Loads of bibliographic citation management programs
Stephen Abrams, SirsiDynix's VP of Innovation (sounds like a fun job title), has a must-read blog, Stephen's Lighthouse, that yesterday featured a post offering links to dozens of software tools for citation management. Yes, we do have RefWorks here at CUNY, but it's worth knowing what else is out there. Check out his post,
Citations, Footnotes, and Bibliographies, oh my.
A Lovely Analogy for Reading
Zadie Smith, author of
On Beauty,
White Teeth, and
The Autograph Man describes reading:
"But the problem with readers, the idea we're given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, "I should sit here and I should be entertained." And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don't know, who they probably couldn't comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That's the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It's an old moral, but it's completely true."
This is from KCRW, a National Public Radio affiliate. You can listen to the podcast
here.
I picked this up from
LIS News but thought it was worth sharing.
LACUNY Winter Membership Meeting - Save the Date
Dear CUNY Library Colleagues:
I am excited to announce that
Leslie Burger, ALA President and the Director of the
Princeton Public Library, will speak about transforming libraries at the 2006 LACUNY Winter Membership Meeting.
When: December 8th, 2006 at 2:30 pm.
Where:
The New York City College of Technology, faculty lounge, Room A632, 6th floor of the Atrium building. You may find directions
here.
Congratulations to the
LACUNY Archives and Special Collections roundtable which sponsored the program "Digital Projects within CUNY Libraries, Archives, and Special Collections: A workshop," which took place on Friday, November 10, at Baruch College. Richard Kim of Metro
blogged about it on the Digitization@Metro
Blog. He mentions an
upcoming Metro symposium called Copyright: The Only Certainty is Uncertainty. The keynote speakers will be
James Neal, Vice President for Information Services and University Librarian of Columbia University Libraries and
Siva Vaidhyanathan, Associate Professor of Culture and Communication at New York University
Academic Libraries - New report from the U.S. Department of Education
The US Dept of Education just released
this report on acadamic libraries
Title: Academic Libraries: 2004
Description: The selected findings and tables in this report, based on
the 2004 Academic Libraries Survey, summarize services, staff,
collections, and expenditures of academic libraries in degree-granting
postsecondary institutions in the 50 states and the District of
Columbia. The report includes a number of key findings: During fiscal
year (FY) 2004, there were 155.1 million circulation transactions from
academic libraries' general collection. During a typical week in the
fall of 2004, 1.4 million academic library reference transactions were
conducted, including computer searches. The nation's 3,700 academic
libraries held 982.6 million books; serial backfiles; and other paper
materials, including government documents at the end of FY 2004.
Academic libraries spent $2.2 billion on information resources during FY
2004.
Posted on behalf of
Anne Leonard, New York City College of Technology
You Know It's the Middle of the Semester...
You know it's the middle of the semester when you read
this quote from Denver Nuggets coach George Karl:
You can go back and get my quotes on Google.
and your first thought is that LexisNexis is a much better choice for that sort of thing.
Results from the 2006 Student Experience Survey are now posted on the CUNY Office of Institutional Research and Assessment page. About 80% of respondents were satisfied or very satisfied with our libraries (see table 9B).
To visit page go to:
http://condor.cuny.edu:7778/portal/page?_pageid=94,92567&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL
On my mind - the Schomburg Center
Recently, I have been doing some research for an
AANB biographical article about Howard Dodson, the Chief of the
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. After a while I noticed something that became hard to overlook, the name of the Center is constantly misspelled. Why can't people spell the name of an institution that's been around for eighty years? The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is constantly being misspelled as "Schomberg.." in reference books and other scholarly works. Evidence?
I wondered about the extent of this problem so I searched New York Times historical database for "Schomberg Center," and got 41 hits! It shouldn't happen. I tried searching for this same misspelling in Lexis/Nexis major newspapers and came up with 99 hits! Then I searched L/N for magazines and journals for "Schomberg" and came up with only 7 hits -- one was a 2002 Publisher's Weekly book review. And yes, a quick scan of the results confirmed my suspicion that in each instance, the writer meant "Schomburg Center" -- the well-known research library in Harlem.
The same misspelling occurs in Gale's Contemporary Black Biography.
So I was pleased that when I searched Google for "Schomberg Center" Google responded to me
Did you mean: "Schomburg Center." (Yes! Of course I did.) In harvesting the Web for this misspelling, Google retrieved 14,000 hits...so that was kind of depressing. The Schomburg Center was named after the Afro-Puerto Rican bibliophile
Arturo Schomburg (1874-1938) who sold his collection of books, art and artifacts to the 135th street branch of the New York Public Library in 1926.
Happy 80th birthday to the Schomburg Center.
Thanks to Stephen Francoeur for reminding me about
Technorati Tags. (Did I spell his name right?)
Technorati Tag
misspellingsTechnorati Tag
research libraries
One of the ways that the millions of blog posts are being interconnected is by the inclusion of Technorati tags in blog posts. When a group of bloggers use the same tag in their posts, then readers can quickly click that tag and see what other blog entries have been so tagged. See, for example, what happens when you click on a tag for one of the recent library and info science conferences:
While as a classification scheme, tagging is a crude method, it still is useful and fun.
Free webinars, podcasts, etc. from SirsiDynix Institutes
A treasure trove of professional development goodies that can be viewed, listened to, read, etc. are found in the
SirsiDynix Institute Seminar Archive.
