Complaints over the cost of academic journals have long been a trope that repeats at library conferences with no denouement, but there are new signs that might be changing.
January 1, 2012
Happy New Scriblio!
The most recently released, stable version of Scriblio is marked 2.9-r1 and was last updated in June 2010. You can be forgiven for thinking development had ceased in the interim. Today, however, I’m proud to introduce a completely new Scriblio, re-written from the ground up to take advantage of the latest features of WordPress and eliminate the mistakes [...]
August 28, 2011
Search The Sears And Roebuck Catalog
You’d think the Sears Archives would offer an online search of their historical catalogs, but the best you’ll find is a list of libraries holding the microfilms. Ancestry.com offers an online search, but only to paying members. I’m looking into this because I was looking for historical trends in consumer products and thought the catalog [...]
February 28, 2011
eBook User’s Bill of Rights
It’s easy to see the eBook User’s Bill of Rights as a sign of the growing rift between libraries and content producers. Easy if you’re me, anyway. It connects very conveniently with Richard Stallman’s open letter to the Boston Public Library decrying what he summarizes as their complicity with DRM and abdication of their responsibilities [...]
May 1, 2010
Pearls Of Wisdom In Mail List Threads
David Cloutman on Code4Lib: Don’t forget to look at trends outside of “Libraryland”. A lot of professional library discussion takes place in an echo chamber, and bad ideas often get repeated and gain credibility as a result. Librarians usually overstate the uniqueness of their organizations and professions. When the question, “What are other libraries doing?” [...]
April 1, 2010
College Students Use, Love, Are Aware Of The Limitations Of Wikipedia
How Today’s College Students Use Wikipedia For Course-Related Research: Overall, college students use Wikipedia. But, they do so knowing its limitation. They use Wikipedia just as most of us do — because it is a quick way to get started and it has some, but not deep, credibility. 52% of respondents use Wikipedia frequently or [...]
February 23, 2010
i thought i had invented the idea , but as for many other ideas i’ve had , once i looked i saw someone already doing it
August 6, 2009
Who Gets To Control The Future Of Libraries?
The following was my email response to a thread on the web4lib mail list: Okay, it must be said: you’re all wrong[1]. I can understand that news of a librarian being fired/furloughed will raise our defenses, but that’s no excuse for giving up the considered and critical thinking that this occasion demands. Consider this: the [...]
June 9, 2009
Book Search Results Vs. Users
Bret Victor offers the above design suggestions (from 2006) to Amazon in the book search results display (he’s comparing to this). I didn’t discover them at the time, but many of them are still relevant now. Bret notes that Amazon’s display doesn’t do a good job of answering the questions a person has when searching for [...]
June 2, 2009
Wolfram|Alpha’s Missing Feature: Libraries
John Timmer brings up my two biggest complaints about Wolfram|Alpha. The first is that it’s even harder to identify the source of information than it is in Wikipedia, the other is what happens when searches fail: A bad Web search typically brings up results that help you refine your search terms; a bad Alpha search [...]
May 6, 2009
Fun Threads For Librarians
Who doesn’t want to be an anarchist librarian? Or a bibliophian?
May 4, 2009
Thank you – got it working with that simple tweak.
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