A link to the Princeton University Library digitized special collection Hand Bookbindings: Plain and Simple was featured as the Library Link of the Day on July 23, 2005. The digitized exhibit consists of 211 items in “26 groups showing genres and structures.” Some of the groupings are Italian bindings, German bindings, endleaves, gold tooling, and early codex and coptic sewing. Each grouping has several examples. When you click on the image of an item, you will get page with a larger image and a manification square. Select the size of the magnification square and move it over the parts of the image that you want made larger.
LibrarianInBlack blogged an announcement on October 10, 2004.
Further research
ALA ACRL Book arts on the Web [C&RL News, April 2004 Vol. 65, No. 4]
Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild CBBAG online gallery.
LLI Bookbinding search.
Princeton University Rare Books and Special Collections: online exhibits.
Google Suggest, a beta-version Google front-end for searching , is useful for people looking for information that has popular interest. It may also be useful for finding combinations of search terms that may have worked for others in the past. Google intends for it to help with refining a search.
In Google’s Suggest FAQ, they explain that this is a bit like Google “Did you mean?” and also like Google Zeitgeist. Google Zeitgeist shows search patterns; there is an archive of past search patterns. As you type in Google Suggest, a drop-down menu of ten items gives suggestions; as you type additional letters, the menu changes. I was looking for Ajax to refresh my mind on this programming technique and to see if there is anything new. Though I found enough to satisfy me on the first results page, there was a mixture of pages that were not relevant to my search. Searching and Google Suggest are best when used with multiple, refining search terms. I had to type “ajax pr” before “ajax programming” with 36,500 results came up in the drop-down menu. When I released the mouse on the search string, I got a results page that said there were about 534,000 results, so I don’t know where that 36,500 came from. Does that figure come from some database built in the past, and can I conclude that interest in Ajax programming is growing?
Google Suggest is built using Ajax, which is a set of Web programming technologies. An article by Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path, Ajax: A new approach to Web programming, is still the best overview. He coined the word Ajax as a shortened form of Asynchronous JavaScript+CSS+DOM+XMLHttpRequest.
More recent articles on Ajax suggest that it is growing in interest. According to this June 28, 2005 article on Microsoft Watch, Microsoft Wants a Piece of the Ajax Action, Microsoft released “Atlas,” to simplify Ajax. Since my original posting Ajax a Web application, a Wikepedia Ajax entry has expanded and through that I discovered the Ajax matters Web site. Following links in an article, I found Mark Birbeck’s Internet Applications weblog and his article Xforms patterns: Incremental and Google Suggest, in which he explains and shows the code for doing a variation of a Google Suggest using Xforms.
A9.com and Flickr.com use Ajax architecture. There was even an Ajax Summit put together by O’Reilly Media and Adaptive Path, which was reported on May 11, 2005 in Silicon Valley Watcher. There is a paragraph in this article that I think clarifies AJAX:
AJAX applications do things like fetch data from the server without refreshing the screen, and use animation within a page to provide smooth transitions or reveal hidden fields. These tweaks to conventional web applications can create an experience that feels much remarkably faster and richer than a web page. One participant described the difference as being “like the difference between email and IM”.
It looks like most writers are settling on using all caps for AJAX, rather than first letter capitalized.
Since this is the day the new Harry Potter book comes out, take a look at Ajaxian.com posting on July 16, 2005, in which they post a link to Tom Riddle’s Magical Diary Comes to Life with Ajax. You need to click on the graphic link and on the diary, type a word or two into the right-hand page.
Google Suggest might be handy to librarians in the reference interview when they are hit with new terms from patrons.
Librarians can contribute to LISWiki or to Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki.
Meredith Farkas, who blogs at Information Wants to be Free, started Library Success to collect and organize information about successful programs and problem resolution:
This wiki was created to be a one-stop-shop for great ideas for librarians. All over the country, librarians are developing successful programs and doing innovative things with technology that no one outside of their library knows about.
LisWiki was started on June 30, 2005 by John Hubbard to
to give the library community a chance to explore the usefulness of Wikis. It is not intended to replace or detract from the Wikipedia Library and information science (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_science) articles (or those in the printed LIS encyclopedias for that matter), but exist as a niche encyclopedia covering library-related issues.
John Hubbard says this is not a war. There is room for both as they have different purposes. See his clarification on the Web4Lib list July/037642.
Be sure to check out ALA Chicago 2005 on the Success Wiki.
