More Hodgepodge

More Hodgepodge

Great news from Google Scholar: all libraries can now get their own results to show up in the Google search, with the right link resolving software. Fantastic! Of course, librarians in general are wary. Hey, if we had something better to offer the public, I’d be fighting for that, but we don’t.

Case in point: Lipstick on a Pig by Roy Tennant: library OPACs are one gigantic failure.

We are focused on making our own lives easier rather than the lives of our patrons. The user-focused enhancements that do make it through generally reflect incremental changes rather than deep, systemic improvements that will create the systems our users need.” I’m cheering madly from the crowd for him, until he says this: ” For that kind of leadership and courage, only the vendor can devote the required resources.”

Uh…what? Why are we relying on for-profit industry to create what we need? Why can’t LIS as a discipline pull itself together long enough to produce some open source product? Why can’t we, as a community of libraries, pitch together to create something that will work for all of us and for our patrons?

Gdrive: get rid of your user interface, your operating system and your folders; just search for things! Hm. No, i still like to put things in their rightful place. I don’t care what order my books or my cds are in, but dammit let me organize the files I create on my computer. There’s something to be said for keeping like near like, isn’t there, Mr. Dewey?

Meanwhile, yet another Canadian library school opts to remove the word “library” from it’s name:

Terri Tomchyshyn (Dalhousie class of ’81), Librarian/Manager at the Department of National Defense, says “The integration of the Master of Library and Information Studies programme into the Information Management model adds breadth and opportunities for those graduating from such a programme.” Stephen Abram, President of the Canadian Library Association adds that “around the world librarians are embracing and leading the change in their profession. Librarians are involved in all aspects of the Internet revolution, managing the transition of many enterprises and governments to address the strategic implications of new technologies. The name Dalhousie School of Information Management is wholly appropriate to reflect and represent the changes at the Dalhousie School and in our profession.”

Right, so the future is to get out of libraries altogether. Fantastic.

Bitch Ph.D reacts to the news that an adjunct professor was ousted because of her blog. I really wish this kind of topic got more attention from faculties in general. Universities are supposed to be a bastion of intellectual freedom, but apparently that’s just a lot of hot air. Yes, it’s just looking for more reasons to encourage my faculty friends to blog, I admit to some bias here.

And on that note, Teleread suggests that high-ranking managers and professionals tend not to keep blogs because it’s not a good way to hide lies and general BS . So maybe top execs (and anyone working for an ad agency in Quebec) should be required to blog.

Xanga infuriates edubloggers…again. Kids put too much personal information on their online journals, police say. This is always a tricky situation for people, kids or adults. Is there something we can do to help develop some sense of information literacy in this area?

While I can see a good educational purpose to the podcast, I am still not impressed with Duke and Drexel’s ipod giveaway. I’ll keep thinking about it, but what exactly is the pedagogical advantage of portability?

And here ends my hodgepodge. Onward and upward.

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