I originally wrote this little rant back in early April, but saved it because posting hot-blooded rants has gotten me into some trouble here & I wanted time to cool off. Then I just ignored it for a while. But now I’m into belated spring cleaning of the email inbox and postponed blog posts. Looking at this again, I’m ok with it, so here goes… Ok, so I’m a little.. Read More
Database indexing & journal copyright agreements
A while back I wrote that I was going to look into whether it’s possible for me, as an individual author, to submit my own article to be indexed in a database. Well, I finally got off my duff and actually looked into it. Actually I only contacted 2 database vendors: Wilson (re the Library Literature & Information Science db) and CSA (re the Library and Information Science Abstracts db)… Read More
NC State Librarian job posting
Although it’s apparently been posted for some time, I just found out about this today: the job posting for the NC State Librarian. Salary Range: $52,784 – $88,442. Know anyone who’s interested?
VRD Learning Center changes
The following is extracted from a mass email to all VRD volunteers (of which I am one), from Blythe Bennett: … the VRD project will end on June 30, 2005. The US Department of Education has had major budget cuts and unfortunately, we are one of the cuts. For those of you familiar with our annual conference, we will still have this year’s conference in San Francisco, but it is.. Read More
Reference Extract and Bibliomancer
I spoke to Dave Lankes yesterday about Reference Extract and Bibliomancer, two new projects at the Information Institute of Syracuse. Dave explained these two projects very clearly: Both are specialty search engines. The corpus searched by Reference Extract is URLs scraped from of dig ref transactions. The corpus searched by Bibliomancer is the content of the pages at those URLs. Dave is interested in having some evaluation done of these.. Read More
The Wikipedia invasion continues
The librarian invasion of Wikipedia continues. The WikiProject for Librarians now has 10 members & a fair To Do list. And this past weekend I got an internal message (a function of Wikipedia that I didn’t even know existed) from Michael Snow, that he’s written a piece on this for The Wikipedia Signpost. This piece appeared in today’s Signpost. In this piece Michael writes that “some people were voicing concern.. Read More
Enquire
I wrote a while back about the People’s Network Enquiry Service, a pilot chat-based reference service in England, staffed by public librarians. The service had a soft launch about 6 months ago. Today, Luke points out that Enquire was launched for real recently. More remarkably, around a third of library services in England are participating! Can you imagine if a third of all libraries in the US formed a dig.. Read More
Who wants to know?
A lot of people in Mecklenburg county, that’s who. I was taking another look at the zipcode data from the NCknows pilot recently. I had already looked at percentages in the stats reports: approximately 75% from within NC, 5% from other states, 20% anonymous. (Conclusion: NCknows is primarily serving North Carolinians, with a fairly minor investment in serving non-North Carolinians.) But I recently had the thought to ask our GIS.. Read More
The Test of Reference
I mentioned the other day that I’d recently reread Anne Lipow’s “‘In Your Face’ Reference Service.” There was one other point from that article that I wanted to mention. Lipow writes: We should conduct a fair test of which is preferred, the human reference librarian or the computer, and if, as I suspect, both are preferred under different conditions, we’d learn when which mode is the first choice. The test.. Read More
Stephen’s Wikipedia soap opera
For those of you who aren’t following this little drama in the library blogosphere, Stephen Francoeur recently discovered that a big chunk of his webpage on dig ref had been plagiarised & used as the Wikipedia entry on dig ref. He posted to Dig_Ref about this & got some response. I even came out of lurker mode to suggest, as I have before, that librarians should take the initiative &.. Read More