I picked up a new Macbook last week at the campus bookstore (splurged on the black one and snuck in on the Nano giveaway) and have been playing around with some of the new features like the built in iSight. I downloaded the oh-so-fun Delicious Library and have been happily scanning in barcodes off the […]

Posted in Technology, The Academy 2 Comments »

I’m finishing up some slides for another Education Institute webcast I’ll be giving on Tuesday, Why the Masses Love Metadata: Folksonomies, Tagging and the Amateur Expert (i’ll post the slides later this week). I was poking around Connotea to see what had changed recently and stumbled through into their Lauchpad , self billed as the […]

Posted in Folksonomies and Tagging, Social Software, The Academy 1 Comment »

:: A whirlwind September follows a relaxing summer blogging hiatus. It was nice to lay off blogging for a bit in favor of other things that were competing for my time. I’m likely to continue to be a sporadic blogger, posting occasionally and dumping links here regularly, but that’s OK with me. You get what […]

Posted in Social Software, The Academy No Comments »

I started writing the following post about three weeks ago but it was never completed. Life has been a bit of a whirlwind lately with conferences and other work projects dominating most of my time. Like many fellow bloggers, I think there is something too that comes with the transition from winter to spring that […]

Posted in Conference Reports, Current Events, Digital Life, Me, Social Software, The Academy 1 Comment »

There are some really interesting findings in a new study conducted and reported by Nature (particularly in light of the beating Wikipedia is taking over the prank pulled on the Kennedy assassination entry).
However, an expert-led investigation carried out by Nature — the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and Britannica’s […]

Posted in Scholarly Communication, Social Software, Wikis 1 Comment »

Totally interesting. And a good lesson on labels.
Google Book Search: “we’ve been thinking lately that Google Print should really be called Google Book Search.
Why the change? Well, one factor was all the comments we got about how excited people were that Google Print would help them print out their documents, or web pages they visit […]

Posted in Digital Life, Scholarly Communication No Comments »

Google Print gets its start today with a live index of works already in the public domain. Current legal undertakings of course put a bit of a damper on the launch, but nevertheless, I suspect its not a fight that Google plans to give up on easily. It was interesting to read that Google will […]

Posted in Digital Life, Libraries, Scholarly Communication No Comments »

A colleague pointed out journalprices.com to me today, and I see now that Resource Shelf is also pointing to the site.
The Journal Cost-Effectiveness page goes alongside An Open Letter to All University Presidents and Provosts Concerning Increasingly
Expensive Journals (as drafted by Theodore Bergstrom and R. Preston McAfee). Their call to action is twofold: […]

Posted in Scholarly Communication No Comments »

The changing nature of college students also makes it important for reference librarians to be comfortable with new technologies. NextGen students are accustomed to using computers and cellphones, sometimes at the same time. They expect services and resources when and where they need them, not when and where the library staff wants to provide them. […]

Posted in Digital Life, Libraries, The Academy 1 Comment »

A lot of Wikipedia critics point to hypothetical situations when giving reasons for not valuing the site. Wikipedia even has a ‘Replies to common objections’ article set up to field these. I’d rather look at some real examples of applying the same level of scrutiny to materials often held up as the Platonic ideal of […]

Posted in Libraries, Scholarly Communication, Social Software, Wikis No Comments »