June 2009

Hey U, Tune In: The LOC Is Now on iTunes U

Library of Congress iTunes. Blog. Twitter. YouTube. iTunes. Yeah, we speak Web 2.0.

You nation’s Library has millions of stories to tell, so we’re trying to tell them as many places and to as many people as possible–whether on our own website or elsewhere. And now you can add another biggie to the list: iTunes U.

For those who don’t know, iTunes U is an area of the iTunes Store offering free education audio and video content from many of the world’s top universities and other institutions. (The iTunes application is needed to access iTunes U, and is a free download from www.apple.com/itunes.)

The Library’s iTunes U page launched today with a great deal of content, with much more to come. (Link opens in iTunes.) A nice bonus, for those in the know, is that the content is downloadable and even includes materials such as PDFs.

So as long as people keep finding new ways to get information, we’re going to keep finding ways to get it to you!

Text-A-Librarian at ALA

From Library Journal: It’s coming up soon, and those attending the American Library Association’s (ALA) annual conference in Chicago in less than two weeks will have a new service to help them navigate their way around—Text a Librarian.

ALA has partnered with Mosio to maximize the conference experience by offering mobile information through a service called “Text an ALA Ambassador.” And with an estimated 25,000 librarians and information professionals expected to show up, there are bound to be lots of questions about the conference’s many seminars, committee meetings, educational programs, exhibitor locations, the registration process—yes, and even fun things to do in the windy city.

Attendees to the July 9–15 conference at the McCormick Place Convention Center can text questions from their mobile phones and receive an answer from one of 250 volunteer ALA Ambassadors who will use Mosio’s Text a Librarian technology to respond quickly.

Scholarly E-Mail Lists, Once Vibrant, Fight for Relevance

Once they were hosts to lively discussions about academic style and substance, but the time of scholarly e-mail lists has passed, meaningful posts slowing to a trickle as professors migrate to blogs, wikis, Twitter, and social networks like Facebook.

“While I am still on a few listservs, it is mainly because they give me no other option for receiving information,” wrote Kay Cunningham, an electronic-resources librarian at the University of Memphis. “I find them increasingly annoying —even those with digest options, and for the most part I delete them unread.”

A Model for Alternative Scholarly Recognition Measures in Academic Librarianship?

Eric Schnell points to The New Media Department and The University of Maine where they amended their promotion and tenure guidelines (all the way) back in 2007 with redefined criteria in the form of alternative recognition measures. Their documents identify nine alternatives to the standard ‘article in a peer-review journal’ model. He thinks the measures can be applied to library science since many aspects of LS has similar accessibility and timeliness requirements for their research/scholarship.
1. Invited / edited publications
2. Live conferences
3. Citations
4. Download / visitor counts
5. Impact in online discussions
and 4 more…

Using WorldCat.org rather than the FirstSearch interface

Laura mentioned on FriendFeed that she is planning to propose a small change to her colleagues – that they remove the link to the FirstSearch interface to WorldCat and replace it with a link to WorldCat.org. Someone commented that they’d like to hear more about her proposal, so she’s posted what she believe to be compelling reasons for them to switch.

(1) The interface. Simply put, WorldCat.org looks more like Google. FirstSearch seems clunky to me, in part because I don’t think it’s changed dramatically since I was in library school seven years ago.

Disruptive Library Technology Jester: EBSCO in Cahoots With Harvard Business Press

A controversy is starting to pick up in the business librarian community — primarily in the U.K. it would seem — regarding the licensing demands of Harvard Business PressL1 (HBP) for the inclusion of Harvard Business Review articles in EBSCOhost. HBP content in EBSCOhost carries a publisher-specific rider that says use is limited to “private individual use” and explicitly bars the practice of putting “deep links” of articles from EBSCOhost (so called “persistent linksL2“) into learning management systems. In my words, HBP is attempting to limit access to its content in EBSCOhost to those who find it through the serendipity of searching. And now HBP is going after schools that are using persistent linking, and this raises all sorts of troubling questions.

Keeping a Story Out of the News For the Safety of Kidnap Victims

For seven months, The New York Times managed to keep out of the news the fact that one of its reporters, David Rohde, had been kidnapped by the Taliban. Thankfully, he escaped by climbing over a wall on June 19.

Days after Mr. Rohde was kidnapped in November, editing tussles began on his Wikipedia entry.

NY Times executives believed that publicity would raise Mr. Rohde’s value to his captors as a bargaining chip and reduce his chance of survival. Persuading another publication or a broadcaster not to report the kidnapping usually meant just a phone call from one editor to another, said Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times. But that was pretty straightforward compared with keeping it off Wikipedia.

Wikipedia, which operates under the philosophy that anyone can be an editor, and that all information should be public, is a vastly different world. More on how the story was treated by Wikipedia from the New York Times.

Texas Tech Librarian Proves Existence of Spider-Man

Yes, Mary Jane (what happened to Virginia?), there is a Spider-Man.

According to Newswise, that’s what pop-culture guru and associate humanities librarian for Texas Tech University Libraries Rob Weiner set out to prove in an article published in the International Journal of Comic Art.

In much the same way that editor Francis Pharcellus Church proved the existence of Santa Claus in his famous 1897 New York Sun editorial, Weiner contends that Spider-Man and his costumed peers have entered mankind’s collective consciousness, filling a shared need for heroes.

“When I started reading graphic novels, I was struck by the fact that stories about Spider-Man or Batman and Superman could have as many plot twists and turns as any story by Shakespeare, Stephen King or Leo Tolstoy,” he said. “I was struck by how good some of the writing was for these so-called “kiddie” books, and that somehow these archetypical characters like Spider-Man were replacing Odysseus and Zeus as part of modern mythology.”

A copy of Weiner’s article is available as a pdf upon request, or a copy of the journal can be purchased at the International Journal of Comic Art.

A Special Librarian/Historian Invites Your Queries

She’s tall, she’s elegant and she welcomes all comers…wouldn’t you like to know more about this lady?

Barry Moreno, the New York historian and author of “The Statue of Liberty Encyclopedia” will be responding to NY Times readers’ questions about the revered woman of New York harbor.

Readers who would like to submit a question to Mr. Moreno should do so in the comments box below. His first set of responses will be published on Wednesday.

C’mon librarians, think of a real stumper and see if he answers it.