Check out this amusing website - it's based on a presentation given at the SLA conference in early June.
Spectacles - How Pop Culture Views Librarians
Personally, I'm most intrigued by the "Read or Die" series... ;p
The Ubiquitous Librarian: FaceBook as an Institutional Repository?
...""Facebook Docs is a library of schoolwork where anyone can contribute. Over 50,000 documents have been uploaded, including problems sets, poetry, lecture notes, and random funny stuff. Every year, millions of college papers are produced, and virtually all of them are just gathering dust on people's hard drives. Too bad, because a lot of that is good stuff that other people would find useful. The point of Scribd is not to encourage plagiarism, but rather to help unlock the information on people's computers by making it easy for people to share their creations."
read more
“The librarian as information priest is as dead as Elvis,” Needham said. The whole “gestalt” of the academic library has been set up like a church, he said, with various parts of a reading room acting like “the stations of the cross,” all leading up to the “altar of the reference desk,” where “you make supplication and if you are found worthy, you will be helped.”
Note:
Users may report an error message when searching Business Search Premiere;
the message reads:
System Problem has Occurred.
We're sorry, your request could not be processed due an internal server
error.To continue with your session, please click here
EBSCO has been notified and they are working on the problem. They have suggested having users use the EBSCOHost interface (green and white colours) instead of the Business Searching Interface (blue and white colours).
To swtich interfaces you can access BSP from any other EBSCOHost product (ie Academic Search Elite) and then select BSP from the drop down menu as if you were switching databases.
from a list I subscribe to...
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2007 12:28:10 -1000
From: Liz Bryson
Subject: good project - the egranary digital library : FWD [Piala] FW: [PLGNET-L:10956]
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
good project - the egranary digital library
Hi folks.
I've worked a little bit with the problems of delivering both internet
services and info to less developed countries - the infrastructure problems
are obvious, and legion.
Via my alumni mag, which apparently is NOT online -- I found this great
project, started by an education alum at the University of Iowa:
http://www.widernet.org/digitalLibrary/index.htm
the "egranary".
It's an 'internet in a box', essentially an intranet for 3rd world
universities who do not have broadband. It's run by volunteers and
librarians.
The eGranary Digital Library provides millions of digital educational
resources to institutions lacking adequate Internet access. Through a
process of garnering permissions, copying Web sites, and delivering them to
intranet Web servers INSIDE our partner institutions in developing
countries, we deliver millions of multimedia documents that can be instantly
accessed by patrons over their local area networks at no cost...There are
over 5,000,000 documents in the eGranary Digital Library, all of them
searchable using our powerful, built-in search engine.
The digital library project represents hundreds of hours by volunteer
librarians and includes the collective contributions of hundreds of authors
and publishers. These individuals have generously given of their time and
resources to create greater learning opportunities for tens of thousands of
scholars in Africa.
the website's kind of clunky, but like most midwestern ideas, it's a pretty
clear and simple idea
Why the eGranary Digital Library?
Many of the developing country universities, schools, clinics and
hospitals with whom we work have no Internet connection. Those that are
connected to the Internet have such limited bandwidth that they cannot offer
free Web browsing to the majority of their staff and students. Bandwidth in
Africa can cost up to 100 times what it costs in the U.S., so for some
organizations a slim Internet connection can consume the equivalent of
one-half their operating budget.
Even for those individuals who have the wherewithal to pay for Web
browsing, the experience can be frustratingly slow -- it can take hours to
download a single audio file.
How Does the eGranary Help?
The eGranary Digital Library addresses these issues by moving a
large assortment of educational Web documents onto the subscriber's local
area network (LAN) so that the documents can be made available to everyone
within the institution freely and instantly.
We "store the seeds of knowledge" inside the institution where they
can be accessed even when the Internet connection is broken.
In a sense, we say, "If you can't come to the Web, we'll bring the Web
to you!"
Here's how we do it..
1. Identify Web sites with rich educational content
Since the advent of the World Wide Web, millions of individuals and
organizations have digitized their information to share the general public
over the Internet. Capitalizing on this phenomenon, we look for Web sites
with pertinent digitized academic information (often guided by requests of
our African partners) and add these to our "wish list."
2. Secure the author's or publisher's permission to copy their
materials
We contact authors and publishers via email and simply ask, "can we
replicate your materials for educational institutions in developing
countries with inadequate Internet connectivity?" Depending on the subject
area, we receive from 50% to 90% positive responses. (So far, librarians
lead the pack. Medical resources are harder to come by.)
3. Copy the permitted materials to a hard drive at the University of
Iowa's WiderNet Project
Using HTTrack, a Web site "scraping" software, we make a duplicate
of the permitted materials on our server. We do not change the content,
although we remove links to annoying advertisement servers and "hit"
monitors. Sometimes we copy an entire Web site, sometimes just the portions
that contain the most useful information.
4. Make copies of the collection and distribute to subscriber
universities
Using large hard disks, we deliver copies of the eGranary Digital
Library to subscribers. Most subscribers already have servers and local
area networks in place, so they simply add the eGranary hard drive to their
existing server. We work with other universities to set up their first
servers, sometimes using donated computers and software.
5. Update and redistribute hard drives as time and travel schedules
permit
We return to update our copy of each Web site on an occasional
basis. Then, taking advantage of traveler's schedules, we deliver updated
hard disks to our subscribers two or three times a year. (The hard drive is
only as big as a paperback book, so it's easy to slip into one's personal
luggage...)
We've also developed a way to use various technologies, like satellite
digital radio, to update the collection on an ongoing basis.
If you're interested - check out the website, I'm going to ask how I can
help - and I have a friend going to Ghana in 5 days, interested in seeing
about local connections.
Mary
Mary Beaty, Brooklyn
(viz.., Univ. of Iowa BEd. Univ. of Toronto MLS, if there are any other
alumni out there.)
**************************************************
To send an email to PAMnet:
pamnet@listserv.nd.edu
To view PAMnet Archives:
http://listserv.nd.edu/archives/pamnet.html
Access is now available to the Johns Hopkins Online Gudie to Literary Theory and Criticism.
Description:
The Johns Hopkins Online Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism is an indispensable resource for scholars and students of literary theory and discourse. Revised extensively to reflect a decade of rapidly changing scholarship, the Online Guide features 48 new entries and subentries. Compiled by 275 specialists from around the world, the Online Guide presents a comprehensive historical survey of the field's most important figures, schools, and movements. It includes more than 240 alphabetically arranged entries on critics and theorists, critical schools and movements, and the critical and theoretical innovations of specific countries and historical periods
The ILL system is currently not working. It will let you fill in the form, put in your information but when you "Accept" the copyright regulations the system says your request has failed. ILL has been notified and a Help Desk Request is being sent.
very interesting development - although not not fully integrated with Facebook as yet.
LibGuides: Library Knowledge Sharing System
"Yesterday, on Facebook, I learned about a new tool called LibGuides from a company called Springshare. It’s a Web-based tool for creating and sharing hosted Library Guides. They are about to launch an application to integrate it with Facebook, which will help put it in front of students, but the tool itself is very, very interesting. It allows you to create research guides with easy-to-use formatting and functional options. I signed up for a demo account last night and converted my “traditional” newspaper research guide into a LibGuide. You can see the results at http://demo.libguides.com/content.php?pid=257."
Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: Systemic change: CIC and Google
This message comes from Nancy Stuart
Students who give a departmental address when making an ILL request for an article will receive the article by campus mail—but they will also receive an e-mail stating the item is available for pick-up at McPherson. Confusing? Yes. Nancy Stuart has created a print FAQ to help students make sense of this. Take a look: there are stacks at the Ref Desk, Loan Desk, and beside the pick-up baskets. Need more? The master is at Access. Have questions? Nancy is the person to contact.
InfoCanada's Reference Canada Online:
Find accurate phone-verified information on every company in Canada in this database of 1.5 million businesses. Additionally our files are processed monthly against the National Change of Address Program. Selection criteria include: Employee size --Sales volume --Primary SIC & Secondary SIC Codes --Executive title --Ticker symbol --Yellow page classification/Ad size --Location type (Headquarters/Branch)
Note:
Simulataneous Users: 3
Remote Access: NO
15 downloads/printouts/emails are permitted per search
Chadwyck-Healey's Nineteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue (NSTC) defines the printed record of the English-speaking world from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the end of the First World War. The project aims to index all printed works published in Britain, its colonies and the United States of America, all printed works in English wherever published, and all translations from English. In addition to providing an exhaustive survey of the complete spectrum of monograph publications in the period, the catalogue indexes thousands of periodicals, directories and other ephemeral publications.
NSTC brings together as one cross-searchable database NSTC Series I (1801-1815), Series II (1816-1870) and Series III (1871-1919), first published by Avero Publications between 1983 and 2002 in print and on two CD-ROMs. It comprises more than 1,200,000 cross-searchable records drawn from the catalogues of the Bodleian Library, the British Library, Harvard University Library, the Library of Congress, the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, the National Library of Scotland and the University Libraries of Cambridge and Newcastle.