an end to who and where

Wood, James. How Fiction Works. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008

I checked out this book a few months ago and am finally being forced to read it (someone has a hold on it). I never took a real literature course in college, and 10 pages in, I’m already in over my head.
But my [...]

google books will get better, or will it?

This afternoon I used Google Books to help answer a readers’ advisory question. Keywords from the patrons’ question turned up in a 1971 issue of Horn Book, the children’s literature review.
Google’s misshapen snippet showed part of a summary of the book, but nothing more. I took the elevator to the sub-basement, got lost, asked [...]

touchscreens

On a recent trip to DC, I watched with fascination as the high schoolers sitting next to me on my JetBlue flight attempted to control the individual TVs in the seat backs in front of them.  Both boys reached up and started touching the screen - tapping, dragging, trying increasingly elaborate gestures on the screen [...]

I was thinking about the thing where The Scientist (register to see) blogged that Merck payed Elsevier publish a fake journal, and I was wondering what the two companies were saying about it.
Tidbits:
* Merck claims no foul play

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?

Thank you, John Hope Franklin

Oddly, given the number of history blogs I subscribe to, I first heard that John Hope Franklin had died from someone on twitter.  And I thought immediately that I wanted to write something, but I didn’t know what.  Then, too, the tributes and memorials and expressions of gratitude started pouring in everywhere I looked to [...]