May 2013
11 posts
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Find a Book - Lexile Framework for Reading →
This looks like an awesome tool for anyone dealing with K-12 readers (I’ve even added it to our Education subject guide, woo). :)
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Eleventh Stack: No Need to Apologize to Your... →
So, so very true. Especially this one:
I’m sorry to bother you. Goodness, no, you are not bothering us. We are at the desks in public areas so that we can be of help to you. We might be working on a project, but that is just to stay busy until the next patron comes along and needs our help.
We have a sign behind our reference desk that says “Please bother the librarian.” I...
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“Sixteen million adults [in the UK] don’t have the basic online skills to...”
– BBC: Seven million Brits have ‘never used the internet’
This figure doesn’t seem to come from the report, so I don’t know if it includes the 7 million that aren’t online, but either way, it’s a fairly large number. I’m guessing there are many more than that...
The Official Unofficial Library Journal Tumblr... →
libraryjournal:
This week I’ll be asking you, the readers of the Library Journal Tumblr, a little bit about yourselves.
It’s just 8 questions, none of them required, which means you can answer as much or as little as you like. 7 are multiple choice. Super easy!
I’d love to hear from you. Take the survey now!
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On my Nexus 7 tablet: Week One
I already posted some comments from the first 24 hours, so the observations below are further comments and ruminations as I enter this strange new world of apps and internet connectivity sans laptop. :)
I got my case, stylus, and screen protector on Saturday.
The stylus has been great (and can double as a pen!), though I do manage to click in ways I don’t intend because my coordination is...
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Letters to a Young Librarian: You Don’t Have to Do... →
There are three main reasons I want to encourage noobrarians not to fall into the trap of trying to Do All the Things. First of all, you’re new! People are thrilled that you can sit at the reference desk unattended without drooling or falling asleep and that you know where to send people when they need to fax something. For the first few months, the very best thing you can be doing for your...
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Publishers Weekly: So You Think You Want to Be a... →
Fortunately, librarians are the original oversharers, and they’ve produced a body of literature—from blogs posts to articles to books—to help you with your decision. This is especially useful since librarians come in different stripes—public, academic, school, special—with some significant differences among them. Librarians also conduct a lot of their professional lives online, so blogs, Twitter,...
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Free access to two Ovid resources for Nurses'... →
The Journal of the Dermatology Nurses’ Association and the Maternity and Infant Care Database from MIDIRS are freely accessible during the month of May in celebration of Nurses’ Week (which Ovid is turning into Nurses’ Month for the purpose of this promotion).
Access requires signup for each resource; click the links above or access the links via the Promotions tab on the Ovid...
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On my Nexus 7 tablet...
I decided months ago that I wanted to get a tablet (not an ereader, a tablet), and settled on the Nexus 7 as the best choice for my wants/needs. I finally actually purchased the thing, and it arrived yesterday.
Comments from the first 24 hours:
It has crashed several times already. I think I know why it did for several of the occasions, but in one or two other instances it just locked up and...
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April 2013
16 posts
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Academic Librarian: Unlikely Conversations and... →
Recently I’ve been getting some requests for what I have called The Improbable Source. An improbable source is some source students hope to find that is exactly on the topic of their research essay, especially when that topic is somewhat obscure. The example I used then that still stands out as the top of this category is “scholarly books and articles on email as a form of civic friendship.”...
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Fair Use Evaluator →
What this tool can do for you:
Help you better understand how to determine the “fairness” of a use under the U.S. Copyright Code.
Collect, organize & archive the information you might need to support a fair use evaluation.
Provide you with a time-stamped, PDF document for your records [example], which could prove valuable, should you ever be asked by a copyright holder to...
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BEN (Biosci Ed Net) Portal →
Welcome to the BEN portal, the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Pathway for biological sciences education. The BEN Portal provides access to education resources from BEN Collaborators and is managed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Over 18,827 reviewed resources covering 77 biological sciences topics are available. BEN resources can help you engage...
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Accidental Discovery: A legible, relevant and... →
hedwig-dordt:
The argument for real books against virtual books is often based on the thingness of the real book — the beauty of the binding, the pleasure of handsome design and typesetting, the sensuality of turning a paper page, the pride of ownership. I sympathize with that, but I’m a reader, not a collector — I love my books (and I have lots of them) for what’s in them. Except for a few...
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Library Babel Fish: Order and Liberty: The DPLA... →
I wasn’t entirely sure what the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) would look like when the long-awaited launch date of April 18 approached. The suspense is finally over: it looks great.
[…]
The DPLAs not going to be a digital version of your local public library’s collections and services – at least, not yet. It is trying to do three things right now: pull together digital assets...
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Update: Hunt for a new RSS reader
My original thoughts from last month had a few gaps, particularly where Old Reader was concerned, so this is my gap-filler post.
Old Reader: Finished importing my feeds on March 21. By the time I got around to testing it out (April 8), it had a note about ‘keeping only fresh content’ (I didn’t copy the exact text, but that was the gist), which makes sense considering I had...
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infoDOCKET: Academic Librarianship: Complete... →
From an ACRL Announcement:
The online C&RL archive now contains the complete contents of the journal from its beginnings in 1939 through the current issue.
[…]
Note: Backfiles are also available via the University of Illinois IDEALS Database Search and browse (by title, author, subject, dates).
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infoDOCKET: ProQuest Offers Complimentary Access... →
Last night we mentioned that Oxford University Press will provide free access in North and South America to the Oxford English Dictionary and Oxford Reference to celebrate National Library Week that begins on Sunday.
Today, ProQuest announced that they’re providing complimentary access to a bunch of resources and other materials in honor of National Library Week.
I don’t know that the...
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Sarah Glassmeyer: Disrupt my industry. Please. →
Legal publishing is broken because it only serves to keep information locked away from people. And, given the unique status of legal information (which we can define here as cases as well as laws and regulations passed by all levels of government bodies), you don’t even have to be one of those “information wants to be free” hippies to agree that there is no reason why this shouldn’t be free,...
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“I think we’re doing really good work to move ourselves, our institution, and our...”
– Attempting Elegance: Keynote from NLS6: Moving Beyond Book Museums
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“It’s kind of silly that maximalists and luddites keep jumping back to this...”
– Techdirt: Authors Guild’s Scott Turow: The Supreme Court, Google, Ebooks, Libraries & Amazon Are All Destroying Authors
Excellent commentary on a recent NYT Op-Ed by Scott Turow (head of the Authors Guild). I definitely recommend reading both.
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E-content: Does piracy impact sales? Not how you... →
What might this mean for our consideration of ebooks? Even though music and books are different in some aspects, they would both fall under what the report refers to as an “experience good” so I believe we can (at least cautiously) extrapolate the findings of this report to ebooks. A perennial issue in conversations with the Big Six is the displacement of sales due to library lending. At times,...
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if:book: The future of the book is the future of... →
The difficult thing however about predicting the future of reading is that everything i’ve said so far presumes that what is being read is an “n-page” article or essay or an “n-page,” “n-chapter” book,” when realistically, the forms of expression will change dramatically as we learn to exploit the unique affordances of new electronic media....
March 2013
12 posts
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“There are two aspects to the ebook that seem to me profoundly to alter the...”
– Guardian Books: Why ebooks are a different genre from print
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Krafty Librarian: Usage Stats: Are They a Double... →
…However, we aren’t the only ones who see our usage statistics. The vendors that sell us our products run the reports and it isn’t in their best interest for us to get the biggest bang out of our buck. I am not trying to imply that all of the vendors are nefarious. I am just saying that if they see that your usage stats are so good that you are only paying $.05 per use and the average...
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eMusic, Subscription Music Pioneer, merges quietly... →
ebookporn:
eMusic, the online music service that pioneered the subscription approach before Spotify was a glimmer in Daniel Ek’s eye, quietly merged Monday with an e-book distributor, in an unusual bit of digital-media consolidation.
The company didn’t issue a press release but did send a brief statement to record labels, a copy of which appears below…
As an eMusic subscriber, this is...
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Agnostic, Maybe: Beg, Borrow, Steal →
I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one to feel this way, but my overall impression of copyright, intellectual property, and swirling vortex of issues around those two issues can be summed up in one word: unsatisfactory. […]
Professionally, it feels like dancing through a landmine field. I am trying to steer people to the legitimate track of properly authorized and compensated copies of...
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Great news for libraries: SCOTUS rules in favor of...
libraryadvocates:
6-3 in favor of first sale.
Opinion (pdf full text)
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Hunt for a new RSS reader
If you haven’t already heard, Google is killing off Reader as of July 1 (much wailing and gnashing of teeth has been occurring on Twitter since the news broke).
So I’ve spent some time trying out a few of the browser-based suggestions posited by various articles and helpful Twitter people.
A note about my conditions of use: Windows OS, web-based, no smartphone interface...
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Pixabay →
Finding free quality images is a tedious task - mainly due to copyright issues, attribution requirements, or simply lack of quality. This inspired us to create Pixabay - a repository for outstanding public domain images. You can freely use any image from this website in digital and printed format, for personal and commercial use, without attribution requirement to the original author.
Looking for input: arrangement of browsable DVDs
We recently moved our DVDs out from behind the desk so our students and staff can browse them. Currently they are arranged by call number, which made sense when it was just library workers, but now that they’re out there for our patrons, I’m thinking it needs to change.
I mean, I’ve browsed the shelves a few times myself and I have absolutely no idea where I might find a...
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Library Babel Fish: Curation for Discoverability:... →
Though libraries have always enabled discovery, we didn’t call it that until it was a software layer. We had catalogs, we had indexes, we had databases, and we had too many of them. Discovery layers to the rescue! This expensive and tricky-to-implement software takes in a simple search query and retrieves sources from all of those different databases. For the busy lower-division undergraduate...
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Scholarly Kitchen: Financial Realities — A New... →
What if the trade-offs many have been portending between big:small, old:new, and open:closed actually were dependencies?
A recent analysis of the scientific publishing marketplace focusing on the financial implications of OA policies and business practices presents these issues in between the lines, concluding that commercial publishers have weathered the storm and adapted to changes, making it...
February 2013
25 posts
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“What struck me about the workshop — and part of why I felt it was so successful...”
– Investigating Journals: An Information Literacy Workshop for Science Students | Daniel Ransom, The Pinakes: From Papyrus to PDF (via thepinakes)
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College & Research Libraries News: Learning... →
Handy list of some free online language-learning materials, reference tools, broadcasts, and other helpful links.
One of these days, I really ought to brush up on the languages I started in school. Though I’ve also wanted to learn to at least read Russian…
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“Recently, the most disturbing news I’ve heard in a long time came across my...”
– IHE Just Visiting Blog: Said is NOT Dead
Is it just me, or are they rather late with the outrage? I seem to remember being taught this in middle/high school and I graduated high school in 2001! Or maybe my (private) school was just ahead of the game? (Which would be funny for a variety of sad...
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Publishing Perspectives: Killing the “Pay First,... →
Sometimes you encounter an idea that seems so obvious it’s amazing that nobody has thought of it before. That’s how Yoav Lorch feels about Total Boox, his intriguing new reading platform that is about to be unveiled this March. The idea is simple: instead of paying up front for a book you may never even look at, you download it for free and then only pay according to how much of the book you...
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Unsustainable Ideas: The DOI has no clothes, and... →
Having just mentioned DOIs in an instruction session last week, this is good for pointing out the lingering problems with that system.
And of course, these big, toll-access, subscription-based Publishers trumpet all the Added Value that their publishing processes put onto the articles that we write and give to them (and referee for them, and persuade our libraries to buy for them, and…). So...
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NYT: Public Domain, My Dear Watson? Lawsuit... →
Some 125 years after his first appearance, Sherlock Holmes remains a hot literary property, inspiring thousands of pastiches, parodies and sequels in print, to saying nothing of the hit Warner Bros. film starring Robert Downey Jr. and such television series as “Elementary” and the BBC’s “Sherlock.”
But according to a civil complaint filed on Thursday in federal court in Illinois by a leading...
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Public Art Archive on infoDOCKET →
The Art Works Blog (from the National Endowment for the Arts Blog) offers a brief intro to the Public Art Archive database and talks with with Rachel J. Cain, the program manager of the Public Art Archive, and Anthony Radich, the executive director of WESTAF.
This looks like a neat resource for those interested in public art installations.
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techdirt: How PeerJ Is Changing Everything In... →
One of the best summaries of the problem with academic publishing that I’ve seen:
Has there ever been a business more ripe for disruption than academic publishing? For anyone who’s not been following along, the business model of academic publishers, built on solving 18th century distribution problems, incarnates the Shirky Principle: that “Institutions will try to preserve the...
