs at any time, and this will continue to be the case.
- They plan to upgrade the search engine to something other than the built-in Movable Type search capability, since it does not work well for large numbers of posts.
Posted by tdr at April 13, 2005 02:55 PM
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