Meredith Farkas is a faculty librarian at Portland Community College in Oregon. From 2007-2021, she wrote the monthly column “Technology in Practice” for American Libraries. Meredith was honored in 2014 with the ACRL Instruction Section Innovation Award, in 2008 and 2011 with the WISE Excellence in Online Education Award and in 2009 with the LITA/Library Hi Tech award for Outstanding Communication in Library and Information Technology. She has been writing the blog Information Wants to be Free since 2004.
Barbara Quint has put together a list of questions and answers about the Google Library Project that have been pondered by various people in the library and search worlds. Some…
Last night, when I got home from my New Year's Eve revelry (which consisted of baking cookies with a five-year-old, playing Chutes and Ladders, and drinking sparkling cider), I found…
The New York Times featured another study furthering the notion that Internet use is socially isolating and takes people away from other activities. I'm perfectly willing to grant them the…
Sorry I didn't have time to post anything today (been working on cover letters ALL day) but I wanted to wish everyone a happy and safe New Year. I'm just…
I guess this is the day to post intros! Peter Suber, at Open Access News, has published a very concise introduction to the concept of open access. A Very Brief…
From Resource Shelf, I have found An Introduction to Feeds, which does an excellent job of describing what RSS is and how to use aggregators. I will definitely send this…
Today, Dorothea at Caveat Lector wrote about Them jobhuntin’ blues. Oh yes, I do feel your pain. After applying for jobs since late September, I really think I could get…
Earlier this month, I had reported on a new way to search handwritten manuscripts that was developed by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Today, the New York Times has…
I don't know what I could say that hasn't already been said about the disaster in southeast Asia on Sunday. It is a tragedy beyond my comprehension -- easily the…
The New York Times today has a story about the closing of the Salinas Public Library. What a sad situation. In a community comprised of many migrant and blue collar…
Hi! The newest issue (Jan '05) of Cites and Insights is out with some commentary on conference blogging, blogging ethics, and a bit on Google Print. Walt Crawford brings up…
This will be my last post before Christmas. My posts may be a bit sporadic until Tuesday as my adorable niece and nephew are coming down for a visit with…
D-Lib has an article about a new grant-funded partnership between the library and information studies departments at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Indiana University at Bloomington to develop…
The Librarian in Black pointed the way to a fabulous tutorial on digital preservation. Anyone interested in the subject should take a look at Digital Preservation Management: Implementing Short-term Strategies…
Wow! In an age of shrinking budgets and shrinking staffs, the Phoenix Public Libraries has secured $175,000 to hire one full time professional librarian and three paraprofessionals to police their…
Here is a disappointing story about the licensing and intellectual property rights . The award-winning documentary, Eyes on the Prize, about the civil rights movement, can no longer be aired…
I'm not one of those people who really notices the sound my computer makes. All through college I practically slept with my laptop on the bed next to me (how…
Here's an interesting article from the San Francisco Gate about how Google has so far undertaken their Herculean digitization task. According to the article, at the rate they're going at…