Dorothea has written a very interesting post comparing the ALA to the guild system in the Medieval world. She makes some great suggestions and observations about the ALA’s mission and whose interests they should be serving. I agree with her 100% that if the MLS is to mean anything, programs need to become far more …
Wow! This has got to be one of the most useful sites I’ve seen in a long time. Susan Herzog, a librarian at Eastern Connecticut State University, has created BlogBib, an annotated bibliography of all things bloggy, with a special focus on library/librarian blogs. It’s quite a resource — a one-stop shop for articles, studies, …
I’d mentioned in a previous story that i’ve set out on the horrid task of digitizing about 5,000 – 6,000 of my family’s 35mm slides, dating from the early 1960s until the present day. I want to free all our old pictures from the prison of the slide carousel, where they’ve sat for – literally …
I may not be online too much over the next few days. My grandfather is in the hospital, probably with a stroke, though they haven’t figured it out yet. When I visited him on Sunday afternoon, he was almost in a coma, and I didn’t think I’d ever be able to talk with him again. …
Peter Suber at Open Access News pointed me to a very interesting pre-print article about the citation impact of open access journal articles. Citation Impact of Open Access Articles vs. Articles available only through subscription (“Toll-Access”) is still in the analysis stages, but they seem to have found that with physics and mathematics journals, those …
Here is an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education that has been causing some controversy on the library-related listservs. Information Literacy Makes All the Wrong Assumptions rails against the traditional ideas behind information literacy curricula. While I disagree with much of what the author has written, he does raise some interesting points. I’ve never …
John Batelle offers up an interesting model for generating revenue with online open access publishing in an article in this month’s MIT Technology Review. Batelle makes the suggestion for “an alternative economy in which the long-standing imbalance between publisher, audience, and advertiser could be corrected.” It’s a short article and definitely worth a read. [via …
Techdirt reported today that the New York Times is considering charging to allow people access to their website. Really really bad idea. It seems that the newspaper, like many others, doesn’t know how to adapt its business model to the current information provision environment. Here’s an excerpt from Techdirt’s coverage. We’ve already explained how the …
It’s like a TiVo hack created by TiVo themselves! TiVoToGo is their newest offering, a free service that allows users to transfer the shows recorded on their TiVo to their computers (via your wireless or wired network). It’s only for series 2 TiVo’s and currently only works on computers with Windows 2000 or XP, but …
Meredith asked me to write about 5 things i think work pretty well. And i do as i’m told. So here they are. 1) Konica/Minolta DiMAGE Scan Dual IV This is a so-called ‘film scanner’ or ‘slide scanner’. It lets you scan 35mm film negatives or slide positives into the computer. The resulting output is …
Steven Cohen commented on my post yesterday about Skype and my husband: I’m just wondering why it matters if librarians hear about new techie devices before or after others do. The point is that we do hear about them and share them with our colleagues. That is what collaboration is all about and is one …
Has anyone else just noticed that Skype has been mentioned a whole bunch over the past few days? I’ve now heard about it from Steven Cohen, Library Web Chic, Dave’s Blog, and Tame the Web. However, I’ve been hearing about it for many, many months now as my husband uses it to talk with his …
Bill Gates recently sat down with CNET for an interview (which begins with the frightening teaser “Bill Gates is coming to your living room, whether you like it or not”). In it, Gates talks about the current state of intellectual property law and the recent challenges to it from certain “communist elements” in the digital …
Senior Librarian, National Public Radio, Washington, DC I know I’m not at all qualified for the position, but wouldn’t it be the coolest job ever?
I have two job interviews coming up that I’m very excited about. It’s made me optimistic that perhaps my job search will be over soon (fingers crossed). I haven’t been looking for so long — it hasn’t even been a month since I’ve graduated. There are plenty of people I hear about who have spent …
The New York Times has an article about how our mobile technologies have made us increasingly dependent on seeking out electricity in places like cafes, restaurants, bookstores and even commuter trains. The author talks about how ettiquette rules have developed for the use of electrical outlets. I know I’ve been at Borders and seen people …
As a former social worker/psychotherapist, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a very familiar concept to me. People must fulfill their basic material needs before they can start thinking about things like self-actualization and intellectual fulfillment. I worked with families who could barely keep their electricity on and get the children to school, and I always …
I decided to stop agonizing over what sort of computer to buy and finally settled on the Sony A-250 I’d developed a major crush on. I couldn’t deny the fact that it had everything I was looking for, and, when I saw that there were some major rebates offered on it now at a local …
From Extension 337 [via Tame the Web], comes 10 Reasons why Nonprofits Should Use RSS. The post lists some very good reasons why RSS is a much better way to get news and information out and connect with interested users/patrons/clients/etc. than most traditional methods (newsletters, unsolicited or solicited emails, etc.). I’m just reproducing the basic …
According to Gary Price at Resource Shelf, GuruNet has become Answsers.com and is now offering a ready reference search engine for free. Answers.com culls its information from a variety of free and pay sources, including Columbia Encyclopedia, Columbia University Press, Merriam Webster, Computer Desktop Encyclopedia, SparKNotes, Who2, and Wikipedia. The user submits a query and …