Annotate the web: four ways to mark up web content

Web annotation has been a pipe dream almost since the birth of the Internet itself. Commenting in the margins of a text itself is so simple for paper and print, yet replicating the experience online remains elusive. In this article, I examine four tools for private or public web annotation. Hypothesis and Genius offer users a shareable way to annotate webpages line by line and start conversations in the margins. Pinboard and Evernote allow users to organize and save web documents and add private annotations

The Future of Web Citation Practices

Citing webpages has been a common practice in scholarly publications for nearly two decades as the Web evolved into a major information source. But over the years, more and more bibliographies have suffered from “reference rot”: cited URLs are broken links or point to a page that no longer contains the content the author originally cited. In this column, I look at several studies showing how reference rot has affected different academic disciplines. I also examine citation styles’ approach to citing web sources. I then turn to emerging web citation practices: Perma, a “freemium” web archiving service specifically for citation; and the Internet Archive, the largest web archive

The LMS and the Library

In this column, I give a brief overview of five ways that libraries can be incorporated into a learning management system (LMS), ordered from easiest to most difficult to scale, or in other words, least to most personal: Insert the library in the LMS template Offer embeddable LibGuides to faculty Create a collection of graded modules for faculty use Create an online library mini-course Embed a librarian in a cours

Hackathons for Libraries and Librarians

Hackathons can be ideal opportunities for libraries and librarians to promote new services and tools. In these social events, attendees form teams and work on a project together within a given time limit. This article explains hackathons, provides a brief history, and details how libraries and librarians can get involved. Similar event structures, like hack days and edit-a-thons, are also considered

Git and GitHub for Librarians

One of the fastest-growing professional social networks is GitHub, an online space to share code. GitHub is based on free and open-source software called Git, a version control system used in many digital projects, from library websites to government data portals to scientific research. For projects that involve developing code and collaborating with others, Git is an invaluable tool; it also creates a backup system and structured documentation. In this article, we examine version control, the particulars of Git, the burgeoning social network of GitHub, and how Git can be an archival tool

APIs and Libraries

This column introduces APIs (application programming interfaces) and discusses how APIs are used in various library projects. APIs allow developers to use and reuse information in new ways and on a larger scale. In the landscape of digital libraries, APIs are enabling exciting new endeavors and simplifying routine tasks. Included is a table of library-related APIs from organizations such as OCLC, Ex Libris, and the New York Public Library

Synchronizing Oral History Text and Speech: A Tools Overview

This article explores three tools that synchronize sound and text for online oral history collections: the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS), the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), and YouTube. A detailed description and examples are given for each. Integrating audio/video recordings and transcripts enables searching and browsing, making oral histories more accessible and approachable

Die Hard: The Impossible, Absolutely Essential Task of Saving the Web for Scholars

The web is fragile and littered with broken links. This poses a problem for the scholarly record and one’s own academic history. In this presentation given at the Association of College & Research Libraries – Eastern New York chapter conference, I review the stats on link rot and reference rot, and I give a brief overview of web archiving and its challenges. I review some web archiving tools: the Internet Archive, Perma.cc, WebRecorder, and GitHub. I advise creators of web projects to design their websites to be accessible and archivable, and to think about preservation (afterlife) of their projects from the start of the planning stages. I advise librarians and archivists to become familiar with web archiving tools and archivability/accessibility practices so that they, in turn, can advise web project creators

Who Does the Internet Think You Are? Three Tools That Teach Students How They Are Actively Profiled Online, All the Time

Your Internet experience is yours alone. For better but often for worse, websites, ads, search results, and even product prices are tailored to you specifically — but how? A vast collection of data describes you to a number of unseen organizations who use this information to shape the internet you see. This transmission of data is not readily visible, but we have the tools to bring this activity into the foreground. We will answer these questions: How does Google profile you to advertisers? How many trackers are following you around the internet? What information are these trackers transmitting, and for whom? We will demonstrate three tools to help students (and ourselves!) understand more about how the Internet really works by making visible what is usually invisible. First, we will look to Google for an example of a user ad profile, which lists known or guessed age, gender, location, and interests. These are but some of the 50+ data points Google can determine about you when serving up ads and search results. Second, we will demonstrate Ghostery and Privacy Badger, two popular browser plugins that display all the trackers (cookies) active on a given webpage, from analytics counters to advertising beacons, and gives users the option to block them. Lastly, we will demonstrate tools built into your browser: how to view the content of cookies that are tracking you and how to view all the files, both visible and not, that a webpage loads. Using these tools, students can build the skills needed to see and control the data collected about them. They will begin to see how technology is not neutral territory