Group items tagged

The second of four New York Times articles, written by a librarian and therefore supportive, but he made several good points. Most learning centers offer computer skills in only English, but to offer those in four foreign languages is impressive, along with the move to circulating digital media and devices.

The third of four New York Times articles; written by a school librarian and focusing on how libraries are a participatory culture.

A very interesting article about a former mainstream academic who had taken to developing his own press, and sued a librarian because of blog posts he had made that were critical of the press. The Wikipedia entry on the press shows the press has also sued a magazine and a website.

SUNY Potsdam is intending to cancel subscriptions to the American Chemical Society's journals as they would consume 10 percent of the library's acquisitions budget. The article looks at one of the biggest problems facing academic libraries and serials, namely journals they are required to carry because of accreditation or approval, yet they either can't afford or carry to carry to the detriment of other departments they try to serve.

This list has some really cool stuff! My favorite is the pocket projector.

"The ALA Washington Office held a special informational session on Sunday afternoon to let librarians get a head start on helping their patrons enroll for healthcare through the new Affordable Care Act, which aims to provide reasonable health insurance for all Americans equally, regardless of any pre-existing conditions."

"One Big Six publisher is, to its credit, on the record saying it is granting ownership. That bears repeating: a Big Six publisher says it is granting ownership. Librarians should do everything possible to test the limits of this ownership and to identify specific vendor practices (or clauses) that may undermine it."

The author raises a good point: is there really a way to teach information literacy in a transferrable way?  Or does teaching it in a particular enviroinment (i.e., backing up concepts with hands-on experience) go further to illustrate the subject?

Every time I look over RUSA's standards, I'm struck by how relevant they are to what we do as customer service professionals.

This is a quick walkthrough meant for librarians who are not sure how to evaluate, plan, and implement technology for their libraries' use.  I'm curious as to what our implementation or IT and Web services folks think of this.

Librarians may find this paragraph interesting: The new divide is such a cause of concern for the Federal Communications Commission that it is considering a proposal to spend $200 million to create a digital literacy corps. This group of hundreds, even thousands, of trainers would fan out to schools and libraries to teach productive uses of computers for parents, students and job seekers.

An interesting observation by a British librarian that the new, incoming model of cataloging done and stored in the cloud by vendors will cause some shifting in practices.   Namely, vendors' records will be seen as "master records."  Also, the sheer number of different people using the same "master record" will result on an easing of standards, while at the same time a governing structure will have to be set up in order for libraries to determine which standards to loosen and which to adhere to.

Very interesting concept. I don't know if I really want people calling me at 2 am to chat about Webpacs. By Felicia A. Smith on I recently read an interesting article titled Make Room for Daddy...And Mommy: Helicopter Parents Are Here, which states, "Helicopter Parents hover over their children interceding as soon as the child faces an unpleasant situation or uncertainty. The parents are 'over-involved' in their child's life."

One of the quotes from this post that stands out is "Of course, sifting through vast quantities of information in order to show people the important stuff is what newspapers are supposed to do..." Substitute the word 'librarians' for 'newspapers' and we are talking the same language.

Free kits for teachers to help students learn to code and hopefully generate interest in coding. This is a really neat program I'm interested in how teachers like it and how they fit it in to their busy schedules. I imagine there is a lot of collaboration between teachers and librarians, since often times librarians are in charge of the school's computer lab.

Earlier this week the ALA sent a strongly worded open letter to publishers about the need to figure out way for publishers to sell libraries e-books for "equitable use at a reasonable price."

A preview of an upcoming publication it doesn't necessarily appear to cover any new ground but does describe the stages in how a disruptive technology that changes an industry is perceived and takes effect.

A disappoint article about a library's response to a reading club winner who is perpetually ahead. There is no evidence he is cheating, but because he wins the contest continually the other kids get discouraged and quit. However, rather than discourage the child from his love of reading, I wonder if an alternate idea would be to make leagues, so there is an overall contest but children also complete with reading groups of a similar level.

This is just full of useful information-READ it!

Harvard librarians learned that lesson when they set up Twitter feeds broadcasting titles of books being checked out from campus libraries. It seemed harmless enough-a typical tweet read, "Reconstructing American Law by Bruce A. Ackerman," with a link to the book's library catalog entry-but the social-media experiment turned out to be more provocative than library staffers imagined.