LISNews: Librarian News

538.com. Nate Silver gives us the benefit of his expertise.

Thanks to the folks at Lifehacker for pointing out a new search engine, Kosmix. Kosmix has the potential to be extra-interesting for us library-types, who have a healthy respect for browsing as an information-finding method. Kosmix tries to "organize the web so that you can explore, learn and discover."

We are six librarians working in academic, public, and school libraries across the United States. In addition to essays by its founders, In the Library with the Lead Pipe will feature articles by guests representing special libraries and archives, as well as educators, administrators, library support staff, and community members..

In the Library with the Lead Pipe is intended to help improve our communities, our libraries, and our professional organizations. Our goal is to explore new ideas and start conversations; to document our concerns and argue for solutions. Each article is peer-reviewed by at least one external and one internal reviewer.

They posted the first article today, What Happens in the Library…

The well known Librarian's Internet Index (LII) has merged with IPL at Drexel. As many are aware of, and as mentioned in the notice below, LII has had their funding cut by 50% the last two years. The merger with Drexel allows ILL the opportunity to continue sharing of sites.

This notice appeared in their last weekly e-mail:

LII IS NOW ADMINISTERED BY IPL
This week the editors received a press release announcing LII's merger with the Internet Public Library (IPL). IPL is a huge and wonderful Web portal hosted by Drexel University and maintained by a consortium of colleges and universities with programs in information science. It has solid funding and a paid staff augmented by graduate students in library and information studies programs, allowing it to maintain and improve the database's content and aesthetics with new skills and technical tools.
As you may know, in the last two years LII's funding was cut by 50%. Consequently, we had to reduce the number of sites we add each week, halt improvements to the browsing structure, and generally do less of everything. IPL will give LII's years of work continued life and value and we think they'll do a terrific job. The LII editorial staff and the newsletter will continue through April 30, 2009. We will share news with you as it becomes available; for more information, please contact IPL or Linda Crowe at

This was the e-mail they sent to subscribers: -- Read More