Jury dutyhi

by Meredith Farkas on 11/30/2004 with 1 comment

I’ve got jury duty tomorrow (and hopefully ONLY tomorrow), so I may not have time to post anything. I would really like to be on a jury as I never have been before, but I’m a bit nervous because I have a job interview on Friday that I can’t afford to miss. I’ll let you …

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Shelter from the storm?libraries

by Meredith Farkas on 11/30/2004 with 2 comments

Michael McGrorty has an eloquent article about the homeless and public libraries in his blog today. This is a really tough subject in public libraries. As librarians, we really don’t want to restrict access to anyone, but at the same time, we also don’t want to discourage many people from coming to the library because …

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Recent articles on blogging (some great, some not so great)libraries, our digital future

by Meredith Farkas on 11/30/2004 with 1 comment

There have been a number of recently published or written scholarly articles on blogging. Communications of the ACM has devoted most of their December 2004 anniversary issue to articles about The Blogosphere. I read the articles for free (one of the benefits of still being a University student) and didn’t really find anything in them …

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Great American History bibliographyreference

by Meredith Farkas on 11/28/2004 with Comments Off on Great American History bibliography

December 2004’s American Heritage magazine features America Unabridged: The Definitive Guide to the Greatest Books About Our Past. This annotated bibliography covers a wide variety of topics and all of the time periods in American History, with materials chosen by many well-known historians. It includes not only books, but movies, photographs, and other works of …

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Paraprofessional jobs?job search, libraries

by Meredith Farkas on 11/27/2004 with Comments Off on Paraprofessional jobs?

This month’s LIScareer.com has an article about taking a paraprofessional job once you have your MLS. This is something I’ve certainly been thinking about now that I’m 2 weeks away from graduation and have seen what the job market looks like for an entry-level professional librarian. While Robert Newlen and Teri Switzer make good points …

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A-List Weblogsour digital future, random

by Meredith Farkas on 11/27/2004 with 2 comments

I recently read an interesting article for my Information Retrieval course about Power Laws and Weblogs, which I found very interesting in light of my recent forrays into blogging. The author states that blogs follow the same power laws that affect most social and economic systems. “A new social system starts, and seems delightfully free …

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RSS and the death of print newspapersour digital future

by Meredith Farkas on 11/27/2004 with Comments Off on RSS and the death of print newspapers

The Washington Post, in a series of focus groups, discovered that young people are far less likely to subscribe to newspapers than people 35 and over. Frankly, that wasn’t a great big surprise to me or most other people living on planet Earth. What was slightly more surprising is that many of them said they …

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Counting and counting and countingrandom

by Meredith Farkas on 11/27/2004 with Comments Off on Counting and counting and counting

According to Wired, the GAO is going to investigate how the vote was counted and during the election, particularly in hotly contested states like Ohio and Florida. This comes on the heels of many discoveries across the country of machines that were “incorrectly programmed” to give the advantage to Bush, and other irregularities. This is …

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Ah but California…hi, random

by Meredith Farkas on 11/23/2004 with 1 comment

My hubby and I got married in the Napa Valley about 4 months ago and spent our honeymoon travelling around the CA coast. My dream is to live out there, but hubby says it’s unrealistic (considering housing costs, distance from our families, and all that). Sometimes I even start thinking that maybe I’m just romanticizing …

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Visionary librariesjob search, libraries

by Meredith Farkas on 11/21/2004 with Comments Off on Visionary libraries

I’ve been applying for jobs since late September as I’ll be graduating in just a couple of weeks with my MLS (or whatever my school calls it). I’m not the sort of person who is dead-set on working in a specific type of library. If anything, the type of library I want to work in …

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Google Scholar Buzzlibraries, search

by Meredith Farkas on 11/20/2004 with Comments Off on Google Scholar Buzz

Wow, Google must be thrilled by all the free press and panic they’re getting from librarians with their brand new offering, Google Scholar. I’d put in my two cents, but I really don’t have much to add when it’s been covered by just about every blog I read. Instead, enjoy some insights on Google’s new …

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PSAour digital future

by Meredith Farkas on 11/18/2004 with Comments Off on PSA

I just wanted to encourage everyone to watch series of lectures on C-SPAN organized by the Library of Congress entitled The Digital Future. There are some great people who are going to speak (Lawrence Lessig, David Weinberger, MIT’s Neil Gershenfeld, etc.). If you miss them on TV, you can access the video feed from C-SPAN’s …

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