Jason Fowler, one of my gifted colleagues here at the library, has been diligently working away at developing an application that would take the tables of contents from our library’s most frequently used theological journals, make them available online, (wait for it……) publish RSS feeds for them, and (wait for it……) even publish discipline-specific RSS feeds for them! From our library’s announcement:

The James P. Boyce Centennial Library would like to announce the beta test of a new web service designed to deliver the table of contents from some of our most frequently used journals and serials to our faculty and students. JTOC, short for Journal Table of Contents, is a an application that provides online delivery of this content through a series of web pages and RSS feeds. JTOC allows students and faculty to keep abreast of what the library acquires in their field or favorite journals. To begin using JTOC, please visit http://library.sbts.edu/jtoc.

The library’s goal in designing JTOC was to create a simple system that would allow the content to be delivered in a quick and timely manner. Because text entry is generally a time consuming exercise, and because scanning is quick, the library’s staff decided to use images to distribute the content.

How should one use JTOC? The most useful way to use it is probably through setting up JTOC’s RSS feeds in a feed reader. Most often, this can be done within JTOC by simply clicking on an RSS feed button that looks like this –> . JTOC offers a variety of feeds. The main feed allows you to keep up with the library’s most recently received journals, but JTOC also serves feeds for specific journals and subject areas.

When you click on a feed button within JTOC, Firefox will give you several options for managing your feeds. Many find the most useful method for keeping up with feeds to be Google Reader. If you select this option in Firefox, and you have a Google account, you can add the feed directly to your Google Reader. When you use Google Reader, you do not even have to visit the JTOC site to see the new journals the library acquires.

The library hopes that you find this new service valuable to your research. Please keep in mind that JTOC is still in a beta test phase. We ask for your patience as we discover any issues that might arise with it.

Well done, Jason.

Popularity: 18% [?]

G. K. Chesterton’s fantastical works of fiction such as his extensive use of fairies, according to Alison Milbank at the University of Nottingham, had an apparently large influence on J. R. R. Tolkien and his Lord of the Rings. Alison argues that Chesterton’s attempts at using fiction to cause his readers to engage the real world in new ways resulted in Tolkien’s appropriation of a thoroughly fictional world — so fictional, in fact, it takes on a sense or reality — in order to engender a theology that is both practical and artistic. They both openly and intentionally created a fictional tradition of sorts in order to render a theological purpose more accessible, and in so doing foster relationships between people and God. She writes in Chesterton and Tolkien As Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real (London/New York: T and T Clark, 2007):

If Chesterton and Tolkien are theologians, as the title of this book claims, it is because they offer a theology of art as practice. Practical Theology as it is taught in seminaries and theological colleges in very often the taking of theological ideas and realizing them in practical activity, or reflecting upon experience with theological tools. …As a gift it likewise cements social relations and draws attention to the exchanges between people, and with the sacred. (p. 166)

Much no doubt remains to be said both in response to Milbanks’s appraisal of Chesterton and Tolkien. On the same cart of new books to be added to our library, however, was another treatment of fictional traditions: The Invention of Sacred Tradition, Lewis and Hammer, eds., Cambridge University Press, 2007. From the introduction:

In the domain of religion, we find an analogous situation, where historically verifiable traditions coexist with recent innovations whose origins are spuriously projected back into time.

Among these recent innovations which have invented traditions for themselves and which are given chapters in this book are Scientology, Castenada’s don Juan, Mormonism, Sun Myung Moon, Rosicrucianism, and Zoroastrianism. As it typical of much contemporary scholarship, however, they also attribute a false tradition to the New Testament due to supposed authorial “inauthenticities,” and thereby label most the New Testament to be forgeries (as well as the Pentateuch).

The combination of these two books in my thoughts did make for an interesting contrast, though. One looks at Chesterton’s and Tolkien’s fictional traditions as a positive source of good theology, traditions so fantastical and metaphorical that their place in both literary and theological history is certain. The other looks at the fictional traditions of Scientology, Mormonism, and the like as dubious sources which are not bases for truth. The combination raises a good discussion about how and when to appeal to tradition as a source — whether that tradition is real, fictional for instructive and artful purposes, or just plain fictional and delusive.

Popularity: 19% [?]

I think they are starting to get it. I asked a few days ago when and whether academic publishers would start recognizing that increased accessibility to their works results in increased exposure and usage. I did not, however, mention that many of the Ivy League university presses here in the States do already seem to be moving toward making academic content available and accessible in full text free of charge, certainly hoping that the result will be greater exposure. The Princeton Theological Review and Harvard University’s arts and sciences faculty’s plan (see here and here) to post academic papers online for free access, unless scholars specifically indicate otherwise, are good examples.

Earlier this month I noticed that the State University of New York (SUNY) Press announced an initiative to sell .pdf files of new books for $20.00 through their “directtext” option, a trend that will no doubt increase as libraries opt to fill digital repositories rather than handing over $75.00 for a hardcover that will need to be squeezed into already packed library shelves. See also Cheaper by the .pdf, but still . . .

Stanford University Press, however, has gone even further and jumped straight into the deep end. Their blog announced last week:

Stanford University Press is pleased to announce that you can now search the full text of our books via Google Book Search. We are currently still in the process of uploading and scanning our backlist, but there are already over a thousand Stanford titles in Google Book Search. When the project is completed, all of our books will be searchable electronically. …[We] are excited to make it easier for readers to discover content and find books most suited to their interests.

Thanks to languagehat.com for pointing this out: STANFORD BOOKS FULLY SEARCHABLE.

Popularity: 22% [?]

I am often amused at the juxtaposition of books that come across my desk. Today I point out two new acquisitions to our library which make for a rather unlikely pairing. If, however, the former is correct, then the latter is all that much more important.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt argues that “if morality represents how people would like for the world to work, then economics shows how it actually does work.” Incentives, cheating, fabrication, self-interest, convenience, randomness, and power are all addressed in terms of how they influence economics and therefore how they effect society. He argues that we live in a age where nothing is as it seems. Everything has a hidden side. Informed decisions, then, are next to impossible since someone else always has the upper hand.

The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment by Tim Challies answers the question that John MacArthur poses in the foreword, “With such a broad patchwork of competing ideas all clamoring for mainstream acceptance, how can the average person in the pew be expected to know what is truly sound, safe, and biblical?” In placing the discipline of discernment in connection with biblical truth and theology, the church’s corporate witness, and personal sanctification, Challies offers a great word on how to discern one’s way through such a freakonomic world. He writes:

Discernment is not a pursuit that stands on its own in the life of the Christian. Rather, it is inexorably connected to others. Those who wish to be discerning must have a posture of discernment. The must commit to reading and studying the Bible, to participating in the local church, and to pursuing the character traits of a Christian. The lives of these people will display the proof of discernment in their obedience to the Bible and in their maturity as Christians.

Popularity: 16% [?]

The United States Geological Survey has confirmed that what woke me up this morning at 5:39am was a magnitude 5.4 5.2 [updated] earthquake with an epicenter in SE Illinois — 154 miles from Louisville, KY. The above image is a “Shake Map” from the USGS which shows the intensity of the quake in the surrounding area. Here is the live footage from WAVE3 during their morning television broadcast.

The USGS also lists three earthquakes of sizable magnitude around the world in recent days. They are:

• Magnitude 5.2 ILLINOIS April 18, 2008
• Magnitude 6.6 ANDREANOF ISLANDS, ALEUTIAN IS., ALASKA April 16, 2008
• Magnitude 7.1 MACQUARIE ISLAND REGION April 12, 2008

Popularity: 15% [?]

I have just come across the perfect solution for putting a coffee shop in our library. I was thinking perhaps we could replace the entire lounge area with one of these. A Javabot. An automated walk-in coffee maker the size of a coffee shop where you can create your own blend, set your own roasting level, and even dictate the temperature of the water. Gizmag (click for pictures) writes:

The system is part of the experience because the coffee system runs throughout the shop It’s the first walk-in coffee machine in effect, and customers sit there and watch as their coffee beans rush past in pneumatic tubes, as they move from storage bins to staging, roasting station, grinding and a brewing machine where they are dispensed with the repeatable accuracy of a purpose-built machine. Customers can choose from any blend of seven different beans and every aspect of the process is controlled.

HT: Slashdot: The Javabot Combines Engineering and Coffee

Popularity: 18% [?]

An article in today’s New York Times (online) by Katie Hafner summarizes a lawsuit brought by three academic publishers against Georgia State University’s appropriation of their content for digital course reading packets. It states, in part:

In a complaint filed Tuesday in United States District Court in Atlanta, the publishers — Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and Sage Publications — sued four university officials, asserting “systematic, widespread and unauthorized copying and distribution of a vast amount of copyrighted works” by Georgia State, which the university distributes through its Web site.

…Indeed, as the printed word is put in digital form, holding onto rights seems to many like climbing up the slippery sides of a glass. The case centers on so-called course packs, compilations of reading materials from various books and journals. The lawsuit contends that in many cases, professors are providing students with multiple chapters of a given work, in violation of the “fair use” provision of copyright law. The publishers are seeking an order that the defendants secure permissions and pay licensing fees to the copyright owners.

Our own library is preparing to launch an institutional repository where digital content will be kept and made available to students/faculty/public depending on the nature of the work and its copyright status. This the very reason why I will be attending a conference on copyright management and libraries later this month at Ball State University up in Indiana. It appears to be a helpful conference, but theme is almost too corny even to mention. Librarians can really be a ridiculous bunch, but we appear to be among the few who are pushing the use of bleeding-edge technological advances for the legal dissemination of information. And yet Georgia State gets sued. Another half-dozen or so libraries have revised their policies for copyright management (which were likely fairly detailed already) in response to publishers’ concerns in the last year.

When will publishers learn that the availability and accessibility of information is directly tied to its usage? When was the last time you bought a music CD without listening to part of it online or at Barnes and Noble first? Similarly, in my humble and often incorrect opinion, the NIV translation of the Bible outsold the NASB translation because the NASB people were more restrictive in their licensing rights for use in publications, programs, curricula, etc… Again, accessibility is directly tied to usage in today’s world.

Admittedly, I do not know the details of this lawsuit. Nor am I acquainted with the copyright policies of Georgia State’s libraries. I do, however, plan on keeping an eye on this lawsuit. It is likely not as clear-cut as the NYT story reports it, nor is it as clear-cut as commercial copyright violations. Copyright law and its application to academic libraries is increasingly murky. And I have been tasked with our own library’s copyright clearance for reserves, e-reserves, and potentially for helping to navigate this issue with our forthcoming digital repository. I just finished revising our copyright policies last year and now I feel like I should do it again because the application of the law keeps changing. If we as librarians cannot keep up with it, how can we expect faculty to understand? Copyright conference, here I come.

Popularity: 14% [?]

Have I just coined a new word? Memeography?

A meme is an idea, project, statement or even a question that is posted by one blog and responded to by other blogs (see Understanding Blog Speak at the Blog Herald). I have been tagged to respond to the Spring Reading Days meme circulating around our campus, so I therefore give you my …memeograph? …memeogram?

1. What are you reading on Spring reading days?

Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt: A Novel by Anne Rice because I am fascinated by her wordcraft. She is a former writer of vampire novels who has now applied her descriptive abilities to the story of Jesus as a result of her newfound dedication to Roman Catholicism.


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Biblical Foundations for Baptist Churches: A Contemporary Ecclesiology by John S. Hammett because I am reviewing this book for the Association of Christian Librarians along with Elders in Congregational Life: Rediscovering the Biblical Model for Church Leadership by Phil A. Newton.


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Deep Storm by Lincoln Child because fiction is not a sin and because I am not no longer a full-time student and therefore do not have a syllabus to dictate my reading list. I enjoy a good, fun, save the world from destruction just in the nick of time kind of book every now and then. Especially on the occasional week when I have a respite from preaching.

2. What do you wish you had time to read?

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel because the video was good. Seriously. I saw a PBS documentary on the search for longitude and was fascinated with the story, the subsequent history which the discovery of longitude sparked, and because sea-clocks are cool.


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Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell because I don’t know what to make of it. It’s like what they used to tell us about taking standardized tests: your first guess usually correct. Really? What role does the Holy Spirit play in spontaneity?

3. What have you decided NOT to read that you were assigned to read?

Assigned? Ha! Okay, I confess that I did not read the President’s Daily Email the other day. Does that count?

4. What is one great quote from your reading?

I am not sure if I am correctly reading a symbolism in this or not. But come on — Jesus, wool, pure and clean white snow, a woman (a bride?) dressed in here finest?

Later that day — the eight days of the Feast of Lights had ended at dawn — I sought out the grove of trees, the only place in the whole of creation where I could be alone. The snow was thick. I wore heavy wool around my feet with thick sandals, but the wool was wet by the time I got there and I was very cold. I couldn’t stay long under the trees, but I stood there, thinking to myself and looking at the wonder of the snow covering the fields and making them look so very beautiful like a woman dressed in her finest robes. How fresh, how clean it all looked. — From Anne Rice, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (New York: Ballantine Books) 252.

5. Why are you blogging? (You’re supposed to be reading!)

Students use Spring Reading Days to study and research. I, on the other hand, get paid to help them study and research! So life goes on as usual for us hip librarians. And that means I can blog at night if I want to. And no guilt.

Popularity: 8% [?]

In case you did not already know, this is National Poetry Month. This constitutes my obligatory poetry post.

I recently saw two books that describe architecture as a poetic endeavor: John Ruskin’s 1893 Poetry of Architecture and Randall Alan Stauffer’s 1989 Architectural Poetry: Study of Spatial and Temporal Expression. If this analogy is valid, then the Library of Congress is without a doubt America’s greatest epic poem. And it is still being written. Or, at least, it is being edited and revised. See the LOC’s latest “lyrical” improvements:

Visit the Library of Congress.

Read the Library of Congress Blog.

Popularity: 13% [?]

I have no idea what is going to come next. Although I have worked with string-search algorithms and data-mining techniques for twenty-five years, I don’t believe in the digital utopia for five minutes. I don’t think that magical tools are going to enable college seniors suddenly to do library research that will eclipse the work of distinguished scholars of twenty years ago. I don’t think faceted metacrawlers are anything more than training wheels for the intellectual under-fives.

Some research will become possible that didn’t used to be, and some research will become easier, but most of it won’t change much. As is usual in history, the new generation will declare victory and do so successfully; whatever mixture of research tools and practices it uses will be defined ipso facto as quality scholarship. But it will in fact take many decades for real definitions of quality to emerge in the new environment. Perhaps in fifty years scholars will look back at the first generation of post-internet scholarship and cringe, as indeed I cringe when I look forward to it.

From Andrew Abbott’s Windsor Lecture delivered at the University of Illinois entitled, “Library Research and Its Infrastructure in the Twentieth Century.“

Popularity: 6% [?]