Invisible Yet Necessary

This is a difficult week for social software systems!

Typepad, one of the blogging tool from Six Apart , was down for several hours on Friday (approx 15-20 hrs)
Now, it is the turn of Del.icio.us, the social bookmarking manager, that just got bought by Yahoo!
Del.icio.us has been down since 8pm PST yesterday and was back online early today.

More info on the Del.icio.us blog

What you need not flying off the shelf? Try the library’s catalogs

OSU’s Valley Library has many ways to get the books you need

By Riad Lemhachheche

The OSU Valley Library owns about 1.9 million monographic volumes (books, videos, maps and government documents). Yet, OSU patrons may not find all the items they need for their research or classes in the shelves of the Valley Library.

Indeed, while the OSU collection is substantial, it is nowhere near the Library of Congress with its 130 million items spread over 530 miles of bookshelves. Additionally, OCLC WorldCat, a worldwide library cooperative, reached one billion holdings this August.

The Valley clearly pales in comparison with it’s 1.9 mil. But, as the saying goes, it’s not the size that matters, it’s how you use it.

So, what are the options left to OSU patrons if items they’re looking for isn’t on the shelves here in fair Corvallis?

In the case of articles, the library subscribes to several online publications accessible through the online catalog.

Another resource is the Summit Alliance Web catalog. Summit is the catalog of all the holdings of the 33 partnering academic libraries in the Pacific Northwest and was created by the merger of Orbis, the Oregon Academic Library Association, and Cascade, its Washington Counterpart. The catalog contains more than 20 million items of which 8 million are unique titles.

Any search done on the OSU catalog, OASIS, can be repeated on the Summit catalog and OSU patrons can borrow items available from any of the Summit Alliance member institutions.

Turnaround time is around three to five days for Summit borrowing.

“The interesting thing is that of this database, 65 percent of the books in the database are owned by only one of the Alliance members. That heterogeneity really increases the value of belonging to the Alliance,” said John Pollitz, the associate university librarian for public services and innovative technology.

More

by Riad Lemhachheche, staff writer

Global Positioning System technology has become famous for letting hikers and travelers find their location wherever they are.

GPS devices are used in cars to provide driving directions and in airplanes to display the distance to one’s final destination. But GPS is only the tip of a growing industry and academic field known as Geographic Information Systems or GIS.

“GPS is no good unless GIS is doing analysis with that data”, said Dawn Wright, professor in the Department of Geosciences at Oregon State University.

GIS technologies are used for research in forest science or oceanography, as well as being incorporated in products and services used by millions of people every day.

Mapping services like Mapquest, Yahoo Maps or Google Earth rely heavily on GIS to associate topographic data, street and highway layout and traffic information to enable their users to plan their travels.

GIS experts were on the forefront of the emergency response team during the Katrina relief effort. They were able to generate up-to-date maps of transportation systems and locate areas where flooding had the most impact.

OSU is an academic leader in the GIS field, as it is one of the 16 founders of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, the major academic consortium in the field, that now counts over 70 members.

Last fall, OSU launched a new program for students and community to provide increased learning opportunities in the field of GIS.

More

Today is World Usability Day. So we should think harder today (and every other day too) on how we can make things, systems, services … more useful and enjoyable to use.
For my part, I am:

• researching on how to make wireless networking more easy and natural to use
• searching and accessing information more efficient (especially multimedia)

What are you doing?

(Update)

Fon, wireless community service

As I was looking at how network providers regulate the sharing of the Internet access they provide to their subscribers, I came across the initiative from Fon.
Fon is planning on being first a Spanish Internet Service Provider (ISP) that will make it possible for subscribers to share ADSL service through wireless connection (WiFi).

Principle

Basically, suscribers could choose between 2 models:

Resellers: in this case, subscribers could resell up to 50% of their connection capacity. Fon will manage the access to other suscribers and give the user a cut of the fees it gets from that particular wireless access point. (Identified in the business model as Bill for Bill Gates I guess!) Community members: subscribers will then give up up to 50% of their connection capacity for free to others members of the service. In exchange, they will be able to roam on any of the other access points made accessible by other Fon members. (Identified in the business model as Linus for Linus Torvalds I guess!)

Requirements and availablilty

As of now, the service will require suscribers to own a compatible router, the Linksys WRT54G Wireless-G Router
The service is not operational yet. It is supposed to open around Nov 15th of this year but the Fon community sign-up page is already available.

More details are available on the Martin Varsavsky’s blog

See also this other way of sharing your connection:
Ubicomp 2005 video: Yellow chairs