OLPC and the Library : The Talk

If you are in the Windsor / Detroit area, please consider joining a talk sponsored by MPOW called:

One Laptop Per Child: Open Source, Open Access, Open Library
January 28th, 7 pm, Freed-Orman Centre
By attending, you could win your very own XO laptop!

There's an article about the OLPC in the Toronto Sunday Star. What I found very amusing is that I share the journalist's same sensibility towards simple computers: he used to own an eMate and I used to lust after one.

Today my guest post at OLPC got published

Today the OLPC News blog kindly printed a guest post of mine about the relationship between libraries and the work of the One Laptop Per Child program.

That's the good news. The bad news is that evidently, there were only 4000 orders for XO laptops from Canada and that due to shipping logistics, the Canadian deliveries have been pushed back until February 15th!

OLA wants your picutres of libraries from around the world

The Ontario Library Association's Super Conference 2008 is asking

Do you have pictures of photos of libraries you've snapped in your travels? If you’ve got some hidden away on your hard drive or in a photo album please help us by submitting them to OLA. Photos of any kinds of libraries (or librarians) in any location are good...

Photos will be used in a gallery on the OLA Super Conference Web site, at plenary sessions throughout the conference and, most particularly, at the closing plenary on Saturday, Feb. 2nd during the luncheon in which incoming IFLA President Ellen Tise from South Africa will be speaking. Photos can be submitted in any of the
following ways:

• Send digital photos to superconference@accessola.com (in any format but as high a resolution as possible).
• If you are a Flickr member, you may submit photos to the “Libraries of the World – OLA Super Conference Pool” Flickr group.Again, as high a resolution as possible.
• Send print photos to OLA, 50 Wellington St. East, Suite 201, Toronto M5E 1C8. Photos can be picked up at Super Conference from the Information Desk in the Registration Lobby. Any photos not picked up will be mailed to their owners following Super Conference.

I'll be at this year's Super Conference for Friday only and will be speaking on that day with Stacy Allison-Cassin in Session #1318: Scholar's Portage: Leveraging Social Networking Tools and Scholars Portal Data.

Books that scientists use - an addendum

Some years ago when I started my tenure as Science Librarian at the Leddy Library, I worked on a particularly tedious project that really helped me get a better understanding on what books scientists actually use in their work (as opposed to so many other titles).

Using Web of Science, I would search for a year's worth of articles from Science, Nature and PNAS, download these articles' references into an Excel spreadsheet and try to decipher which ones were books. It was a very very mechanical and time-consuming process. But it made me a better science librarian.

Now, I'm pleased to say, that Scopus makes this same task possible in less than 30 seconds:

1. in search for box type in journal name (e.g. Nature) and select Source Title from drop-down menu
2. limit date range to a particular time period (e.g. 2007)
3. hit search button
4. in the Refine Results box, limit your results to just the journal name in question (e.g. Nature and not Nature Biochemistry)
5. in the Results box, click the Select All box and the hit the References button
6. If your initial search results brought more than 2000 hits, you will be informed that only the first 2000 articles will have their references retrieved.
7. review the list of most cited references of that journal from most cited to least

Here's a list of the 10 most cited books by Nature, Science, and PNAS*. The second number in the list represents where in the journal's list of most cited items can the book be found.

Most Cited Books in Nature, 2007**
1. [1] Molecular cloning: a laboratory manual (1989)
2. [2] Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (1994)
3. [3] Numerical Recipes (1992)
4. [4] Biometry (1995)
5. [5] Biostastical Analysis (1984)
6. [7] The Rat Brain in Stereotaxic Coordinates (1986)
7. [13] Principles of Optics (1980)
8. [15] Physics of Semiconductor Devices (1981)
9. [19] Intermolecular and Surface Forces (1992)
10. [21] Co-Planar Stereotaxic Atlas of the Human Brain (1988)

Most Cited Books in Science, 2007**
1. [1] Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (1994)
2. [2] CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics (2005)
3. [3] Biometry (1995)
4. [4] Biostastical Analysis (1984)
5. [5] The Rat Brain in Stereotaxic Coordinates (1986)
6. [9] Principles of Optics (1980)
7. [10] Computer Simulation of Liquids (1987)
8. [11] Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III-R (1990)
9. [12] Advanced Organic Chemistry (1988)
10. [14] An Introduction to Probability Theory and its Applications (1971)

Most Cited Books in PNAS, 2007**
1. [1] Molecular cloning: a laboratory manual (1989)
2. [4] Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (1994)
3. [6] Numerical Recipes (1992)
4. [8] CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics (2005)
5. [9] Biometry (1995)
6. [10] Biostatistical Analysis (1984)
7. [12] The Rat Brain in Stereotaxic Coordinates (1986)
8. [13] Handbook of Mathematical Functions (1972)
9. [22] Stastical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences (1988)
10. [23] Statistical Methods (1980)

*Nature and Science published almost 2000 items in 2007 and PNAS published closer to 3000 items in 2007.

I'm planning to use this method to determine if there are any important books my library is missing by reviewing the references of the key journals in various fields for 2007. Its still a largely mechanical process (although the Foxy Leddy LibX toolbar makes book-checking much faster than typing titles into the library catalogue) but its a good task to slowly start the work of the new year.

**Addendum:
I've been thinking further about these lists and I think I am in grievous error.

For example: the approximately 2000 articles in Nature evidently produce 24,660 references. That's about 200 items in each item's bibliography - which sounds high but its in the realm of possibility. But what confuses me is the cited by column which says that the first item in the list, Molecular Cloning: A Laboratory Manual, has been cited 103, 825 times. So that must refer to how many times the item has been cited within the Scopus database. The fact that the some of the books in the list appear in the same relative order when performing the same procedure using the journals PNAS and Science, means that these lists reflect the most popular science books within Scopus and not necessarily within each journal.

Rats.

Scholars Portal Day Presentation

Stacy Allison-Cassin and myself gave a presentation / daytime talkshow chat on our Scholr 2.0 paper last week at the George Ignatieff Theatre, University of Toronto as a part of Scholars Portal Day : slides • video stream (37 min)

Information Literacy Literature Review 2006

For the last handful of years, the journal Reference Services Review has published an annotated round-up of articles on Information Literacy and continuing this tradition, its most recent issue (Volume 35 Issue 4 2007) has the 57 page literature review, Library instruction and information literacy 2006.

A Reading List for PSAG

I recently volunteered to come up with the beginnings of a reading list for the OCUL Public Services Advisory Group to help start our brainstorming on an upcoming user/usability study that OCUL will be commissioning. Here it is:

First and foremost, we need a vision

We suggest clients look five or ten years into the future and ask the question, "What will using our site be like on that date? What experience will the user have?" Team members from the best organizations can answer this question. They have a consistent, clear idea what the user's experience will be like in the future. Having a clear vision lets the team chart a direction for their design, helping identify if any design idea is moving them closer to the vision or farther away... It's critical the vision not focus on future technology but instead on future experience. What are the steps in today's process that makes things cumbersome or frustrating? How could the experience become more delightful? [Thinking in the Right Terms: 7 Components for a Successful Web Site Redesign]

We need to understand our users

"The University of Minnesota Libraries received support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop a multi-dimensional model for assessing support for scholarship in the context of a large research campus. The project team explored discipline-specific needs for facilities, information content, services,tools, and expertise in the humanities and social sciences. The goal was to develop a model for bringing greater coherence to these distributed resources through physical and virtual means, and also a research support environment that could be modeled, prototyped, and evaluated." [A Multi-Dimensional Framework for Academic Support: Final Report]

"Our first task was to identify one trenchant research question to guide the project. The question we developed was, What do students really do when they write their research papers? Between the assignment of a research paper and the finished, submitted product was a black box that largely concealed the processes undertaken by the student. We wanted to take a peek into that box to see what we could find." [Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester (pdf)]

We need to build something better

"The author seeks to answer the following questions: What characterizes the queries that end users submit to online IR systems? What search features do people use? What features would enable them to improve on the retrievals they have in hand? What features are hardly ever used? What do end users do in response to the system's retrievals? Are end users satisfied with their online searches?" [Markey, K. (2007). Twenty-five years of end-user searching, part 1: Research findings. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(8), 1071-1081.]

"Reading and synthesizing Marcum, Calhoun, Bates, Mann, Hildreth, Borgman, Anderson, etc., should be mandatory for everyone who cares about the future of the online library catalog. The next steps must be to engage all interested parties in serious dialogue, system prototyping, decision making, and action so the online library catalog of the future hits the ground running just as mass digitization projects end." [The Online Library Catalog: Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained?]

"Richard Wallis of Talis suggested during his Access 2007 presentation that if the catalogue knew a bit about you, it could present better search results to you. Using the example of the keyword lotus, an engineering student would get items about the car of the same name while the botanist would get items about the genus Nelumbo. Mark Leggot, using his metaphor of the search box as Lego brick, suggested in his Access 2007 presentation that it shouldn't be difficult to embed a library search box into a course-specific page that was already constrained to the sources that were relevant to both the subject of the course and the course level." [Access 2007 Wrap Up Part Three - The Importance of Being Relevant]

We need to get into the places where our users are

For me there are five parts of a strategy for maintaining the library as a vibrant enterprise worthy of support from our campuses...
4. Reposition library and information tools, resources, and expertise so that they are embedded into the teaching, learning, and research enterprises. This includes both human and, increasingly, computer-mediated systems. Emphasis should be placed on external, not library-centered, structures and systems.
5. Migrate the focus of collections from purchasing materials to curating content. [A Strategy for Academic Libraries in the First Quarter of the 21st Century]

"We suggest three main areas, with specific recommendations for each, where our institutions can help to alleviate these pressures.

• Enhance and improve the user interface
• Connect the citation network to user workflow
• Embrace standards and technologies that will allow present and future network discovery systems to make use of what we offer" [Scholr 2.0]

The Distant Librarian: Some initial thoughts on library advertising in Facebook

The Distant Librarian: Some initial thoughts on library advertising in Facebook

Trying on a new look

Darwins shoes..., originally uploaded by Norma Desmond.

I've updated this blog's template to something more readable. This won't make much of a difference to those readers who take in these words via an RSS reader, but just over half my visitors come to the site directly or stumble in here through search engines, so they might like the change.

The banner photograph is part of this image called Darwins shoes taken by Norma Desmond. The statue of Darwin can be found by the Shewsbury public library.

Blood on the Stacks

ARGNet:

This year marks the second time that the Trinity University's Coates Library in San Antonio has run Blood on the Stacks, an alternate reality game that helps new students to get familiar with the school's library. According to this entry at the SHU - Blogcause07 blog, 'anecdotally the library and support staff reported feedback from students of feeling more familiar, less alien in the environment, the library was associated with fun and the staff were more approachable.' This appears to be yet another neat way that people are using ARGs to assist in a social environment.

One Library Per Child

I had heard about the One Laptop Per Child Project (aka the $100 laptop) before May of this year, but it wasn't until I heard Rochelle Mazar's presentation at the WILU Conference at York that I picked up on the connection between it and the mission of libraries and of its possible educational opportunities for both here and abroad.

Fast forward to today. While the library blogosphere has been weighing in on Amazon's Kindle reader, I've noticed scarce mention of the OLPC's XO laptop. Ah, but there's still time for this to happen, because it has just been announced that the XO laptop will extend commercial sales through its GiveOneGetOne program until the end of the year. (So you should check it out.)

I'm glad for the extension for a number of reasons with one being that it was only today that I finished setting up a display in my library on the One Lap Per Child Program (and what it has to do with libraries).

There are other events that I'm hoping will develop from this. Hopefully more about this soon!

Access 2007 Wrap Up Part Three - The Importance of Being Relevent

Peter Binkley did a simple and elegant comparison of a number of online library catalogues to begin his presentation, Searching the OPAC - The State of Play. He did performed the same search in all the library catalogues he examined; he did a keyword search for the word canada.

Its a ingenious example. You see, if a user types in a one word search in a catalogue for, say, dogs and gets results in which all the books that are entitled 'dogs' came up first, you would be hard pressed to say that those results weren't relevant.

But if you search for the word, canada, in say in most university library catalogues, you don't get books entitled Canada coming up first. Instead, the first result you get will likely be a document with a long name like Emergency food service : planning for disasters (U of A), Post-war Canadian housing and residential mortgage markets and the role of government (University of Windsor), or Progress report by the United States. Environmental Protection Agency. Great Lakes National Program Office and Environment Canada (University of Toronto).

This is because these library catalogues use a scoring system in which search and item word matches are used to assign points to items in order to determine relevancy. So a book by a Canadian government agency (which will frequently have the word Canada in its name twice - once for the English version and one for the French) about something Canadian, will tend to outscore the single word titled books.

Discovery layers don't correct this problem: La sécurité humaine et les femmes autochtones au Canada is the first result from McMaster's library catalogue; NCSU's first response is Compendium of plant disease and decay fungi in Canada, 1960-1980.

Librarians have largely left the responsibility of the library catalogue's search algorithm to the commercial library vendors who (putting this delicately) don't dedicate as much development time to it as, say, Google. But with the advent of open source indexing software such as Lucene some librarians are beginning to tinker with relevancy rules. Is it just coincidence that library catalogues that are running either the open-source Koha or the open-source Evergreen both pass the canada keyword test?

Another means of improving relevancy is to put the most popular items at the top of the list, like Amazon does. Bibliocommons and Koha use circulation counts in their relevancy rankings while WorldCat Local uses the number of global holdings in theirs.

But relevancy is too difficult a problem that can be solved by the simple tinkering of the numbered weights in the search algorithm.

A fundamental shortcoming of the library catalog is that it doesn't (and as currently designed can't) know the why for any given search. A search for the subject "breast cancer" in PVLD's catalog results in over 40 distinct subject headings listed in alphabetical order from the simple "Breast – Cancer" through "Breast – Cancer – Religious Life" to "Breast – Cancer – United States". The catalog doesn't know that one person is searching for books on this subject because she has to write a term paper, and another because his wife has just been diagnosed with the disease – and therefore it gives no clue as to which of these subject headings is most relevant to each person. [PVDL Director via Everything is Miscellaneous]

One of the means by which Bibliocommons addresses this issue is through the resorting of items so that highly rated items by trusted sources appear on the top of the list. This is one way of informing the library catalogue of who you are, at who you are as defined by who else you find trustworthy. Richard Wallis of Talis suggested during his Access 2007 presentation that if the catalogue knew a bit about you, it could present better search results to you. Using the example of the keyword lotus, an engineering student would get items about the car of the same name while the botanist would get items about the genus Nelumbo. Mark Leggot, using his metaphor of the search box as Lego brick, suggested in his Access 2007 presentation that it shouldn't be difficult to embed a library search box into a course-specific page that was already constrained to the sources that were relevant to both the subject of the course and the course level. Addendum: As Shibboleth allows for some attribute-based authentication to be passed to an online source, there may be a potential to tailor the interface or search results based on the user's subject specialty or readership level [Scholr 2.0: 3.2.2 Shibboleth].

That's the last of my Access 2007 wrap-up blog posts. Sorry for the irrelevant ending.

If ebooks light your fire

Why spend $400 for Amazon's new Kindle ebook reader (with a DRM that would kiss libraries good bye) when you could buy 2 great ebook readers for the same price that is open source. Oh yeah, and one of these laptops goes to a child in a developing country. But you need to act fast!

Collegiality as a weapon

Google Scholar Blog: Academic Freedom, Tenure & Collegiality for Librarians

Librarianship is a very collegial profession. This brings post highlights one of the downsides of collegiality.

True story about a library journal that is so sad its funny

So a colleague of mine who has recently graduated from library school recently learned that she had a paper approved for publication in a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the work of library science students on subjects of general interest to librarians. This week she received a 'proof' of her article which looked good except one thing: the article was dated as if it was from the year 2004.

We talked about this on the phone and I tried to reassure her that it*must* have been a typo because it could not be possible that a publication from a library school would back date their publication to a such an extreme. It couldn't happen.

But being curious, I checked the Library Literature and Information Science Index to see when this organization had published their last issue and was horrified to see that it was "Spring/Fall 2003". I urged my colleague to email the editors to see if the 2004 was in error - perhaps the result of some archaic publication management software?

She got an email back yesterday. It wasn't a typo. At one point, she was told, there was a delay in publishing and in order "to avoid confusion over any missing years" they decided to keep the years consecutive.

DID IT NOT OCCUR TO THESE PEOPLE THAT A SWITCH TO A VOLUME AND ISSUE SCHEME COULD REMEDY THIS PROBLEM? DOES THIS PRACTICE NOT DEFY THE VERY NOTION OF ACADEMIC INTEGRITY?

But it gets worse. MUCH worse. Guess what that name of this journal is? Come on! Guess!!


It's...

(wait for it)

CURRENT ISSUES IN LIBRARIANSHIP!

You just can't make this stuff up.

In the literature - Librarians and Scholarship

Fox, David, 1948-


• Finding Time for Scholarship: A Survey of Canadian Research University Librarians
  
  
• Abstract:

  More than half the participants in a survey of Canadian research university librarians indicated that scholarship activities were required or encouraged at their universities, yet most university librarians have year-round schedules of assigned duties that present challenges to the engagement in sustained, meaningful scholarship. Full-time librarians reported spending an average of 47 hours per week on all of their responsibilities combined, but most librarians devote less than five hours per week to scholarly activities. Ideally, librarians would like to spend 15 percent of their time on scholarship. Strategies for increasing time and support for scholarship are considered.

• portal: Libraries and the Academy, Vol. 7, No. 4 (2007), pp. 451–462
• University of Windsor link to article
  

Conversations in LibraryLand

Jon Udell of LibraryLookup fame is not a librarian but he has great talks with those from libraryland as part of his podcast series, Interviews with Innovators. Last week, he spoke with Beth Jefferson of Bibliocommons. Other interviews with direct library-content include chats with Stuart Weibel of The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, Art Rhyno of the University of Windsor, Geoffrey Bilder of CrossRef, and Dan Chudnov on OpenURL.

Access 2007 Wrap Up Part Two - The Importance of Being Open

(This is the second of what I hope will be three wrap-up posts on Access 2007. Rather than a chronological recount of the days' events, I've chosen to highlight three themes and threads that I picked up. The first one is here.)

The Importance of Being Open

Jessymn West began Access 2007 with a talk that reminded the audience of the rural population that libraries serve and some of the challenges one faces in order to serve them with proper technology. As an aside, she said that a state-wide union catalogue would go a long way to ease some of these challenges.

We learned the next day that the province of British Columbia is pursuing such a project. Ben Hyman spoke of the history and the goals of the project. It was decided that the best means to provide a common interface for all the public library branches of BC would be to first provide a common back-end. And so they have decided to use Evergreen, an open-source library catalogue. They made the same conclusion as the panel of Associate University Librarians did in their panel, ILS Options for Academic Libraries: choosing open-source software is no more risky than investing in a commercial software solution. As if on cue, Laurentian University announced at Access that they would making the shift to Evergreen.

Recognizing that only strengths of library catalogue technology are the 'backend' or inventory functions, many librarians are creating their own front-end interfaces to go over top of the library catalogue. If this interface can handle non-book materials like articles, this interface is frequently referred to as a 'discovery layer', perhaps incorrectly as it is still providing a 'search' function. There are still no usability studies that demonstrate these new layers provide any significant improvement to the user experience.

One reason why development in this area is slow is because many commercial library catalogues are difficult to 'skin' in the first place (in computer parlance, this means adding a layer as opposed to removing a layer) and one of the Access "Thundertalks" was dedicated to the extensive workarounds performed in order augment the interface of the library catalogue. The inability to freely access and remix one's own data hosted in commercial software is clearly frustrating to many librarians.

Joshua Ferraro of Liblime, a company that provides service and support of open source software, believes that much of the friction that occurs between librarians and vendors is a result of a larger problem: that software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry. He suggests that a closer partnership between commercial vendors and libraries based on open tools, standards, and data could improve this relationship and, presumedly, improve the library experiences of our users. I believe that Biblicommons is an example of this next generation enterprise.

Beth Jefferson of Bibliocommons spoke at Access and at its pre-conference and shared some of her research dedicated to improving the improving library catalogues in the public library sphere. Bibliocommons has developed an interface with partners in the public library community, that integrates with a library's existing catalogue software. One way that Bibliocommons is different from the other library catalogue interfaces and 'discovery layers' that I have seen, is that it has made the effort to integrate the tagging and ranking of items at the user account screen (books out, when books are due, books on hold, etc.) since it is at this point when the reader is 'ready' to share what they felt about what they've read.

There are several implications to how they've done this but I just want to highlight one: library catalogue interfaces will have be able to seamlessly communicate with the information at the back-end (such as circulation data and patron information) and this means that library catalogue must have open data channels. The longer the commercial vendors resist opening up access to what is *our* data, the longer the opportunity for open-source library catalogues like Evergreen will have to make into the library marketplace.

Adding print holdings to the SFX menu

This is most likely going to be of interest to those librarians part of the OCUL consortium, but I thought you should know that Art Rhyno has written up a description how to Add Print Holdings & ILL Links to the SFX Menu in SPOT-DOCS.

Canadian Academic Library webpages

I captured and collected these screenshots of a subset of Canadian university library websites because I had the feeling that there were archetypes of such sites. I've tagged some elements that I thought were interesting and you are welcome to tag and make notes yourself.

In some cases I was interested in language (catalogue vs books, for example) so added tags of the exact wording used and in other cases, I added a more general tag (e.g. site map) if a particular element was present. I'm going to continue to work on the tagging and the markup in the next few days as I haven't finished all the libraries yet.

I also included a set the top 10 websites in Canada according to Alexa because it's important to remember that while librarians may take their cues from other library sites, our students do not.

One profession, one book

The recent AskMetafilter question, What single book is the best introduction to your field? [waxy] should be required reading for the reference and collection librarians among us (hint: the LibX toolbar makes the title lookups not so painful)

I wonder if there is anyway to add these directly into a library catalogue's relevancy engine?

Check it out

Threadless T-Shirts - November Was A Good Month by Mike Sayre

Access 2007 Wrap Up - The Context of Objects

I can't remember whether it was Martin Holmes or Chris Petter but one of the speakers of the presentation, "Image markup and Web applications" at Access 2007 made a statement that resonated with me: "Archivists care as much about context as they do about content." For example, a photograph of a soldier is an object and the scrapbook that contains it provides a context. A scrapbook of a major is an object and other pieces of other veteran's collections provides a context. And so on.

Ray Siemens spoke about creating an "Professional Reading Environment" with tools that allow scholars to annotate, link and otherwise provide context to a collection of digital objects. Such work currently requires considerable efforts and Shawn Martin in the David Binkley Memorial Lecture, wondered out loud whether such specialized, single topic, grant-funded projects are sustainable in the long term.

One alternative model to these separated digital projects is UPEI's Virtual Research Environment as introduced by Mark Leggott. Using a common environment created with Drupal and Fedora, the VRE hosts a number of different research communities where scholars share data, use tools for analysis, and of particular note, can seamlessly upload their material into a institutional repository. (reminder to self: suggest an Access Conference digital repository for next year's hackfest)

I was thinking about the context of digital objects and collections while I was listening to John Durno and Martha Whitehead debate the importance of place in the definition of the library. One point that I think was missed by both speakers was this: what makes a library different from a collection of objects, digital or otherwise, is that a library is a *commitment* to a collection. My personal collection of books is not a library unless I make efforts that it will exist over generations. More than being a collection of objects or contexts, a library is essentially a promise to the future and librarians are a profession of eternal hope.

A giant now off my shoulders

I have been reading, thinking and writing lots about academic librarianship and information technology as of late but you won't see the results of this work at this here blog.

That's because I, along with my Scholars Portage partner, Stacy Allison-Cassin, have just released a white paper called Scholr 2.0 on its very own blog to take advantage of the commenting goodness from the CommentPress WordPress theme.

While the purpose of the paper is to generate discussion among the librarians in the consortium that we both belong to, the conversation is open to anyone. Please join in.

A Collection Development Secret

Some years ago when I began ordering science books for my library, I asked a colleague of mine for some advice on what I should be selecting. He gave me some suggestions and he also told me a story.

My colleague was visiting a friend of his who was a senior researcher in one of the sciences at a prestigious university and while they were talking in his friend's office, the phone rang. After the researcher and the other person on the line exchanged short pleasantries, the researcher told the person, who was evidently returning a previous call, that he had been made editor of a forthcoming book on ___ and he asked whether the caller had a paper to submit. The answer was affirmative, quick arrangements were made and the call was shortly finished.

So while some scholarly monographs reflect years and years of sweat and toil, you too should be aware that there also exists a set of scholarly books that are merely collections of recently published or never-published articles.

In a possibly related aside, I have noticed when I have reviewed the circulation counts for the science books that I am responsible for, that there is a tendency for books with very vague titles not to be borrowed as many times as books with very specific titles.

Take these two points together and now you know why I very rarely order books that have titles like these:

• key topics in ____
• frontiers in ___ research
• ___ research advances
• ___ research trends
• new aspects of ___
• perspectives on ___
• new research on ___
• focus on ___ research
• new topics in ___ research
• new frontiers in ___
• ___ research frontiers

Who knew it would be so tasty

After months of resistance, I finally decided to try out del.icio.us. Now I regret that wait.

Consider this the raw feed of the New Jack Librarian.

Open Library (Open Library)

"Imagine a library that collected all the world's information about all the world's books and made it available for everyone to view and update. We're building that library" [librarian.net]

ticTOCs - Tables of Contents Service | Project Homepage

ticTOCs - Tables of Contents Service | Project Homepage:
"The aim of the ticTOCs project is to develop a service which will transform journal current awareness by making it easy for academics and researchers to find, display, store, combine and reuse tables of contents from multiple publishers in a personalisable web based environment. JISC is the primary funder of the ticTOCs project, which will run for two years from April 2007."

Leddy Library Has A LeddyLibraryThing

We haven't advertised it on campus yet, but the staff of the Leddy Library have listed some of the books that they have enjoyed on LeddyLibraryThing.

Give me five or give me ten

One of the more ingenious techniques I've picked on that has helped me better prepare for teaching, is the simple method of breaking down a class session into 5 or 10 minute sections and then dedicating the effort to effectively teach *one* concept within that time.

It's a great way to ensure that one doesn't overwhelm the audience with too much information as most people, including myself, tend to over-estimate what one can cover in 5 minutes.