Group items tagged

In this brief overview, I hope to illustrate some of the bstrategies and practices I've encountered in review writing--from my own experiences as a reviewer, from my students' questions and comments related to reviewing, and from several eminent voices in LIS who have written about reviewing--as well as what you can expect related to processes and communication between you and JWL. Review writing is one of the clearest examples of professional service within LIS, impacting continuing education activities, collection development decisions, and, indirectly, the surface of the publishing landscape for LIS serials, monographs, and software. There are, of course, individual benefits as well, but I'll get to those shortly. The discussion below is meant to illustrate several techniques that might be useful as you prepare your first few reviews, but with respect to any specific technique, your mileage may vary; feel free to adapt these suggestions to match your personal working and writing styles.

To say that Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home is more a users' manual than a book is not to belittle it. Email is like an appliance that we have been helplessly misusing because it arrived without instructions. Thanks to David Shipley and Will Schwalbe, our blind blunderings are over. With Shipley and Schwalbe's excellent instructions in hand we can email as confidently as we load the dishwasher and turn on the microwave.

Should the Library of Congress (LC) jettison Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), the longstanding professional taxonomy? That’s one of the provocative suggestions in a new report released last month by LC. “The Changing Nature of the Catalog and Its Integration with Other Discovery Tools,” commissioned by LC and written by associate university librarian Karen Calhoun of Cornell University, was making waves weeks earlier, thanks to a critical review of a draft of her paper, written for AFSCME 2910, the LC Professional Guild, by Thomas Mann (author of The Oxford Guide to Library Research). It warned of “serious negative consequences for the capacity of research libraries to promote scholarly research.”

Professor Nov, an information systems expert, produced a nice data point that seems to be methodologically sound, covering eight different motivations for contributing to Wikipedia.

The intrinsic motivations in the list may add a bit of extra incentive, but the main goal is to get one's point of view heard.

This paper explores the use of blogs as a platform for providing reference service, and discusses Lyceum, an open source software project from ibiblio.org, for this purpose.

In this article we will identify resources for locating faculty blogs, identify some well-regarded faculty blogs worthy of review, and discuss how faculty blogs can benefit academic librarians and why we should be reading them as part of our regular keeping up routine. Our goal is to encourage our academic librarian colleagues to add more faculty blogs to their regular regimen of blog reading.

In January 2007, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) announced its second multi–year technology grant program for America’s public libraries. The purpose of Phase II, Keeping communities connected: The next step is to help public libraries sustain the public access computing infrastructure laid down during Phase I. Now, as then, the goal of the program is to bridge the digital divide. But it is a digital divide as defined by Bill Gates and not the public library community. Situating Gates’ philanthropy within a critical policy frame, this paper considers two alternatives to Gates’ problem definition of the digital divide, and how knowledge of these might benefit those communities served by public access computing (PAC) services as found in public libraries. The two specific alternatives considered come from the Free Software Foundation (FSF), and Community Informatics (CI). Significantly, both social movements promote the potential of free and open software as an important part of any solution. Finally, the public library literature is reviewed for patterns in the community’s use of FOSS, and the argument is made for its use in the delivery of PAC services.

Introduction. It is argued that the actual elements of typical browsing episodes have not been well captured by common approaches to the concept to date. Method. Empirical research results reported by previous researchers are presented and closely analysed. Analysis. Based on the issues raised by the above research review, the components of browsing are closely analysed and developed. Browsing is seen to consist of a series of four steps, iterated indefinitely until the end of a browsing episode: 1) glimpsing a field of vision, 2) selecting or sampling a physical or informational object within the field of vision, 3) examining the object, 4) acquiring the object (conceptually and/or physically) or abandoning it. Not all of these elements need be present in every browsing episode, though multiple glimpses are seen to be the minimum to constitute the act. Results. This concept of browsing is then shown to have persuasive support in the psychological and anthropological literature, where research on visual search, curiosity and exploratory behaviour all find harmony with this perspective. Conclusions. It is argued that this conception of browsing is closer to real human behaviour than other approaches. Implications for better information system design are developed.

This annotated bibliography was commissioned to support the NSDL Evaluation Workshop (planned for October 2003) that will 1) explore the issues around evaluating the impact of digital libraries on education and that will 2) begin developing a strategy to evaluate the impact of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) on STEM education. The bibliography’s purpose, then, is to identify research to date on evaluating the impact of digital libraries on learning and teaching. It contains a Summary & Analysis section, which defines terms, makes observations about the literature, reviews the resources included, highlights issues, and suggests areas for further consideration.

WikiRef is a collaborative review of databases, books, websites, etc., that are part of the collection of Reference Resources available at or via the Butler University Libraries. It functions like a Reference User's Group that facilitates discussion between and the empowering of reference users.

The full-service network (FSN) is a telecommunications infrastructure capable of providing all of today's known telecommunications applications as well as laying the foundation for future applications.

. This tutorial reviews the FSN as deployed in a rural setting.

Technology is transforming the way in which researchers gain access to archives, not only in the choices archivists make about their uses of technology but in the portable technologies researchers bring with them to the archives. This essay reviews the implications of electronic mail, instant messaging and chat, digital reference services, Web sites, scanners, digital cameras, folksonomies, and various adaptive technologies in facilitating archival access. The new machines represent greater, even unprecedented, opportunities for archivists to support one of the main elements of their professional mission, namely, getting archival records used.

We asked marketing professor Peter Fader, Don Huesman, senior director of information technology and management professor Dan Raff to give us their reviews of Kindle.

Our Mission: To successfully establish the public library as the hub of the community in which collaborative information sharing by community members and library patrons enriches and informs their library experience, their cultural and recreational life, and their community involvement.

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to provide an overview of the collaborative tagging phenomenon and explore some of the reasons for its emergence. The paper reviews the related literature and discusses some of the problems associated with, and the potential of, collaborative tagging approaches for knowledge organisation and general resource discovery.