Cheers for Padma

As I’ve mentioned before and will try not to overuse, I was named one of Library Journal’s Movers and Shakers for 2008. In the printed issue, I was fortunate to share the page with Padma Polepeddi. I say fortunate, because based on her profile, I’d say we’re something of kindred spirits. She reportedly “buttonholes new [...]

A Cautionary Story on Databases

Recently I received a request from a patron for mentions of two individuals in the main papers of Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Juneau. The patron gave me a time frame and I went to work. I went to my favorite newspaper database, clicked on the “info” button and found that the database contained articles from the [...]

Tag Surfing: An Outreach Tool?

One of the nicer features of WordPress is their “tag surfer” feature. It allows you to view entries from other WordPress.com hosted blogs that match categories and tags used in your own blog.
It occurs to me that this feature might be used by libraries and librarians with WordPress hosted blogs as an outreach tool. When [...]

RDA: Imminent Debacle?

RDA: Imminent Debacle is an opinion piece by Michael Gorman in the December 2007 issue of American Libraries appearing on page 64.
My blog post here is not to pass judgment on the new Resource Description and Access (RDA) or on the current Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules AACR2.
What I do want to address is Mr. Gorman’s interesting [...]

In Flew Enza

In Flew Enza is the title of an article in the December 2007 issue of American Libraries. The article by Nora J. Quinlan appears on page 50 and is a “look both ways” type of article. Ms. Quinlan looks back to the 1918 flu epidemic and forward to towards a future flu pandemic and how [...]

Information R/evolution

Thanks to Samantha for pointing out this video on Twitter. It’s a fun and creative viewing. It’s a little too either/or for me. Especially now that I have some experience with wiki-spam. Still, I think many of the videos points are well taken. Especially the point about how the digital realm allows us to put [...]

Nuevo servicio para detectar plagios

Plagiarism lives the world over, as this post by Argentine blogger Diana Rodriguez suggests:

Nuevo servicio para detectar plagios

via BiblioTICando(r). Blog bibliotecario con humor (por Diana Rodríguez) by Diana Rodríguez on Aug 20, 2007
“Según informa María Valerio, para El mundo.es Salud, se ha implementado un nuevo servicio para detectar y frenar el plagio de publicaciones [...]

Librarian resistance through the ages

Stephen Abrams has a post called Kicking and Screaming, which gives a good overview of technologies or approaches that librarians have resisted over the years.
A few good quotes:
“It is certainly not the function of the public library to foster the mind-weakening habit of novel-reading among the very classes—the uneducated, busy or idle—whom it is the [...]

Uncontrolled Vocabulary - Listen Today, Talk Tomorrow

If you’re a librarian and you haven’t yet listened to Greg Schwartz’s new podcast Uncontrolled Vocabulary, zip on over to the site (see below) and listen to the first episode. Then sign up for the podcast.
Uncontrolled Vocabulary (UV) #1 featured Greg and several other librarians having a live discussion on various library issues from patron [...]

Journals - Difference between e and print

This isn’t meant to be a “print good” / “electronic bad” sort of post, but I wanted to jot down how different my experience is between actually handling a physical professional journal vs getting that same journal in electronic format.
Case in point - American Libraries. As an ALA member I get my own copy sent [...]