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 [...]

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 [...]

debutantes, nurses and librarians, part 2

So the Joker shoots Barbara Gordon, who ends up paralyzed in the Killing Joke. And it gets interesting right away because that’s not the end of Babs’ career as a crime-fighter. No, specifically because she is a librarian, specifically because she’s got the mad information skills she doesn’t lose the superhero mojo when [...]

debutantes, nurses and… librarians

So this post dovetails with a conversation Shaun and I have been having about gender and comic heroes and science geekery. Southern Fried Scientist is trying to answer this question here -
Why do heroes so rarely hold advanced degrees? And why are villains so often among the highly educated?
And there are bigger cultural questions, [...]

Notes from our Online NW talk - Soapbox, Echo Chamber & Salon…

Soapbox, echo chamber, and salon: Social media and civic engagement
Rachel Bridgewater & Anne-Marie Deitering
Online Northwest, 2009

Media Use & Civic Engagement data
Pew Internet and American Life project

Post-Election voter engagement (12/30/08)
The Internet and the 2008 election (6/15/08)
The Internet gains in politics (1/11/08)

Huffington Post and Politico lead wave of explosive growth at independent political blogs and news sites [...]

so here, here is some text that looks cool

So this is related to Caleb’s last few posts if you squint really hard and look over to the left. Because Caleb wrote about text, among other things, and he wrote about it over my head (but I’m thinking - Rachel and I will catch up!). And I’ve been watching these videos in [...]

discovery on the network level - it’s too messy out here for customers

Rachel said:
“So, yeah, when I hear all the stuff about trying to make our libraries more like businesses and trying to make our patrons more like customers it makes me despair.  Despair because, for one, if we seriously think we can compete with commercial booksellers at their game we’re seriously effing deluded but more importantly, [...]

control freaks

So I want to confess something about this paper I wrote in college.
See, I took this Constitutional Law class in the PoliSci department.  We had to analyze a hypothetical Supreme Court case and write up a legal opinion just like we were Justices.  For this class we used an actual law school Con Law casebook [...]

secret library books

So I’m really entranced by this idea I saw on this game design blog - books that you know in your bones are really about your thing, even though on the surface they claim to be about another thing –
I am building a list of the “secret” books on game design. These are books that [...]