The LibraryThing Blog turned up at #991 on the Bloglines Top 1000 RSS feeds today. “Movin’ on up… to the big time…”

Popularity: 21% [?]

Would someone please tell me why the December 2007 issue of Searcher, which is supposed to be “the magazine for database professionals,” is writing about charity knitting and crocheting? Their Internet Express column, which is usually a helpful discussion and comparison of useful online resources, has resorted to “We Knit the World: Charity Knitting and Crocheting on the Web.” The column starts:

The concept of creating three dimensional objects out of loops of string, aka, knitting and crocheting, fascinates me.

Oy. No fascination here. Now compare that to the magazine’s self-ascribed description:

Searcher: The Magazine for Database Professionals is a unique publication that explores and deliberates on a comprehensive range of issues important to the professional database searcher. The magazine is targeted to experienced, knowledgeable searchers and combines evaluations of data content with discussions of delivery media. Searcher includes evaluated online news, searching tips and techniques, reviews of search aid software and database documentation, revealing interviews with leaders and entrepreneurs of the industry, and trenchant editorials. Whatever the experienced searcher needs to know to get the job done is covered in Searcher.

I think most reference librarians and professional searchers have little professional need to read about how to participate in a group afghan project. Maybe our good friends at Information Today will stick to the point next time.

Popularity: 20% [?]

But without the jokes. So provide your own.

This is an episode of from a US Government film series on careers filmed at the Iowa State College (now Iowa State University) library in 1946. In the words of my wife, “Wow. This is really boring.”

Popularity: 19% [?]

Citing Wikipedia is most certainly verboten in academic circles, but how many in academic circles are familiar with the citation managers cited, summarized, and compared in this Wikipedia article? I highly encourage their use — they save more time than you could imagine.

Includes a comparison of

• operating system support,
• Export file formats
• Import file formats
• Citation styles
• Citation file formats
• Word processor integration
• Database connectivity
• Password “protection” and network versions
• References
• External links

Thanks for the link, Montana Russ!

Popularity: 25% [?]

Time management. But they are wrong. The ProQuest study says this, however, because:

When study participants were asked to identify which resource they preferred for academic research and course assignments, they overwhelmingly preferred library databases. However, students will opt for Google if they have difficulty navigating the library’s e-resources Web page, if they’re faced with multiple obscure links or “how-to guides,” or if they’re not aware of the library databases that pertain to their particular need.

Seems to me that the issue is not so much time management as a lack of information competency. Everyone thinks they are an expert searcher, and so of course they will indicate when asked that their biggest obstacle is just time rather than efficiency. “If only I had more time to look for articles.” If only students saw the need for further training in identifying, locating, and accessing articles thereby mining more time to digest and write.

The very end of the press release concerning this study gives some indication that my assessment may indeed be a bit closer to the mark:

Results of the ProQuest study have inspired toolkits specifically designed to help academic and public libraries better market their online resources, become more attuned to patron concerns and develop outreach strategies to assist their patrons throughout the research process

If time management were the issue, why not just distribute copies of David Allen’s Getting Things Done: the Art of Stress-Free Productivity to students rather than assisting libraries in marketing their training opportunities? Either way the study hardly appears to be all that revolutionary. You mean college students struggle with time management and information competency? Who knew? Students use Google? Really?

Popularity: 16% [?]

Let me start with a quote from Hugh Hewitt’s Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That’s Changing Your World:

What made it all possible? What gave Luther the ability to succeed in his reform where others had failed? What allowed Calvin to shape the thought of every generation that followed him? Print. In 1449 Gutenberg amplified the human voice such that it could be heard around the world. He provided the means by which one person could communicate with the masses without the interference of the institutional structures of the day. At last individuals could speak, and none could silence them.

For the Mainstream Media, it is 1449 and 1517, at the same moment. (p.59)

Hewitt’s point is that we have embarked upon the next wave of transformation in the dissemination of information, and like the Reformations of the Sixteenth Century, this transformation provides a broader voice.

What, then, does this mean for libraries? If we are tasked with not only provision of access to information but also the preservation of that information, what are we to do with this new form? Clearly, anybody who can get online can read a blog. But if blogs are the new media, then what of their preservation? Whose, how often, and in what form should blogs be archived? And who should be tasked with it? In a hundred years will today’s blogs be accessible like the preserved media of a hundred years ago?

My second question concerns the cultural and societal change which is being sparked by this change in media. William Sonn in his Paradigms Lost: The Life and Deaths of the Printed Word argues that with each major historical shift in the manner and method of information dissemination there has been a consequent, and often quite significant, change in society. To quote him:

For every time the way media were produced changed in the past, politics shifted. So did economics. Migrations and emigrations followed; even mating habits changed sometimes. It is hard to trace how one particular tool–the telegraph, the radio, a device that made printing cheaper–directly led to one particular change; but all hell seemed to break loose when a new communications device superseded an old one, or even when the nitty-gritty manufacture and distribution of old media changed. (p. 7)

So where, then, are we going? And who will record the journey?

Popularity: 15% [?]

Items I find interesting as I read my feeds in Google Reader now show up in the right sidebar as “Dogeared Pages.” I tried to add this about a week ago via the code provided by Google that imports the items I mark as shared, but Microsoft’s Internet Explorer just plain couldn’t handle it (ahh, Microsoft IE: the bane of web development).

Anyway, I latched onto the RSS feed and here it is. Everything from experimental library technology to daddy/daughter dance shoes right from the sidebar. Let me know if you see something helpful. Or immensely unhelpful. Either way, it’s still nifty.

Popularity: 10% [?]

This mistaken preference for the modern books and this shyness of the old ones is nowhere more rampant than in theology. Wherever you find a little study circle of Christian laity you can be almost certain that they are studying not St. Luke or St. Paul or St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas or Hooker or Butler, but M. Berdyaev or M. Maritain or Mr. Niebuhr or Miss Sayers or even myself.

Now this seems to me topsy-turvy. Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. And I would give him this advice precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet. A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it. It has to be tested against the great body of Christian thought down through the ages, and all its hidden implications have to be brought to light. Often it cannot be fully understood without the knowledge of a good many other modern books.

C. S. Lewis, “On the Reading of Old Books,” as reprinted in Richard Gamble’s The Great Tradition: Classic Readings on What it Means to be an Educated Human Being (Wilmington, De.: ISI Books, 2007) 597. This book just crossed my desk and I am loving it. It contains excerpts from Plato to the Reformers to Dorothy Sayers.

Popularity: 11% [?]