News for Library Nerds, March 28, 2014

Want to feel exactly what a book’s protagonist feels? MIT has a wearable sensory book.

If that's not creepy enough, Harvard Library’s collection includes books bound in human skin.

The ubiquity of the book club. 

Should libraries team up with bookstores? 

 

Getting teens into the public library.

Don’t forget, National Library Week is coming soon!

News for Library Nerds, March 21, 2014

Sorry this is a little belated . . .

Why you can get old music on iTunes, but not old books as ebooks (blame the courts). 

How conspiracies and false information spread on Facebook. 

Expanding the role of libraries and their most devoted patrons. 

News written by algorithm. At least automatically generated news stories make more sense than those scholarly papers written by computer programs.

A group of teachers try to catch a cheater online.

News for Library Nerds, March 14, 2014

Information Literacy is a top priority for Academic Library directors (in case you weren’t sure about that). 

Snarky opinion piece about the best ways to destroy a scholarly communication/internal repository initiative. 

Want to get the data? It becomes less available with every year past publication, when it’s left only to the article writers to manage it. I smell a role for librarians, unless it’s ruined by the problems highlighted in the opinion piece above. . . 

Will books become like Netflix? (i.e. delivered electronically by subscription)

Some myths about clicks and reading on the Internet, along with the reality. (You may want to keep reading below the fold.) 

Tim Berners-Lee celebrates the 25th anniversary of the Internet by calling for a digital Bill of Rights.

You’ve heard of selfies. What about the “shelfie?”

Mayor apologizes for cuts to the library budget, saying "It is the absolute worst decision I have made in the time I have been in public office." Isn’t it great when people realize how much important stuff libraries do? 

Happy Pi Day!

News for Library Nerds, March 7, 2014

ALA’s environmental scan of Open Education, MOOCs, and Libraries. 

ERIC’s removal of thousands of ERIC Docs, followed by the total blackout of the government shutdown, has made many education librarians nervous about relying on the government for purely digital copies. The Center for Research Libraries has a nice summary of the changes to government documents in recent years. 

Another Nobel Laureate attacks the current paradigm of peer-review, publish-or-perish, and tenure evaluations.

Textbook companies are moving into the online courseroom business.

The internet makes for strange bedfellows, like Rap Genius and Harvard Divinity School.  

And copyright may get in the way of the development of the “Internet of Things.” Thanks, Keurig. 

Getty making many of its images available for free. If you can't beat the infringers, perhaps you can use them as advertising.