In a report on a USF study, that I found a little disheartening, it was concluded that, while college students do use social media, they don’t use Twitter much and remain unaware of its use for business/professional purposes. So, they use it to connect with friends, but couldn’t care less about businesses, brands or organizations [...]

The Internet Resources column in the April issue of C&RL News (vol. 70, no. 4) offers a useful list of resources to help academic librarians with the research component of their workload. The column, by Laurie L. Putnam, is entitled Professional Writing and Publishing: Resources for Librarians.

OCLC and Ebsco have announced an agreement that makes it possible for libraries that subscribe to both WorldCat Local and EBSCOhost services to provide their users with online access to the full text of electronic content. My system has a WorldCat Local beta installation (and several Ebsco products). Users who have tried the beta have [...]

An interesting list of tips, apps, and resources for teachers on Twitter (100 of them). May be more geared toward K-12 but still some good ideas for the higher ed crowd. I’m playing with the idea of a session for my faculty.

Steve Ostrem at Library Journal wrote a nice article on how librarians can use Google Book Search for reference, research and collection development. Particularly interesting, and new, is the “popular passages” search, the subject headings, the ability to clip and paste from public-domain works and the personalization options now offered via “My Library” with a [...]

Today, March 24th, is Ada Lovelace Day. It is an international day that wants to draw attention to women excelling in technology. I would like to highlight two women here that I admire for their technological skills. I also have the pleasure of knowing them personally and, bonus, they’re librarians! Jill Hurst-Wahl is an expert [...]

Brian C Gray shared this morning that the IEEE Xplore database reached two million documents this month. The two millionth article loaded into IEEE Xplore is “Intelligent Packet Dropping for Optimal Energy-Delay Tradeoffs in Wireless Downlinks,” by Michael J. Neely from the University of Southern California. It appears in the March issue of IEEE Transactions [...]

I have seen two examples recently of libraries reaching out to their users to gather their comments. Concordia University Libraries, in Montréal, Qué is using a web form (?) to gather comments and publishes responses via a blog. Questions/comments and answers are coming at a good clip. The Libraries administration actually uses the comments to [...]

The American Institute of Architects selected eight recipients for the 2009 AIA/ALA Library Building Awards. For each winning library, I tried to link to the website and to project details, via the architects’ sites and/or via the Architectural Record, if available. Arabian Library, Scottsdale Public Library, Scottsdale, Arizona richard+bauer architecture, LLC about the project C.V. [...]

A little late, but interesting reading, ARL published mid-February a statement to publishers regarding research libraries and the global economic crisis. The document lists a few of the effects the economic crisis has on research libraries: current and future -possibly permanent -budget cuts cancellation of ongoing commitments bigger preference of electronic over print shortening of [...]

McGraw-Hill announced a major revision of its Digital Engineering Library. The new site will be called AccessEngineering and the URL (http://accessengineeringlibrary.com) will be activated March 9th 2009. The new site will offer new features and enhancements, including: New graphical user interface: state-of-the art functionality streamlines access to content and reader New taxonomy book view: the [...]

Brian Scott Mathews over at The Ubiquitous Librarian made some very interesting looking into the underground market for academic materials via illegal file sharing sites like bit torrent. Apparently, his fictional research brought up big time reference titles like the CRC handbooks, the entire Referex engineering e-book collection, Harvard Business Cases, textbooks and tutti quanti. [...]

Harvard University Provost Steven E. Hyman created a committee charged with improving the efficiency of the university’s library system. Since Harvard’s creation in 1638, no less than 75 different units have been instituted and have evolved “organically”. Some branches are autonomous, other services are centralized. The desired outcome would be “recommendations to improve the strength [...]

Library Journal just published its list of best 2008 sci-tech books. Something for everyone. (Thanks John Dupuis for the heads-up)

As a collateral to my February 25th post, Peter Bromberg at the Library Garden blog, posts about Twitter etiquette at conference business meetings. The good and the (very) ugly. Although, sometimes I think new Twitter users don’t always realize the permanent nature of their tweets. And how very public they are.