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.

News for Library Nerds, February 28, 2014

ACRL’s draft of the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (click to read) is out. It tries to be less formulaic than the original Standards for Information Literacy, and takes into accounts some of the recent changes in higher ed.  It also expands the definition of Information Literacy:

"Information literacy combines a repertoire of abilities, practices, and dispositions focused on expanding one’s understanding of the information ecosystem, with the proficiencies of finding, using and analyzing information, scholarship, and data to answer questions, develop new ones, and create new knowledge, through ethical participation in communities of learning and scholarship."

IEEE and Springer removing 120 computer generated papers from their collections. 

Here are 11 issues facing academic libraries. Some issues have seen a lot of play, but some of the others haven’t been discussed as much. Which issues seem the most pressing to you?

Can (should) your library have a personality? Or do we just give the facts, dispassionately? 

The opposite of being an online librarian: the archivist in the National Geographic historical image collections. 

News for Library Nerds, February 21, 2014

Academic libraries looking at e-book lending between institutions. 

Top ten reasons to prefer print: an infographic. 

How do you thwart copyright infringement? One mapmaker thought they had found a way . . . 

Dept of Ed is again looking at the “state authorization” rule for distance education.

Two opinions in WIRED about the benefits of ditching Net Neutrality.  

MIT still figuring out what their internal information policies should be after the Aaron Swartz case. 

Sometimes the Internet is the Wild West, and that’s even true for scholarly publishing. Check out the series of blog posts on Public Integrity and Ethics, an organization trying to make a name in scholarly circles. (Posts One, Two, Three, & Four).

The novel as a unique combination of paragraphs: a version of Tristan & Isolde that is recombined differently for each reader.

News for Library Nerds, Februray 14, 2014

The Dept of Ed’s biennial report on Academic Libraries is out. 

In case you need some reading that makes you nod slowly in agreement: Library Babel Fish’s thoughts on the journal and the difference between how undergraduates and experts see the information landscape. That's also why students see articles as individual things, while scholars see them as contributions to a conversation (an earlier post of hers).  

Wikipedia highlights the difficulty of creation and editing in a mobile world. Small screens are for looking, not making. Well, except for those cell phone novels.

Americans LOVE their libraries!

But Americans aren’t showing much love for foreign literature. (With the exception of Murakami, when was the last time I read a translated book? Clearly, I need to up my game . . . as soon as I finish The Goldfinch.)

Is Amazon good for books? 

The list of America’s most literate cities is out. Hooray for the Twin Cities, who are both on the list! Of course, the fact that I can't take a walk without running into a Little Free Library pretty much shows we've got books coming out of our ears around here.