LISNews Librarian And Information Science News

Chicago Tribune reports: Documents related to U.S. Sen. Barack Obama's service for a nonprofit education project started by former 1960s radical Bill Ayers were released last Friday from an archive at the University of Illinois at Chicago library. They had previously refused to release records of the project. Will the archive be fodder for the Swift Boat-types?

Science 2.0 Gains Another Search Engine: Q-Sensei From Lalisio

"While the 2 million-plus article content nowhere near reaches the size and scope of behemoths such as Elsevier’s Scirus or Google Scholar, the Q-Sensei search engine (http://literature.lalisio.com/oai.html) has a metadata orientation that offers some interesting search capabilities."
and "At present, the Lalisio social network of scientists seems to be the most active side of the operation (www.lalisio.com)."

Read the full article in Information Today at:

Science 2.0 Gains Another Search Engine: Q-Sensei From Lalisio

Science 2.0 Gains Another Search Engine: Q-Sensei From Lalisio

"While the 2 million-plus article content nowhere near reaches the size and scope of behemoths such as Elsevier’s Scirus or Google Scholar, the Q-Sensei search engine (http://literature.lalisio.com/oai.html) has a metadata orientation that offers some interesting search capabilities."
and "At present, the Lalisio social network of scientists seems to be the most active side of the operation (www.lalisio.com)."

Read the full article in Information Today at:

Science 2.0 Gains Another Search Engine: Q-Sensei From Lalisio

SPEAKING at Sydney University last year Richard Fisher, academic publisher at Cambridge University Press, compared the academic monograph to the Hapsburg monarchy in that it seems to have been in decline for ever.

Chris Lloyd points out

It is about time we got commercial publishers and paper millers out of the process of distributing knowledge. But it is not going to be easy to come up with a system that combines academic integrity with free and wide dissemination.

How Dumb Can You Get?:

The spines of the books, instead of reminding me of trees in a forest, as they often do, suddenly began to look like tombstones. Each date on a book spine recorded the death of a book. I was standing in the middle of The Dead Library. Book readng was over.

(Review of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future [Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30] )

Ithaka has recently released the full findings from our 2006 surveys of the behavior and attitudes of faculty members and academic librarians. These complementary studies, co-sponsored by JSTOR and by Ithaka’s incubated entities Portico, Aluka, and NITLE, have been of interest to academic librarians and scholarly publishers alike in presentations over the past year, but now we are making the datasets and a detailed white paper available as well.

Here's a photo & video tour of the newly renovated North Georgia College and State University (both!) from the Gainesville Times.

Library Director Shawn Tonner said the new $18 million Library Technology Center is much more than a library with 150,000 books. It also houses 200 computers, 50,000 electronic books available to students online, a coffee shop, 25 group study rooms, a writing center for peer editing and the Center of Teaching and Learning Excellence.

Even the St. Paul Public Library is getting into the political act as the Republican National Convention approaches.

The library will host political analyst Mark Halperin on Monday and pundit Susan Estrich on Tuesday to talk about the election.

Both events will be held at Metropolitan State University as part of the library's political series. Dozens of political commentators are expected to descend on the Twin Cities for the September convention in St. Paul.

rudibrarian Wonders Would tenure pressures in public libraries make good changes?

To make clear my assumption here: since public librarians are not pushed to produce in the same ways that tenure track academic librarians are pushed, little time, space, resources are provided to resolving thorny issues in public librarianship. Or so it seems?

An anonymous patron asked:

Why is it so challenging to find library jobs in Pittsburgh? I know there is a library school turning out new grads each semester and I know people don't like to leave the city but, aren't there enough colleges for jobs to open up at least once a year? I've been away for two years and I haven't seen a job pop up in my area. I was wondering if anyone had a theory?

Anybody have any suggestions?