Thursday, December 27, 2007

Librarian: Executive Summary - US News and World Report

Librarian: Executive Summary - US News and World Report 

Librarian: Executive Summary

By Marty Nemko

Posted December 19, 2007

Forget about that image of librarian as a mousy bookworm. Librarians these days must be high-tech information sleuths, helping researchers plumb the oceans of information available in books and digital records. It's an underrated career. Most librarians love helping patrons dig up information and, in the process, learning new things. Librarians may also go on shopping sprees, deciding which books and online resources to buy. They even get to put on performances, like children's puppet shows, and run other programs, like book discussion groups for elders. On top of it all, librarians' work hours are reasonable.

Related News

Median Pay

National: $51,400.

More pay data by metropolitan area

(Data provided by PayScale.com)

Training

Smart Specialty

Special Librarian. All sorts of organizations need librarians, not just universities and local governments. They work for law firms, prisons, corporations, and nonprofit agencies. In fact, special librarianship is the field's fastest-growing job market. Unlike public and university jobs, which require night and weekend hours, these jobs are mostly 9 to 5.

Other Resources

Librarian: Executive Summary - US News and World Report

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Library 2.0: An Academic's Perspective

Library 2.0: An Academic's Perspective 

An article in Inside Higher Ed just caught my eye, "Pooling Scholars' Digital Resources ". The article described something that is hopeful for social scholarship, ominous for libraries.

The brief article describes the advent of Zotero Commons, a collaboration of George Mason University's Center for History and New Media and the Internet Archive. The purpose is to create an archive of scholarly resources, contributed by working scholars, in the public domain. The archive will offer a free optical scanning service to make the documents searchable.

Scholars will upload documents to the archive with an enhanced version of the Zotero plugin for Firefox. Imagine scholars contributing documents that they've annotated with Zotero and you get one of the great ideas behind this initiative. This version of the plugin will also allow scholars to collaborate on materials on a shared server.

Score one for social scholarship. Score a big one. But where are libraries in all of this? Andy Guess, the author of the article, has an answer. Here is his opening paragraph:

The various and competing efforts to digitize university libraries’ vast holdings have no lack of ambition, but access to documents and copyright issues have been two factors slowing the development of online scholarly repositories. Now, an effort at George Mason University seeks to bypass libraries entirely and delve into scholars’ file cabinets instead.

Bypass libraries entirely.

Apparently, we libraries are a) not innovative enough to solve the problem of access, and b) too caught up in copyright issues to be of much use in the age of social scholarship.

Is this a fair comment? On the face of it, not really. First of all, I'm not sure that access and copyright are the main things holding us back. And second, these are issues that concern us and rightly so.

I think the problem goes deeper. I see no evidence that academic libraries have it in them to band together to sponsor a project like Zotero Commons. We don't have the group vision. If we did, we'd be doing it.

There seems to be promise in the Open Content Alliance. The OCA is also associated with the Internet Archive and includes content from academic library collections. But here's the heart of the matter, the operative phrase "library collections". We need to be looking beyond the realm of our collections and figuring out our role in the process of scholarship. This is where our profession doesn't seem to get it. This is why an initiative such as Zotero Commons has no library involvement.

Our collections are our bedrock, but the notion - and reality - of collections are changing. The scholarship that makes use of these collections is changing. The Zotero Commons might contribute to that. " “I think it’s really going to have an impact on the way that scholarship is done.” So says the Center director. This may be overly optimistic, maybe not. But when two notable groups get together with this goal in mind, academic libraries should sit up and take notice. We should ask ourselves why we aren't involved. We should wonder why we didn't think of this ourselves. We should ponder what this says about us, and our role - and our concept of our role - on campus.

Bypass libraries entirely. It's so disheartening to read this.

Posted by Laura Cohen at 01:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Library 2.0: An Academic's Perspective

PDF or ODF?

 

Some information taken from http://www.academicproductivity.com/blog/2007/on-metadata-indexing-and-mucking-around-with-pdfs/

 

OASIS OpenDocument Format (ODF) could be the solution for this. It seems that word processors are slowly taking  an interest in reference management. Word 2007 features a reference manager, although it is really primitive and not usable for serious academic use. OpenOffice has been behind ODF for a while. if ODF becomes a de-facto standard, we may not need to rely on PDF. And ODF is XML, so adding different fields that can be mined by reference managers shouldn’t be hard. ODF is overseen by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). That way, the metadata is no longer an extension of the document: the entire document could be parsed and each component could contribute in its indexing. This would make easy to do what citeSeer is trying to do ‘the hard way’ (parsing author, title, etc out of the papers that we academic have in our homepages, and making them available and searchable). 

The need is there. I think the company/University dept. that gets this right will have a winner. For example, the Zotero forums express this need as follows:

(post by CuriousGeorge) Here is what I would like to do ideally:
1. Begin literature review on new topic using databases like JSTOR, Proquest, and Web of Science.
2. Use Zotero’s current “folder” icon in address bar to select articles of interest.
3. Zotero downloads citation information (this already works well), abstract (this often works), and the associated PDF file (with this option enabled in Zotero preferences, it currently works well in JSTOR but not other databases like Proquest).
4. Zotero stores all PDFs in one folder and automatically renames the PDFs based on the associated citation information in the format “Author, Year, Article Title.pdf” (or customized format selected by user).
5. PDFs are read in the browser window and notes are taken in the associated Zotero entry.
6. Zotero allows search in any combination of citation information, abstract/notes, and full text of website/PDF snapshots (stored locally).
7. Lit Review is built by creating new notes that synthesize various articles (these notes take advantage of the “related” option in Zotero to link back to the associated references).
8. The lit review notes and “related” citations are exported to a word processor.
9. The word processor is dynamically linked to the Zotero database for adding new citations and for searching the Zotero database for quotes/notes.

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Firedoglake - Firedoglake weblog » Congress Screams “Kiddie Porn,” Tries To Kill Public WiFi

 

Congress Screams “Kiddie Porn,” Tries To Kill Public WiFi

By: Jane Hamsher Tuesday December 11, 2007 12:19 pm

Lack of universal access to the internet is a big problem, and it's only going to get worse with this:

The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a bill saying that anyone offering an open Wi-Fi connection to the public must report illegal images including "obscene" cartoons and drawings--or face fines of up to $300,000.

That broad definition would cover individuals, coffee shops, libraries, hotels, and even some government agencies that provide Wi-Fi. It also sweeps in social-networking sites, domain name registrars, Internet service providers, and e-mail service providers such as Hotmail and Gmail, and it may require that the complete contents of the user's account be retained for subsequent police inspection.

It's the Patriot Act of wireless porn, forcing Starbucks clerks to turn into snitches and join Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton in wagging their nagging finger in the latest high-tech chapter of the culture wars, to the detriment of public WiFi:

The SAFE Act represents the latest in Congress' efforts--some of which have raised free speech and privacy concerns--to crack down on sex offenders and Internet predators. One bill introduced a year ago was even broader and would have forced Web sites and blogs to report illegal images. Another would require sex offenders to supply e-mail addresses and instant messaging user names.

Wednesday's vote caught Internet companies by surprise: the Democratic leadership rushed the SAFE Act to the floor under a procedure that's supposed to be reserved for noncontroversial legislation. It was introduced October 10, but has never received even one hearing or committee vote. In addition, the legislation approved this week has changed substantially since the earlier version and was not available for public review.

Not one Democrat opposed the SAFE Act. Two Republicans did: Rep. Ron Paul, the libertarian-leaning presidential candidate from Texas, and Rep. Paul Broun from Georgia.

This kind of legislation is only "noncontroversial" to those who think that public WiFi is a bad and dangerous thing. The chill factor it places on anyone wanting to offer it is potentially enormous; given the hefty fines in place for noncompliance, it will certainly give pause to more than a few legal eagles.

One of the things I frequently get asked about when talking about blogs, online journalism and internet activism is the lack of availability of online access to people of color and those with limited means, who thus find themselves largely excluded from many organizing and communications opportunities. This bill may be good for the telcos and values nags, but it sucks for everyone else.

Firedoglake - Firedoglake weblog » Congress Screams “Kiddie Porn,” Tries To Kill Public WiFi

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Interactives . The Periodic Table . Atomic Basics . Name That Atom

Interactives . The Periodic Table . Atomic Basics . Name That Atom

 

Cool periodic table probably more for high school than college but provides with orbitals, melting points, boiling points, etc.

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Dude, Where's My Video Phone? - Forbes.com

The best quote from the article....Maybe I am just someone who  prefers to spend time in his pj's....

Full article -- Dude, Where's My Video Phone? - Forbes.com

"Or not. Because no matter how cheap and easy pervasive computer technology makes video telephones, they still bump up against one central issue: whether people will want to see and be seen by those they communicate with.

"People did not want to comb their hair to answer the telephone," said Lucky in an interview with Bill Moyers.

Of course that could change, too, and wouldn't it be ironic if the breakthrough to popular video telephony ended up not being any technological advance, but a shift in human vanity. Once we stop combing our hair when we go out, then we'll finally embrace video telephones.

Or not. The technology for Spandex catsuits has always been with us, but few people wear them because few people look good in a leotard. A similar logic might explain why video phones will remain forever locked in the more attractive future."

Neil Steinberg is the author of Complete and Utter Failure and, most recently, Hatless Jack: The President, the Fedora and the History of American Style .

Dude, Where's My Video Phone? - Forbes.com

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Welcome

I needed a place for my personal and professional stuff....So here it is welcome.....