Mary Frances Casserly is one of the authors who has thought about the meaning of a collection in the digital age (Casserly, M.F. (2002). Developing a Concept of Collection for the Digital Age. Libraries and the Academy 2.4 (2002) 577-587. The article is relatively old, but that's ok.

One of the problems one faces is finding a metaphor to describe a collection that for a large part consists of resources available on the internet. She mentions a few (citing others), like interface, logical gateway, information commons, gateway library or even information population.

The main idea, rather obviously, seems to be that there is a huge collection of information on the internet but that the collection (the one deemed relevant for... well whatever) is a subset that needs to picked from the total set of available online resources.

I find it quite remarkable that the new collection is seen as the result of a process of picking elements, a process similar to finding shells on a beach. The delivery of new resources is, as a process, set apart from setting up a collection. It is the sea that bring us new shells, and the sea is a mystery.

What if we expand the notion of a collection in such a way that the sea becomes part of it? The main issue with any sensible collection is quality control. We don't want ugly things in our collections. But if documents, and this surely is the case in the digital age, become fluid, for instance when there are many version of one document and when documents show up as movies, datasets and the like, and when it becomes hard to judge such a huge variety of documents with respect to their quality, it might be a good idea to refocus quality control; away from the documents towards the people that add documents. Qualified people can add documents.

Then a collection is not a simple store of documents anymore, but a rather complex system of interrelated documents, controlled by a selected group of people.

Librarians "just" need to make the system searchable.

Well, I don't know, really...

Today we officially released the first beta version of PurpleSearch, software for federated search developed by people from my department, the digital library department of the university of Groningen. André Keyzer in particular is responsible for the design, Bart Alewijns has been the main programmer of the system. It is a beta version. Also a number of features that were present in its predecessor livetrix were dropped, or are given a less prominent place, because the user interface had to be as simple as possible. PurpleSearch also offers a few webservices, in particular a recommendation function that returns an "educated" guess consisting of a number of databases that might be relevant for a query. PurpleSearch is a learning system in that it stores all queries ever entered by users and determines which databases return a significant number of hits given the query.

The following text, taken from the PurpleSearch helpfile, describes the system.

Purplesearch enables simultaneous search in the most important scientific and scholarly databases. It is an interface that eases and enriches federated search.

It eases this method of searching by not requiring manual selection of the databases to search in. PurpleSearch learns, over time, what each database contains and will give good results for any given search query. PurpleSearch combines smart search techniques, local indexing, and using that index for each new search. As such, presented results are those from a search in the best scoring databases for a query. It is also possible to do targeted searches within different databases.

Among other things it chooses databases that are likely to give results for any given query. As this does not always pick the most important databases for the intended subject area, you may use the subject guide to start searching in the most important databases, or choose the databases you want to search in manually.

It allows catalogue searching for books and other physical resources, and will lead researchers to electronic full-text articles when we have a relevant subscription.

A number of festivities are organized to promote the use of PurpleSearch within the university of Groningen.

It is a nice day. :)

Declan Butler used the technorati rankings to find the Top 50 science blogs. His results, and an explanation can be found here.

It shows that real science can be communicated via blogs too, often in a rather informal and playful manner.

First seen on Open Access News

It doesn't seem to be an official service from Amazon, but it is common knowledge that images can be retrieved from Amazon by sending a URL of a certain form. Such images can be used by libraries too when making lists of books (Latest acquisitions, exhibitions, perhaps even in the catalog).

I wanted to know what the "protocol" is because I am working on an XSLT stylesheet for a list of Latest Acquisitions of our library and thought that those cover images might make it look better. Before starting a series of experiments to see what Amazon really had to offer, I first did a search on the Internet and, luckily, came across a nice page by Nat Gertler called Abusing Amazon images who has already done a number of experiments to determine the way these URLs can be used.

They are exremely ugly, but they do seem to have a clear pattern. The pattern is as follows:

The most important bit of information in this URL is the ASIN number, the number that Amazon uses to identify the items in its stock. In the case of books, the ASIN is simply the ISBN (without spaces and bars).

The BaseURL can be

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/

and ASIN, country-code and commands are separated by a dot. Other BaseURL's are possible too, for instance

http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/.

An example of a real and usable URL is:

The country code can be a two-letter-code, where 01 is for probing the amazon in the US and Canada (amazon.com), 02 for the UK (amazon.co.uk), 03 for Germany (amazon.de). A full list of country codes I wasn't able to find.

The commands section is the ugliest part, and it is hard to imagine anyone, sane of mind, to have set this up. But what it amounts to is that certain ugly strings have certain nice results. The command string can be in one of three formats, two of which I'll discuss here shortly. For more information, you know where to go to. :)

1. A size specification
2. A series of commands to transform a picture

Examples of the strings in format 1, are:
THUMBZZZ Returns a small size picture

TZZZZZZZ Default size picture

MZZZZZZZ Medium size

LZZZZZZZ Large size

In the other format it is also possible to specify sizes, but extra commands can be attached to these strings (by prefixing them to the size specification and embedding them into two underscores) to achieve some effects, like adding a border and shadows to the pictures. For example, getting a medium sized image we have to use SCMZZZZZZZ and to add a shadow to it, we have to use PB, which leads to

The final URL would then be

And the result is:

Of course Amazon has more to offer here than just links. It is possible too to direct the user to the site where the book can be ordered, as you can see below.

But the full use of Amazon's capabilities is too much for one post. Perhaps another time.