Bill Brahms of Reference Desk Press (a librarian publisher like myself) has just released his company’s second book: Last Words of Notable People. It is much more than a complement to his previous book, Notable Last Facts, and more likely to find extensive use as a part of a reference collection. There are more than … Read more Last Words of Notable People
At Litwin Books and Library Juice Press we have a number of projects sitting on back burners awaiting the right authors to get them going. I will list some here, with the invitation for potential authors to contact me. First, a few books about statistics. Not the science of statistics, but statistical data that has … Read more Seeking Authors
In teaching students and other library users how to evaluate web pages and other published information for the presence of bias, we direct them to look for a number of cues that reveal whether the producers of the documents are more interested in accomplishing a goal in the world or working toward impartial truth-seeking and … Read more “Nonpartisan” …. nonplussed
An item in the New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” section in the last issue is about the difficulty of keeping track of a valuable information object over time: a concert ticket. How do people remember where they put it? This one has to do with a long awaited reunion show by Pavement, in Central … Read more Organizing personal info in an age of change: Tickets to a Pavement concert
I have commented on problems stemming from automated reasoning as capitalism shifts to an AI foundation. Here is a juicy example of what I am talking about.
I thought the FBI had been shamed out of spying on pacifists long ago, but check this out. Incredible. Greenpeace, Thomas Merton Center, Catholic Worker, and other anti-war activists got put on terrorist watch lists and were the subject of 200 page reports. It’s almost funny how much the reality matches liberals’ paranoid fears post … Read more The Mad Men of the FBI
Increasing use of AI means smarter-than-average searchers constantly need to learn tricks in order to counteract the AI that assumes a user base of average consumers. Here is one for Google: Presently, if you search german modernist collage, the search results will be full of hits that assume you meant to type “college” rather than … Read more A Google trick for staying ahead of AI
From an early pamphlet advertising a bibliographic database, found among the ephemera saved at the University of Virginia Libraries: “Why use a computer search? Consider the time it takes to search manually through the many issues of printed indexes. The computer searches these indexes in seconds; the search is faster, more comprehensive, and often … Read more Ephemera from UVa Library’s computing past
Leonard Kniffel, editor of American Libraries, the American Library Association’s house publication, write in his blog: Book burning is the most insidious form of book banning, and just as the American Library Association is preparing to celebrate the freedom to read during Banned Books Week, along comes one Rev. Terry Jones of the 50-member Dove … Read more Props to ALA on 9/11
There is a new issue of Information for Social Change, on the theme of information ethics. This issue is edited by Mikael Böök. It’s a very international collection of articles, some of them a little odd and all of them interesting.
Save this date if you’re planning to be in New Orleans next June for the ALA Annual Conference. Saturday, June 25th Library Juice Press, possibly with one or more other groups, will be hosting a party of some kind. What to call it? It will be more lively than a reception or a meet-and-greet, but … Read more Save the Date: New Orleans, June 2011
Chapter one of Vanishing Act: The Erosion of Online Footnotes and Implications for Scholarship in the Digital Age, by Michael Bugeja and Daniela V. Dimitrova, is now online: Extinct Citations, Missing Links and Other Bibliographical Wonders A decade ago, most research was done in the library rather than through its Web site, and scholars, editors, … Read more Extinct Citations, Missing Links and Other Bibliographical Wonders
I blog about tech stuff only very rarely, but this is something I really want to share. If you’re at all concerned about online privacy, you will want to know about the Network Advertising Initiative’s “Behavioral Advertising Opt Out Tool.” Go to it, and it will show you which advertising networks have installed tracking cookies … Read more Tracking Cookie Opt-Out (Behavioral Advertising)
The 1980s began the “give ’em what they want” era of library collection development, when it became irredeemably elitist for librarians to think they occupy some kind of teaching role as selectors and reference librarians for their communities. In 2010, the war of the populist cultural conservatives against the latté sipping liberal elitists is wearing … Read more Brief note on libraries and elitism
More and more, I find that the library profession’s efforts to stay relevant in the age of information technology are in fact eroding our relevance. As a result of these efforts, it is becoming less and less clear what we offer that is different from what everybody else offers in the information economy. The reason … Read more Our niche and how to get back into it
Jaron Lanier has an Op-Ed in the August 9th issue of the New York Times, titled, “The First Church of Robotics.” It is a brief revisitation of some ideas from his recent book, You Are Not a Gadget, which was reviewed in the Times earlier this year. What Lanier has to say about artificial intelligence … Read more Jaron Lanier Op-Ed on AI
Jeremy Dibble, of the PhiloBiblos blog, has reviewed John Miedema’s book, Slow Reading, which was published by Litwin Books last year. I am late in linking to the review. Jeremy Dibble’s blog consists of “[r]eviews of books old and new; news and commentary on book history, library culture, archives and related subjects.”
Ralph Shaw was an academic librarian, an educator, and in 1950, the founder of Scarecrow press. He was known as an outspoken guy who forged his career more on the basis of saying what he thought than making friends. I first read about him in Ken Kister’s biography of Eric Moon, which is a great … Read more Remembering Ralph Shaw
Richard J. Cox of the University of Pittsburgh i-School has posted a review of Michael Bugeja and Daniela Dimitrova’s Vanishing Act: The Erosion of Online Footnotes and Implications for Scholarship in the Digital Age to the group blog “What SIS Faculty Are Reading. (Full disclosure: Dr. Cox is the author of two books for Litwin … Read more Richard J. Cox reviews Vanishing Act
From The Onion Unable to rest their eyes on a colorful photograph or boldface heading that could be easily skimmed and forgotten about, Americans collectively recoiled Monday when confronted with a solid block of uninterrupted text. … “Nation Shudders At Large Block Of Uninterrupted Text