I got back from JCDL a few days ago, and I keep meaning to write a post about some impressions & observations from the conference. Maybe I’ll even get around to doing that. But the first observation I want to make is this: there seems to be some semantic slippage happening around the term “digital reference work.” Specifically, there was a paper titled A Dynamic Ontology for a Dynamic Reference.. Read More
Oops
A reader (I say that like I have so many) just informed me that comments weren’t working here in PomeRantz. Upon further investigation, I discovered that the “Allow people to post comments on the article” option was unchecked. I have no idea how that happened; I don’t remember doing it, though I suspect I must have. I took a break from blogging (for no reason other than I didn’t feel.. Read More
Google saving university presses?
Some Publishers Warm to Google Book Search, from the Chronicle This has been so effective, says a representative of Oxford University Press, that “321,000 times in the last two years, people have clicked on an Oxford book saying ‘I want to buy this.’ We spent nothing to do that. That’s why we’re a big fan of this program.” This is an interesting (one presumes) unintended consequence of Google Book Search,.. Read More
Ich bin ein Stuhl
How cool is this? Tefko emailed me recently to invite me to be a program co-chair of the 2008 Libraries in the Digital Age conference. Every year LIDA has two topics, and in 2008 the topics are “Reference in digital environment” and “Education and training for digital libraries.” Tefko invited me to be the chair for the Education topic, since I’ve been working on the DL Curriculum project. I’ve accepted.. Read More
I have got to get me one of these
Look at numbers 6 & 7 in the Pimp Your Cube 2017 slideshow, from PopSci. Cordless power? RFID tags in staples so your lost papers can find themselves? Totally want.
Ego Cloud
I suspect I’m way behind the times, in that I’ve just discovered this, but… I’ve just discovered TagCrowd. And it’s way addictive. Because I’m an egomaniac, I created a text cloud from the titles of my journal pubs. Big surprise, “digital” and “reference” are the big winners. More interesting is that I use “collaborative” fairly frequently. What this really says to me, though, is that my titles are descriptive, but.. Read More
Kudos to the UW Libraries
It’s been a long time since I’ve done my librarians-need-to-take-professional-responsibility-for-the-reliability-of-Wikipedia-as-an-information-source rant here, mostly because I felt there was nothing more to say on the matter. However, I need to revisit it on account of this article in the latest D-Lib Magazine: Lally, A. M., & Dunford, C. E. (2007). Using Wikipedia to Extend Digital Collections. D-Lib Magazine, 13(5/6). In May 2006, the University of Washington Libraries Digital Initiatives unit began.. Read More
Authors@Google
Maybe I’m hopelessly behind the times, but I just stumbled across this: Authors@Google. The Authors@Google program brings authors of all stripes to Google for informal talks centering on their recently published books. Interestingly, the full set of videos is on YouTube and not Google Video. Though I suppose now that Google owns YouTube, it’s six of one half dozen of the other. Makes me wonder why Google Video still exists,.. Read More
FOIA Foobar
So back in March I submitted a FOIA request for a report submitted to the IMLS in May 2003. I already had an IMLS report that a colleague had FOIA’ed, and the report I FOIA’ed was cited in that report. And here’s where this story becomes a comedy of errors. What did the IMLS send me? The same report I already had. Oops. The two reports have similar titles, &.. Read More
What is wrong with this picture?
Apparently F. W. Lancaster is a volcanologist. Click for the full-size version: I’ve been using Amazon for over a decade now, and this is literally the first time I’ve seen an error like this. Incidentally, Volcanoes in History, in Theory, in Eruption is by Fred Mason Bullard, not that that name means anything to me. But then, I’m not a volcanologist.