LISNews Librarian And Information Science News

Michael Mamerow sent over news on the new blog http://infowiss.wordpress.com/ The blog adresses students of the courses information science, speech-technology and computational-linguistics as well as students of related courses and is administrated by students of the Heinrich-Heine-University, department of language and information in Düsseldorf.
The content consists of selected news that might be interesting for students of the courses named above. The whole purpose is to archive these news and to offer a research possibility for homeworks, presentations or
examina.

Marginal Revolution has the best comment I could find on This Paper (Summarized Here on "The Long Tail."

Overall I cannot call this one for Elberse. If you take a genre as given, the web looks less revolutionary but part of the long tail is the creation of new genres. We have blogs now, for instance, and we didn't fifteen years ago, even though blog readership is quite concentrated among the top sites....You could have rewritten that as "The Long Tail hypothesis is basically true, just don't sell to the Long Tail alone." On that we should all be able to agree.

Folio reports that Time, Inc. will be offering a new service called "Maghound." It allows consumers to choose titles from a variety of publishers for a mix-and-match “subscriptions” where they pay one monthly fee and have the ability to switch titles at any time. The Freakonomics Blog has some interesting commentary on this.

Newsweek says Don't Be Deceived; Even A High-Tech Library Still Needs Shelves Of Books And Journals.

"Who made the decision that everyone who is not computer-literate-very computer-literate, in the ease of our new library-could be left in the cold? Who is pretending that men and women from low-income neighborhoods, schooled without computers and without computers at home, can use this library? And how many decades will pass before everyone who graduated from pre-computer colleges is dead, and until inner-city and rural public schools have computers in sufficient numbers to teach all their children how to use them? Indeed, precious few minority faces are to be seen at the computer stations in our fancy new library."

I'm doing some research for work, and having trouble finding information. Can anyone point me toward any websites, blogs, or print resources with information about using non-MLS staff to work at a library's chat reference service? It could be anything: statistics, opinions, case studies, etc. It could even be about non-MLS staff providing "regular" (non-digital) reference. Most of the information I've found tends to just be debate about whether support staff should be called "librarians."

Paula J. Hane at Info Today Newsbreaks Notes In what has to be viewed as a surprisingly low-key launch for a product in a brand new market, LexisNexis (www.lexisnexis.com ) rather quietly announced its new Library Express service. This is the company’s first product for public libraries. No advance notice on the news was given to the library press or industry analysts, and there’s been almost no mention of it in the blogosphere. It will be officially available as of today, June 30, and is being shown at the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference this week in Anaheim, Calif. It is very similar in features and functions to the company’s Academic library product though it offers slightly less content.

Online service lets blind surf the Internet from any computer, anywhere:
Visions of future technology don't involve being chained to a desktop machine. People move from home computers to work computers to mobile devices; public kiosks pop up in libraries, schools and hotels; and people increasingly store everything from e-mail to spreadsheets on the Web.

But for the roughly 10 million people in the United States who are blind or visually impaired, using a computer has, so far, required special screen-reading software typically installed only on their own machines.

New software, called WebAnywhere, launched today lets blind and visually impaired people surf the Web on the go. The tool developed at the University of Washington turns screen-reading into an Internet service that reads aloud Web text on any computer with speakers or headphone connections.

A new 24/7 service from ChaCha allows cell phone users on the go to ask a wide range of reference questions in conversational English and get answers free of charge. Each question is routed to a human guide who searches the Web for the information and within minutes returns the answer in a text message with a web reference link.

Asked if ChaCha represents competition for reference librarians, David Tyckoson, president of ALA's Reference and User Services Association, told American Libraries that people already rely on librarians less for help with finding short, factual results that they can obtain on their own. "What they need a librarian's help with are the more complex searches," he said.

It's been a while since I pointed to LISWire.com - The Librarian's News Wire. You can grab the main LISWire RSS Feed Here. You can subscribe to one of our mailing lists and check out all the other feed options Right Here.

Here are the latest releases posted. If you spot anything interesting in your travels, let us know!

Registration fee waived for librarians attending Atlanta Book Show
--- http://liswire.com/node/104/

Code4Lib Journal, Issue 3 published
--- http://liswire.com/node/103/

LexisNexis® Introduces New Content, Functionality to Intellectual Property Solutions
--- http://liswire.com/node/102/

Houston Public Library Goes Live with Evergreen
--- http://liswire.com/node/101/

In the world of broadcast news, it's normally a given courtesy that, when a well known news personality dies, the station they worked for will be the first to break the news after the family has been notified. It's one of the unwritten rules of journalism.

In the case of beloved NBC newsman Tim Russert, Twitter scooped the massive network on the big story.

Turns out that a minor lackey at the station heard the news and, assuming it was public knowledge, edited Russert's Wikipedia page to reflect the death. Someone at the station caught it, which makes me wonder who they pay to watch Wikipedia, and changed it back some eleven minutes later.

Too late.

By the time they made the changes, the story was already out on Twitter.