May 2015

Billions of times per day, consumers turn to Google for I want-to-know, I want-to-go, I want-to-do, and I want-to-buy moments. And at these times, consumers are increasingly picking up their smartphones for answers. In fact, more Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries including the US and Japan.1 This presents a tremendous opportunity for marketers to reach people throughout all the new touchpoints of a consumer’s path to purchase.

From Inside AdWords: Building for the next moment

I know this is a pretty open-ended question, but I think what I’m really trying to get at is whether the meme of a tragic and dramatic blow to the stockpile of accumulated human knowledge is really accurate, whether it’s accurate in a limited context (i.e. it sucked for Greece but didn’t matter much in the long run), or whether it’s a total myth and really nothing too critical or unique was lost due to duplication/transportation/etc.

From How serious a loss was the burning of the Library of Alexandria to human knowledge? REddit : AskHistorians

Public libraries are a cornerstone of modern civilization, yet like the books in them, libraries face an uncertain future in an increasingly digital world. Undaunted, librarians around the globe are thinking up astonishing ways of reaching those in reading need, whether by bike in Chicago, boat in Laos, or donkey in Colombia. Improbable Libraries showcases a wide range of unforgettable, never-before-seen images and interviews with librarians who are overcoming geographic, economic, and political difficulties to bring the written word to an eager audience.

From World’s most unusual libraries – Boing Boing

“Public libraries are arguably more important today than ever before,” Marx says. “Their mission is still the same — to provide free access to information to all people. The way people access information has changed, but they still need the information to succeed, and libraries are providing that.”

Or as Andrew Carnegie said many years ago: “A library outranks any other thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert.”

From Do We Really Need Libraries? : NPR History Dept. : NPR

Scholars at the University of California, Berkeley have uncovered and authenticated a cache of stories written by Mark Twain when he was a 29-year-old newspaperman in San Francisco. Many of the stories are 150 years old.

From Mark Twain stories, 150 years old, uncovered by Berkeley scholars | Books | The Guardian

Cites & Insights 15:6 (June 2015) is
now available for downloading at http://citesandinsights.info/civ15i6.pdf

The print-oriented two-column version is 24 pages long. For those
reading online or on an e-device, or who wish to follow links in the
issue, a 46-page single-column 6×9″ version is available at
http://citesandinsights.info/civ15i6on.pdf

The June 2015 issue includes:

The Front: Making It Easy, Making It Hard: A Personal Note on
Counting Articles pp. 1-4

This oddity offers some notes on OA publishers and
journals that make it easier–or harder–than usual to find out how
many articles appear in a journal over a given year, from the utter
simplicity of MDPI, SciELO and j-stage to the utter…well, read the
article.

Intersections: Who Needs Open Access, Anyway? pp. 4-24

Noting and discussing a range of commentaries by people
who are either “I’m all for OA, but…” (where the
but is the most important word in that phrase) or
discussing ways in which others attempt to undermine OA: clearing out
two years of “oa-anti” tags.

Kids have access to thousands of free books and ebooks from their public libraries right now in the United States. Think of what we could do if we worked together to invest in ebooks and our existing infrastructure instead of building yet another app and hoping that this time the things we promised would come true.

From Aren’t libraries already doing that? — The Message — Medium

After a long day of answering questions and serving up information to the public (students, etc), a librarian could use a laugh. So pick up a copy of Roz Warren’s OUR BODIES, OUR SHELVES: A COLLECTION OF LIBRARY HUMOR (HOPress, 2015) and see what might be between the covers that tickles your funnybone.

Here’s an excerpt from one story: Freeze! It’s the Library Police [a librarian’s fantasy of recovering stolen books]

“Open up bitch! It’s LIBRARY SQUAD!

Library Squad! A group of enraged middle-aged librarians. We’re brainy, we’re relentless. We’ll hunt you down. We’ll never give up. We know the Dewey Decimal Sysytem and we’re not afraid to use it. And we always get our book.

And if you resist? We’ll shush you. Permanently.”

In addition to her library duties at the Bala Cynwyd Library right outside Philadelphia, Roz Warren writes forThe New York Times, The Funny Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Jewish Forward and The Huffington Post. And she‘s been featured on the Today Show. Our Bodies, Our Shelves is her thirteenth humor book. Years ago, Roz left the practice of law to take a job at her local public library “because I was tired of making so damn much money.” She doesn’t regret it.

Our Bodies, Our Shelves, ISBN 9780692406465

From The Chicago Sun-Times:

The Sun-Times has learned that the Barack Obama Foundation will announce on May 12 that the Obama library, museum and presidential center will be in Chicago.

Multiple sources confirmed on Monday that the Chicago-based Obama Foundation, led by Obama friend Marty Nesbitt, is planning an announcement event a week from Tuesday.