Yesterday, Lili (my one and only PhD advisee), posted a question to Dig_Ref: where can she find the most recent stats on dig ref services? She got a great response, kicked off by a reply from Buff Hirko, where she said that at ALA, the RUSA MARS Virtual Reference Committee accepted a project to create an online index of all chat services in the US & eventually the world. This.. Read More
Faulty cable crashes Pakistan Internet, from Reuters An undersea cable carrying data between Pakistan and the outside world has developed a serious fault, virtually crippling data feeds, including the Internet, telecommunications officials said Tuesday. That’s got to be a first: an entire country dropping off the net. Can you imagine if this happened in the US? I shudder to think.
Thanks, Dave, for pointing this out: OCLC launches ‘Ask a Librarian’ pilot in Open WorldCat OCLC has implemented a pilot project within the Open WorldCat program that allows Web searchers to submit questions to librarians through online reference services of OCLC member libraries. … Once a searcher enters a postal code or other geographic identifier and receives Open WorldCat results listing nearby libraries that hold the item they’re looking for,.. Read More
From “the so-new-it-still-sparkles LITA blog” (thanks Jason!): Reference Interactions in the Digital Age: Revising the RUSA Behavioral Guidelines The members of the panel seemed to agree that the goals and objectives for remote reference are no different from those for face-to-face reference. The same behaviors are desired, but new skills may need to be learned to accomplish the same results — reference interviews in which the librarians satisfy their clients’.. Read More
Breaking news! The Internet transforms modern life, from CNN I’ts just this kind of bold and daring journalism that’s made CNN the most trusted name in news.
The Information Use Management & Policy Institute at Florida State University recently released the latest in a series of studies on public libraries in the US & network access. They’ve done these studies approximately every 2 years since 1994. This one was funded by the Gates Foundation & the ALA. Major findings: 99.6% of public library outlets in the United States are connected to the Internet. 98.9% of public library.. Read More
From a post yesterday from Blythe Bennett to the Dig_Ref listserv: Subject: [DIG_REF] final edition of ALA2005 digref events Final version is posted with all edits I was sent. I also included some blogs, but there are bound to be others. Have a good time everyone, hope to see you there. Those of you who can’t go, maybe checking the blogs would be a next-best-thing. http://vrd.org/DigRef@ALA.pdf and http://vrd.org/DigRefevents.doc
Foggy screen points the way, from Nature Inventors have fashioned an interactive computer display from a curtain of fog. The FogScreen uses ceiling-mounted air jets to create a vertical, turbulence-free slice of air a few centimetres thick, into which a fine mist of water is pumped. An ordinary projector can be used to display images on the resulting wall of fog. …with the help of a laser-scanning system, the FogScreen.. Read More
Publishers’ Group Asks Google to Stop Scanning Copyrighted Works for 6 Months, from the Chronicle The Association of American Publishers has asked Google to stop scanning copyrighted books published by the association’s members for at least six months while the company answers questions about whether its plan to scan millions of volumes in five major research libraries complies with copyright law. “We’ve simply asked for a six-month moratorium to facilitate.. Read More
Here’s another spring-cleaning post. I originally wrote this back in March, shortly after Malcolm Gladwell came to talk at Duke; I no longer remember why I didn’t post it at the time, except that I never finished writing it. So here it is, completed & submitted for your edification. Since reading about the idea of transactive memory in The Tipping Point, I’ve tracked down the article that Gladwell cites on.. Read More