Google Books and Google Scholar

I had a look at Google Books. It's an easy and fun application to use.
Particularly good for searching for works that are out of copyright.
I was able to browse through classic texts by ancient Greek writers
such as Plato, Homer and Zeno. Great for researchers and students alike.

I use Google Scholar a lot in my work. It is great to be able to set the 'Scholar Preferences'
so that my searches pick up books in the VU Library Catalogue and direct links to articles in full-text from our subscribed databases. It is fascinating to see how quickly Google Scholar has become essential to research since its launch in 2004. I hope that in conjunction with the rise of institutional eprint repositories Google Scholar wll be able to break the costly hold that publishers like Elsevier have over Universities. VU Library currently pays over $100,000 per year for the citation tracking products Scopus and Web of Science, and yet when I search a free product like Google Scholar for citations I get better results. Go figure...

Google Docs

I've logged into Google Docs and uploaded a document into my account. I've shared this document with two of my colleagues. The portability of Google Docs is a great thing. I'm doing all this work out at the Info Desk between clients. I don't have to be at my desk to collaborate with others on a document. In fact I could be at home right now!
In the Knowing and Knowledge unit, AXF1001, they introduced the students to another online collaborative, free software called Zoho. There is even an animated tutorial for the students about Zoho that you can find from the Library Webpage under the 'Web 2.0 toolbox' link. Here's the Zoho tute URL http://intranet.vu.edu.au/AEHD/web2_usersite/tutorial2.asp
Zoho won a court case against Microsoft to be able to use the same icons on Zoho so it is even more familiar to those of use raised on Microsoft products. I think Google and small , entrepreneurial web companies like Zoho will eventually break Microsoft's hold on the market.
This will be a good thing as it will allow Web 2.0 innovations to be introduced and developed much more quickly and hopefully they will be low cost or free to use, benefiting Universities like VU and cash-strapped students.

Google Maps

Google maps is great. I can get directions of how to travel from place to place and I could see my house in great detail from above and see the front of the house on 'street view'. However it does cross my mind that the 'Big Brother' George Orwell described in his book, 1984, has happened by stealth without us knowing or asking for it. This type of technology is not always benign, as the article below shows:

German police investigate serial rabbit killings - 9 July 2008

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2008. All rights reserved

Some 40 rabbits have been beheaded and drained of blood in northern Germany, prompting a police inquiry

Fear is driving rabbit owners in Germany to lock up their pets at night after a spate of brutal bunny slayings in which pets have been beheaded and drained of blood.

More than 40 rabbits have been killed in the country's Ruhr district since late last summer, prompting police in the Dortmund area to set up a special task force to find the culprit.

There has been speculation that satanists could be responsible because many of the way the rabbits have been killed.

Since April, five officers in the small town of Witten have been investigating the case, according to Spiegel Online.

The task force is looking into the possibility that the rabbits were being targeted using the online mapping programme Google Earth.

The officers have interviewed more than 300 people but have so far found nothing, the website reported.

Initially there were only a few isolated killings, but this spring the number of incidents picked up with four fatal attacks in May.

Animal rights groups in the region have put up a reward of €2,500 (£2,000) for information leading to the arrest of the killer.

My Space and Facebook

I had a look at Myspace and Facebook for the first time today. Myspace seemed okay, the pages used by Libraries and Librarians were informative but a bit dull and I would wonder how useful they are in terms of the time spent on them. Some had an 'Ask a Librarian' box which might make our younger clients more comfortable when they want to send in a query.

I created a Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1439345212
and added a few friends. As with Myspace, you'd have to be quite careful using this as a medium to talk to clients in a professional capacity. Myspace and Facebook seem to be very informal spaces both in their structure and the language used on them. I'd question how useful it would be for individual Librarians to have Facebook pages. However I thought the widgits that I could add from different information sources, ie JSTOR, Libraries Aust & Deakin Uni were a particularly good way of getting our 'wares' out where the students are spending time.
The Deakin Library search widgit was clear and easy to use.

Digg

I'm now on Digg. It sure makes it easy to find the popular sites on the web.

Thieves in it for big Monet
Herald Sun. Melbourne, Vic.: Sep 13, 2006. pg. 60

TOGETHER, they would make up a stunning gallery: 167 Renoirs, 166 Rembrandts, 175 Warhols and more than 200 works by Dali.
Experts have a world tally of 170,000 important pieces of missing art -- burgled from private homes, snatched from museum walls or pilfered from storerooms.
Only a fraction is ever found: Interpol puts the figure at 10 per cent. Yet well-known masterpieces such as Edvard Munch's The Scream and Madonna, recovered this month in Norway, turn up more often, partly because of intense police work to find them and partly because they are so tough to sell.
Criminals sometimes mastermind a spectacular burglary, then discover nobody will touch a work of art so famous any buyer would have to hide it from view, says Karl-Heinz Kind, a specialist officer on art theft at Interpol.
Thieves may demand a ransom, or try to sell works at a fraction of their worth. This is when some thieves trip up: the Italian house painter who stole the Mona Lisa in a famous 1911 heist was caught two years later when he tried to sell it.
After a robbery, "the second step is . . . to make money out of it", Kind says. "And that's the much more difficult part and I think very often underestimated by the thief."
But for lesser treasures, the market is lucrative and vast. The FBI estimates the market for stolen art at $7.8 billion annually.
The Art Loss Register, which maintains the world's largest database on the subject, has tallied 170,000 pieces of stolen, missing and looted art and valuables, staff member Antonia Kimbell says.
Interpol has about 30,000 items on its database.
In museums, many thefts occur in storerooms and sometimes go unnoticed for years until museums do inventory.
Then there are the dramatic raids, such as the 1986 assault on the National Gallery of Victoria when the "Australian Cultural Terrorists" stole Picasso's Weeping Woman from the wall. However, Kind wants to dispel the myth of art-world criminals such as Pierce Brosnan's suave character in the 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair.
"I would warn against considering art thieves as gentlemen thieves," Kind says of criminals who are increasingly armed and violent.
The Munch paintings were stolen by masked gunmen at the Munch Museum in Norway in 2004, when the museum was open. Police have said little about their recovery. In 1994 another version of The Scream was recovered undamaged three months after being stolen from the National Gallery in Oslo.
In February, gunmen raided the Chacara do Ceu Museum during Carnaval celebrations in Rio De Janeiro. They made off with a Picasso, a Monet, a Matisse and a Dali before blending into the party crowd.
In 1990, two men disguised as Boston police officers walked into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. They persuaded security guards to unlock the doors, then stole 13 priceless items including works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas and Manet.
That heist appears on the FBI's list of the top 10 art thefts. The list is topped by the looting of Iraqi artefacts after the US invasion in 2003 -- an event that mobilised the international community's response to cultural theft.
IN 2004 the FBI dedicated 12 agents to a special art-crime team. In its first year the team recovered more than 100 pieces worth more than $65 million.
"International law enforcement is getting better, they are devoting a lot more resources to it -- specifically in the US, where they really upped their staff," Jonathan Sazonoff, who runs a website on stolen art, says.
Some mysteries are solved without happy endings. Stephane Breitwieser, a French waiter, was sentenced last year to 26 months in prison after he admitted to stealing 239 pieces -- worth $18 million to $26 million -- while he visited small provincial museums.
But the story didn't stop there. Prosecutors said Breitwieser's mother tried to protect him by chopping up paintings and tossing other items into a canal. Investigators recovered 102 pieces -- watches, cups, vases, statues and others -- from the mud. Many other works are believed lost forever.

For Pete's Sake

Peter Hannah at Work