Warning: shameless plug to follow.

Our library will be hosting a 2-hour seminar and demonstration on advanced searching with Google and other search engines on November 7, at 10:00am. This is the first of many such seminars on topics ranging from database usage to research methods, but we thought we would start with something that would draw students in. If you are a student in the Boyce College or Southern Seminary community, please feel free to attend. Please respond via the Facebook event or send me an email so we can plan accordingly.

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Pierre Bayard, a well-known professor of French Literature at the University of Paris, has written a new book advocating the art of skimming in place of actually reading a book “the scientific way.” Move over, Mortimer, you’re old school now.

His book, Comment Parler des Livres que l’on n’a pas Lus (How to Talk about Books that You Haven’t Read), sold out in France and is soon to be published here in the States as well. It is destined for the best-seller list. According to the New York Times Magazine, his tips include:

• How to talk about a book you have never read: Avoid precise details. Put aside rational thought. Let your sub-conscience express your personal relationship with the work.
• How to review a book: Put it in front of you, close your eyes and try to perceive what may interest you about it. Then write about yourself.

While this advice is rubbish, it may appear that not all he has to say is that bad. For instance, in an interview with the New York Times Magazine he says, “I think a great reader is able to read from the first line to the last line; if you want to do that with some books, it’s necessary to skim other books. If you want to fall in love with someone, it’s necessary to meet many people. You see what I mean?” (10/28/07, p13).

Of course, I haven’t actually read the book. Ironic, isn’t it?

Read more here (New York Times – USA) and here (Times Online – UK).

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I’ve seen a lot of fences in the last few days. Those pretty fences one only sees in Kentucky’s horse country: flat stones stacked waist-high, with perpendicular ones laid along the top. Something about that is attractive to me: permanence, boundaries, strength.

One of my favorite poems by Robert Frost is his “Mending Wall,” which begins with the famous line, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” He’s right. Walls deteriorate and require work to keep up. I think, though, that when it comes to human relationships, even the most intimate of relationships, walls are natural and require continuous work to tear down.

In Frost’s poem, two neighbors meet every Spring to walk the length of the fence that divides them and, keeping the fence between them, they repair the stones that have fallen from the wall over the course of the year. One neighbor is convinced that “good fences make good neighbors.” The other, however, is not convinced:

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That wants it down.

We can debate the extent to which walls make good neighbors. There can be no debate, however, that they make for terrible marriages. My wife and I have just returned from our yearly retreat with the sole purpose of toppling walls, and I am reminded that I have the most patient and longsuffering wife on the planet. Here’s to open fields, sweetheart. May it always remain so.

I promised Barbara Napier, the host and incredible gourmet of the beautiful, relaxing, and ambrosial Snug Hollow Farm Bed and Breakfast, that I would offer some cyber-kudos for her hospitality. Thanks, Barbara!

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Biblio-forensics is an art form.

Just see Brian Dettmer’s examples of what he calls “book autopsies.” Fascinating, time consuming, and, well, just plain cool.

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I have for several years now been a fan of Nota Bene for academic writing in large part because formatting according to various styles (APA, MLA, Turabian, etc.) were built-in, citation management was convenient through their Ibidem module, and bibliographies are a snap.

Other programs seem to be catching on. In particular, Microsoft Word 2007 has an integrated citation manager and auto-formats references according to most major styles, including Turabian. From the Word Blog:

As I write my paper, all of the citations that I have been inputting are stored in this awesome tool called the source manager which can be accessed by clicking “Manage Sources”. This means that instead of my list of books I have been pouring over going into the ether I call index cards, all of my work is stored in one little handy database. Enter incredible time savings.

I’ve finished my paper and input my information as I’ve gone along. I know that everything I have been working on is stored in my source manager is safe and sound and ready to be put to good use. Well, all I need to do is click the “Bibliography” drop-down and choose whether I want a bibliography or works cited. Word will then pull the information that you have in your current list and auto generate the information you need into a formatted bibliography (or works cited). It really is that easy.

There are some really cool power features that I didn’t dive into that live in the source manager like the ability to keep a master list (great for students working on papers that often pull from common books or articles) and the ability to search my running bibliography or even preview a particular citation.

It will be interesting to see where this goes and what the folks at Nota Bene do to push usability even further. I have not actually tried the MS Word 2007 features, and so I will continue to recommend and use Nota Bene — especially since all appearances indicate that Word 2007 will not import citations from another system… Yet.

Other (but FREE!) options include:

• Zotero. I LOVE Zotero. This Firefox plugin has saved me countless hours of work since it not only identifies bibliographic information when viewing a book in a catalog or on Amazon, but it also will export that information as BibTex. I used this when compiling the WikIndx that will be going live at our library soon.
• BiblioExpress. is a simple reference manager for researchers. It is the freeware edition of the company’s flagship product – Biblioscape. BiblioExpress can be used to collect literature references of different types, to explore bibliographic resources on the Internet, as well as to serve as a free viewer of bibliographic data. BiblioExpress can format records in several popular styles, including ACS, APA, and MLA. BiblioExpress is designed to be small and efficient. You can run BiblioExpress from a floppy disk.
• Projects and products related to the ShareRef Project which in one way or another provide bibliographic management features to end users.
• SourceAid builds your reference list online for free in the major styles.
• Bibus Bibliographic Database is an open source bibliographic and reference management software that works with Open Office.
• OttoBib creates bibliographies from ISBN numbers. Turabian compatible.
• JabRef is an open-source client for bibliographic citation management.
• BibDesk is a bibliographic citation management tool for Mac users.

Citation format tools that I use include:

• KnightCite
• Citation Machine

There are many, many other tools available, and they are becoming more numerous by the day. Please feel free to leave a link and description to others in a comment if you like.

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A relatively recent study entitled Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester (.PDF) has the following to say concerning the Google generation and their approach to reference services at an academic library:

So self-service is the preeminent model and strategy of the information-seeking student. But when the student cannot satisfy his/her own needs and turns to real-life service providers, what happens? In their drawings of ideal library spaces, students sometimes group librarians with technical support staff and baristas at service desks (see Chapter 4). When they do not differentiate between different kinds of service providers, it is in part because they do not know the service providers, having experienced few person-to-person service relationships. If they have a need, they want it filled. If they want a need filled, they want to go to a font of all sorts of service, a sort of universal service point, a physical Google. In other words, they want Mommy. (p. 76)

HT: Nicole Engard, Metadata Librarian at Princeton University

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In a 1972 book, John Stott wrote of “escape routes by which we avoid our God-given responsibility to use our minds responsibly.” He cites ritualism, radical social action, and an emphasis on experience as examples prevalent in particular denominations. See John R. W. Stott, Your Mind Matters (London: IVP, 1972) 10.

Henry Blamires in his classic book, The Christian Mind, didn’t bother beating around the bush quite so timidly. He wrote (45 years ago!):

The Christian mind has succumbed to the secular drift with a degree of weakness and nervelessness unmatched in Christian history. It is difficult to do justice in words to the complete loss of intellectual morale in the twentieth-century Church. One cannot characterize it without having recourse to language which will sound hysterical and melodramatic. Ther is no longer a Christian mind. There is still, of course, a Christian ethic, a Christian practice, and a Christian spirituality. . . . but as a thinking being, the modern Christian has sucumbed to secularization. — (1962, p.42)

Have things improved? Or have we continued to slide down hill? If so, is there even, as Blamires said, “a Christian ethic, a Christian practice, and a Christian spirituality” that is objectively recognizable anymore?

Ouch.

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In Anthony Kronman‘s Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 35, he asks:

In what sense, and in what way, can the question of what living is for be made an appropriate and useful subject of academic instruction? today, in most of our colleges and universities, it is not, in fact, a subject of organized study, and one might infer from what I have said that this is because th question by its very nature precludes it — that it is too personal to be studied in this way. But the question of life’s meaning has not always been neglected as it now is. Once upon a time, and not all that long ago, many college and university teachers, especially in the humanities, believed they had a responsibility to lead their students in an organized examination of this question and felt confident in their authority to do so. They recognized that each student’s answer must be his or her own but believed that a disciplined survey of the answers the great writers and artists of the past have given to it can be a helpful aid to students in their own personal encounter with the question of what living is for–indeed, an indispensable aid, without which they must face the question not only alone but in disarray.

The consideration of life’s chief end and purpose has not only left the academy in its abandonment of an education in the classical disciplines, but it has also left the home in too many cases as well. Of course, the chief end and purpose of life can only be discerned in any definitive sense as we understand our place before the Creator, as the Westminster Catechism so famously stated. If “the answers the great writers and artists of the past” do indeed have something to contribute, as indeed they certainly do, perhaps we should begin here.

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College students live on Facebook. Our seminary has a college. We want to provide reference and research services to our students where they are. We are now on Facebook. We are the SBTS Library Rats.

Coming soon – pushing library content into eCampus via RSS feeds.

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