LISNews: Librarian News

You probably already saw the big announcement for this months essay contest:

The first ever LISNews Librarian Essay Contest invites librarians to write an original essay about issues that impact librarianship. The contest will run for the entire month of February, 2010, with the fabulous prizes awarded sometime in March. Winning essayists will receive one of several prizes including Amazon or Borders gift cards, and a year of hosting from LISHost.org.

You can browse the current essays at http://lisnews.org/essays

What you might not know is you can help pick a winner. Each essay has a set of Stars that allow you to register your vote. The average score for each essay will help pick our winners.

Eight Years!

It's hard to believe it's been eight years since Gene and I started a comic strip called Overdue, quickly renamed Unshelved. In that time we've each gained a daughter and a house, and each lost quite a bit of hair, not to mention our day jobs. Yes, in case you didn't get the memo the first time around, this little web comic strip now provides incomes for both of us, thanks in large part to the support of fans like you.

The first ever LISNews Librarian Essay Contest invites librarians to write an original essay about issues that impact librarianship. The contest will run for the entire month of February, 2010, with the fabulous prizes awarded sometime in March. Winning essayists will receive one of several prizes including Amazon or Borders gift cards, and a year of hosting from LISHost.org.

You may know Peter Morville from such books as Information Architecture for the World Wide Web or Ambient Findability, or from any number of library conferences, or his sites semanticstudios.com and findability.org. Well, he's back with a new book and site, http://searchpatterns.org/ , and Search Patterns: Design for Discovery.

"Search is among the most disruptive innovations of our time. It influences what we buy and where we go. It shapes how we learn and what we believe. This provocative and inspiring book explores design patterns that apply across the categories of web, e-commerce, enterprise, desktop, mobile, social, and real time search and discovery. Using colorful illustrations and examples, the authors bring modern information retrieval to life, covering such diverse topics as relevance ranking, faceted navigation, multi-touch, and mixed reality. Search Patterns challenges us to invent the future of discovery while serving as a practical guide to help us make search applications better today."