BookArmy post from BoingBoing.net

My husband sent me a post from the popular blog Boing Boing about a new website, in beta (public trial mode), BookArmy.com, that aims to “link every book and every author on earth.” It’s an interesting concept and a potentially great tool to find new books and authors.

I’d like to see it again when it becomes more well-used and fleshed out. I signed up as a user and made suggestions for similar books to Twilight, but I found that suggesting the books was very frustrating. Adding three at a time was unweildy, since every second choice I made would invalidate the first. So I finally went in and one by one added three books. This is a beta so these are the kind of things they are working to fix. I highly recommend signing up and suggesting books you like that may be similar to other books you’ve read. This will help BookArmy be more successful. Like I said, I love the idea.

How it will compare to databases to find books that we pay for our users to use, like Novelist Plus (you’ll need your library card number handy to see this)? I don’t know. I doubt it will ever be as good as a professionally created database, but it has the advantage of being free and open on the web. To use Novelist you have to be a member of a library that pays for a subscription.

Here’s the post (oh, and let me just say to Steve Jobs, “So, people don’t READ anymore? Au contraire, pal”):

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/04/22/bookarmy-a-lastfm-fo.html

BookArmy: a last.fm for books
Posted by Cory Doctorow, April 22, 2009 10:40
Mark sez,

Bookarmy.com is a London-based start-up aiming to be the last.fm of books — and we’re gathering steam on our mission to link every book and every author on earth.

A month into public beta, the site’s already throwing up some curious connections. Neil Gaiman and Lewis Caroll? Ray Bradbury and George Orwell? Charles Stross and Fyodor Dostoevsky? Anything goes: Bookarmy recommendations are generated by members themselves, who can mix and match similar reads from a full bibliographic database. The site also give readers space to host online libraries of their favourite books — and compares their tastes to refine its recommendations.

Big-name authors already active on Bookarmy include ‘Alchemist’ author Paulo Coelho and ‘Jumper’ scribe Steven Gould. Publisher HarperCollins recently took a stake in the business, which should mean not just bags of multimedia on the way but potentially access to all manner of great content as the ebook revolution gathers pace!

Book Army (Thanks, Mark!)
posted in: Book , Happy Mutants

Poll–Doubt–Is Father Flynn Innocent or Guilty or are you not sure?

Since we just showed Doubt at the library movie night, I thought it would be interesting to create a little poll. Tell us what you think, if you’ve seen the movie!

Music Plasma: Cool Tool for finding new music

This particular site (MusicPlasma.com)has been around for a while now (about 5 years), and I had forgotten about it until recently. The idea is that you enter a band or musician that you like and a word cloud of related/similar bands will appear, those closest being the most closely related, the ones farther out being less similar. Each band cloud can be clicked on to see similar bands to those bands.

They have added movies and actors, but I still find the music the most effective search. Go check it out–it’s worth hours of fun

P.S. On the left-hand side is a link that will link the selected band to Amazon, where you can listen to free sample clips to see if you like the band.

Hall of Mammals at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History

Click thumbnails to see larger image

-contributed by staffer Shannon Wertzberger

Microsoft to pull Encarta Software from Stores and Web

This is a little sad, considering it was a decent encyclopedia program, one of the first to replace physical encyclopedias. Here’s the link to the Yahoo blog article explaining more

Of course, my husband’s first comment when I told him was, “Oh, yeah! Encarta! I forgot all about that…”

Interesting National Library

I saw this on the way back from the Cherry Blossom Festival and thought, “How appropriate!” This is now my favorite offering by the National Park Service!

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Samples of the Tulip Library:

Impressions from CIL 2009

Well, I haven’t been on blogging this conference as much as last year’s, the main reason being that there is no time during the day and at night the Wi-Fi is bogged down horribly. My main complaint from last year seems to have been addressed, (yeay user surveys!) that the descriptions for some programs were not accurate and many of the seminars were geared toward academic libraries. Several of the seminars were divided up, like CMS for Public Libraries, and CMS for Academic Libraries. That was nice so I knew which one to avoid. However, the pickings were slim as far as decent seminars to attend. They did the whole Open Source track again, and nothing seems to have changed there and I didn’t want to just repeat for the fun of it. Another track was entirely social networking and mobile apps for libraries (like making an app for iPhone kinda stuff), which doesn’t really apply to our library. I did one seminar about using blogs as webpages, and that was useful. I didn’t know that you could download Blogger and Word Press software for free and host it on your own website host (therefore giving you more control over the site and also giving you your desired URL).

I have definitely extracted many useful things from this conference and the big book of collected slide presentations will be a useful object to have at hand, and I plan to go through and explore sources listed therein. Overall, it’s been a good conference and at least I didn’t have to worry about conflicting seminars, since there wasn’t too much that bowled me over as far as selection. Maybe this isn’t one of those conferences to attend two years running. Oh well…next year I’d like to go to the Innovative Users Group anyway, since that’ll be back on the East Coast.

But stay tuned for some great pictures I took of the Cherry Blossom Festival yesterday and some other sights along the way. I was going to photoblog this whole thing, but you know, you can only look at so many strangers up at a podium and the back of other strangers’ heads before you get bored. I’m saving you all the trouble! You can thank me by sending me chocolate chip cookies!

Shannon