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?
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
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
Survey on Blogger Perception on Digital Preservation
Songphan requests that I post this: Do you blog? If yes, then please consider participating in an online survey from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science. The study, Blogger Perceptions on Digital Preservation, is being conducted under the guidance of The Real Paul Jones. The study team is interested in hearing from all bloggers on their perceptions on digital preservation in relation.. Read More
The bookless library
If a Library Is Bookless, What’s In It?, from NPR It’s always interesting to me to see how libraries are presented in the media. This piece makes us look rather cutting-edge, which is a happy thing. Amusingly, there were technical problems with the first guest, who was connecting remotely from the studios of a member station, and what Neal Conan got was dead air. And my immediate thought was: and.. Read More
Electronic Backfiles at Duke
New Library News from Duke: Electronic Backfiles of More than 3,000 Journals Purchased by the Duke Libraries Most of the 3,000+ e-journal titles were acquired through purchase of the interdisciplinary Periodicals Archive Online (PAO) and of science and social science packages offered by several major journal publishers. These backfiles can be accessed by title through the library catalog and through the e-journal link on the library Web site.
Plymouth NH is cooler than you thought
My parents, who live in way northern New Hampshire, sent me an article the other day from Plymouth Magazine about a point of local technological pride: the information architect for the Lamson Library at Plymouth State University in Plymouth NH recently received the Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration. For what did he win this? For WPopac, an OPAC app based on WordPress. This OPAC now seems to be the default,.. Read More
Wicked smaht
Apparently lobster-trap mesh is good for archival preservation. Who knew? Crustacean Innovation, from the Chronicle
Thoughts on one very small part of Weinberger’s Henderson Lecture
I went to see David Weinberger‘s talk on campus earlier today, and this post is a reaction to that. Before I go down that road though, let me just say that I really enjoyed the talk. I just finished reading Small Pieces Loosely Joined maybe 2 days ago. So that’s fresh in my mind, and of course I haven’t yet read his next book, Everything is Miscellaneous, because it isn’t.. Read More
More thoughts on the death of Google Answers
This article in the NY Times repeats a lot of the same coverage, and even much of the same text I’ve seen elsewhere, but it does have one additional bit: “It has been one of our most successful launches,” said Tomi Poutanen, product director for Yahoo Social Search. … Mr. Poutanen described it as a way to harness the “wisdom of the crowds.” First of all, it’s the wisdom of.. Read More