Has anyone seen an access statement like this before?
Sociological Research Online
Open-ish access … but wait! Not if you’re at a university. How is this a good idea? Are the articles in Sociological Research so very very important that one could not possibly achieve academic success without access to them, making [...]

what makes a technology new?

I’ve been thinking some about new technology. What really makes a technology new, and what does that mean?
I have an inkling to stand on my high hobby horse and say that a new or improved application of an existing technology isn’t really new. My Subaru Outback and a Model A Ford are basically the [...]

getting married and having kids

Now and then I hear that reference service differs between public libraries and academic libraries in that public libraries give answers, whereas academic libraries teach.
I’ve never accepted this definition. True, it is not useful to make distinctions when you are running a collaborative multi-type reference service, but mostly, I just don’t see it, and [...]

a different digital divide?

I came across a post this morning by Joshua Schachter, “on url shorteners“. He begins:

“URL shortening services have been around for a number of years. Their original purpose was to prevent cumbersome URLs from getting fragmented by broken email clients that felt the need to wrap everything to an 80 column screen. But it’s 2009 [...]

real-world information management question

go! answer! I’ve been thinking a lot lately about shifting a lot of my instruction focus from “search-and-find” to “manage-and-use,” so this question is very interesting to me —
Short-Circuit Signs: Tags and Tagging
What’s the best way to tag, is there a best way?