Thanks to Gerry Mckiernan for pointing this out, in a post to Dig_Ref: Top Ten Facebook Apps for Librarians (in 3 parts) from Ellyssa Kroski’s iLibrarian blog Apparently, UIUC is the only library that currently has an app for its OPAC, but they’ve posted the code, so others could follow. Also there’s a search app for JSTOR. May I suggest other search apps for other online databases? Perhaps by vendor?
Eight random facts meme
I don’t usually do these meme blog posts, but I’ve been tagged by Sally, and when my favorite elected official comes calling, I shall answer. I grew up just outside of Boston and lived in Massachusetts my entire life, until my PhD program. When I moved away I always just assumed that I’d move back to Boston after I completed my PhD. Seriously, I just couldn’t imagine living anywhere else,.. Read More
The Red Shirt Phenomenon
Star Trek, statistical data analysis, and Tufte-style Powerpoint-bashing. It’s a rare treat to read something that combines all three. Analytics According to Captain Kirk, by Matt Bailey Conclusion: Never wear a red shirt. Avoid fights. Make sure Captain Kirk gets play. And heavens sake, don’t beam down to any planets with Captain Kirk if you can avoid it. Via Ed Cone.
Not a killer app
Kids say e-mail is, like, soooo dead, from CNET News This is nothing new; a lot has been written about the apparent fact that teenagers and younger don’t use email much. Indeed, this gave rise to what is probably my favorite headline of all time. But if this is true, then maybe so much for email being the internet’s killer app; that was just a phase. Thus far, chat has.. Read More
Duke faculty are apparently more workaholic than UNC faculty
Study: Duke Is N.C.’s Most Productive Research University, from WRAL Well, the headline pretty much says it all. UNC-CH comes in second, and I should bloody well hope so. The study is from Academic Analytics, using their Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index.
Errol Morris, unintentionally on metadata
Errol Morris (one of my favorite filmmakers in any genre) has a column in the NY Times today: Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire. Perhaps this is a result of me staring too long into the sun (or into my own navel), but it seems to me that this column is, at its core, about metadata, and how metadata changes our relationship to the thing to which it refers. Pictures are.. Read More
Upgraded
I’ve finally gotten off my duff and upgraded my version of WordPress to the latest version, 2.2.1. (I believe I was previously using version 1.5.2 — very, very old.) Most important: comments are working again, finally. Considerably less important: in my copious spare time I plan to start futzing around with some new plugins.
Follow-up to a recent post
A reader wrote me an email a few days ago, referring to my recent Ohio State Open Access Initiative post: What data did you find dubious in the Torrey article? I am not going to reproduce my entire (entirely too long, more like) reply here, but it went more or less like this: First was this quote from the ITS report: The report clearly describes student behavior: “The average user.. Read More
UBC is not ignoring Google Scholar
Five (5) Reasons Why Academic Librarians Can’t Ignore Google Scholar, from the UBC Academic Search – Google Scholar Blog For my money, reason #2 is the killer: GS will now contain on the order of 800 million to 1 billion citations, thus making it probably one of the largest scholarly citation databases on the planet. Ignoring that is like ignoring the elephant in the room. And, I would just like.. Read More
That’s *The* Ohio State Open Access Initiative
The Ohio State University Press Open Access Initiative The mission of The Ohio State University Press is to disseminate the best scholarship as widely as possible. Towards that end, we are making the complete texts of certain books available from our website. You will need the free Adobe Reader or some other PDF-enabled program to read the text. All titles available this way, whether old or new, have gone through.. Read More