Here’s a new book that’s gone straight onto my must-read list:
Perspectives, Insights and Priorities: 17 Leaders Speak Freely of Librarianship
Edited by Norman Horrocks
“This extraordinary book defines and describes librarianship and library
science through insightful and thoughtful essays contributed by 17
recognized leaders of the profession.”
Citations and reference lists can seem like a dull topic, but they have always been important. Several speakers at Blogtalk Downunder (gosh, that conference seems wayback now) mentioned the need for people to cite references more adequately on the web. Granted, those speaking were describing the need for references to be cited in students’ […]
I just realised that I haven’t mentioned my visit to the new City of Sydney Customs House Library yet. It has a bit of a Seattle Public Library feel to me - it’s beautiful, it’s busy, but it’s a little difficult to actually use. Instead of being one level like the old Town Hall […]
The Sydney Morning Herald has several articles today about the failure of Federal Government committees over the past few years -
A Herald investigation has found that the Federal Government has not replied on time to a single public inquiry out of the 62 it has ordered in the House of Representatives since December 1998. […]
On another Open Source note, with the use of Lightning Bug at Radical Reference to track reference questions, there is almost no aspect of library operations that cannot be run with Open Source applications. Many packages like Koha are now stable enough for widespread deployment.
An open classification system for physical objects may be the […]
Karen Schneider points out the biggest benefit of a consortia that includes public and academic libraries -
Not only that, but as long as I continue living near a public library with Link+ access, when I graduate from University of San Francisco next year I won’t lose access to scholarly or hard-to-get materials.
This […]
An exceptionally cool project is looking at how Personal Information Management software can represent social relationships [Via We make money not art]. To me, it’s a cross between The Sims and the task view in Entourage -
“Your phone’s screen shows a crowd of human figures, each an avatar of one of your friends, acquaintances […]
I’ve signed up to and been editing a few wiki pages in various projects lately. While some librarians are a little hesitant about wikis, particularly Wikipedia, I am a big fan of them. Perhaps even more so since Steven Cohen pointed to the Wikipedia live changes site [unfortunately now offline due to high traffic].
I […]
Crossing Boundaries: 2005 IA Summit Wrapup: Overview and Pre-Sessions discusses the summit held in Montreal in April (which I missed by just a couple of days, sigh). Christina Wodtke writes -
In recent Summits, IAs have admitted that the idea of a platonic organization system is a false one; our choices in categorization always reflect […]
In general, I dislike audio tours in museums. Not really because of the audio tour itself (I’ve never heard one) but because of the people that use them. They tend to cause people to stand in front of paintings for an overly long amount of time, cause bottlenecks all over the gallery, and really, they […]
