Jeffrey Pomerantz

Decaf Librarians

Decaf Librarian’s Blend A flavorful blend of Indonesian, African, and Central American beans, the Librarian’s Blend is named for that person who always told you to keep quiet when you were studying. This blend is representative of the soul of the librarian: steady, reassuring, and always there with that slight edge of eccentricity. It has a bold base with a bit of sparkle. Here’s to good reading. Personally, this librarian.. Read More

Superfine teaching

This guy has the coolest name: Professor Superfine. And he’s at UNC! It’s so gratifying when we get good press. Bringing Life to Physics Class, from All Things Considered’s series on Popular College Courses. This story makes me wish that information science lent itself more to dramatic demos. This would probably work for showing how packets move, but to show how search engines work? How databases are structured? Maybe not.. Read More

Jon Stewart un-banned

It’s gratifying that the chairman of the library board of trustees has a firm grasp on the purpose of libraries: “We don’t decide for the community whether to read this book or not, but whether to make it available.” Library board puts Jon Stewart’s book back on shelves, from CNN

Do they give lifetime memberships to the Etch A Sketch Club?

This is such a cool idea I’m actually amazed that no one did it sooner. This totally beats the Maquarium. Mouse-controlled Etch-a-Sketch, from BoingBoing And here’s the original site: Electr-O-Sketch, which was a class project for an Electrical and Computer Engineering course at Cornell. BTW, I’m not kidding about the Etch A Sketch Club.

It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future

The Internet’s Future? It Depends on Whom You Ask, from the NY Times Some interesting quotes: Some of the more cherished notions of the Internet age – that it isolates people from real-world interaction, for instance, or that people use the Web to find reinforcement for their political views and filter out opposing ones – generate deeply divided views among the specialists. Some 42 percent of respondents agreed with the.. Read More

Group Cognition

Fred and I were talking the other day about group cognition in the blogosphere – a topic which yes, is starting to interest me. It interests me because I believe that multiple heads are better than one, and that a community can make a more thorough contribution to a topic than any one individual. Fred and I discussed this in our paper Lyceum: A Blogsphere for Library Reference in the.. Read More

Bloggers and Reporters

Paul and Fred and I were having a conversation over lunch the other day about bloggers and reporters and First Amendment rights, and lo and behold, I stumble across this article: Bloggers Blur the Definition of Reporters’ Privilege, from The New York Sun (via Boing Boing). Of course, for all I know, Paul was thinking of this story during that conversation. This story mentions the Claus von Bulow case, where.. Read More

Scholarly burstiness

This story comes from NewsScan, a couple of days ago: THE FUTURE OF PUBLISHING: THE WEB, OF COURSE The distinguished computer scientist Ramesh Jain says in his blog that his interview with John Gehl for Ubiquity received widespread attention and demonstrated that the importance of paper publications is becoming less significant compared to appearance of ideas or articles in cyberspace: “None of my articles that appeared in well respected journals.. Read More