Vast Active Library and Information Science blog. From a recent library science graduate in Wellington, New Zealand. A focus on reference and current awareness tools and issues, especially free, web-based resources.

 
Steven pointed this out - FeedFire is a free tool for creating RSS feeds from websites that don't already have them. Crucially, it enables you to scrape sites that aren't maintained by you. It's fairly easy to work (though you have to register) - in only a few minutes I'd created a feed for the Victoria University library's news page. Copy the feed into Bloglines, and I'm automatically tracking updates from the library.

I like it.

| posted by Simon at 7:06 pm

 
Thesestickers parody the weird and scary "evolution is just a theory" disclaimer sticker, actually used in Georgia, USA.

"This textbook contains material on gravity. Gravity is a theory, not a fact...."

"This book was anonymously donated to your school libary to discretely promote religious alternatives to the theory of evolution. When you are finished with it, please refile the book in the fiction section."

| posted by Simon at 12:44 pm

 
Steven Cohen points to an article by Roland Tanglao on avoiding information overload caused by excessive use of RSS.

Steven points out that he himself doesn't believe in information overload - "We are not forced to subscribe to over 500 feeds, or have thousands of messages coming into my inbox every day from electronic mailing lists. If we didn't read anything, we wouldn't suffer from IO"

I'm not so sure. It's true that much of the information we take in is discretionary. But it's also true that the amount of scholarly literature has increased vastly in the last 50 years or so. This, I think, makes it impossible to read everything that is relevant to our area of interest. At best, we can hope to read a few key sources thorougly, and skim through others.

That said, I'm going to take a close look at what both Steven and Roland have to say, and see if I can be more efficient as I try to keep current.

| posted by Simon at 8:42 pm

 
A very useful set of short reviewsof different RSS readers. Very pertinent for me, as I've been looking for a reader I can recommend to non-techie users, that will integrate with Outlook. Looks like NewsGator is the way to go.

Personally, I still love Bloglines, and Amphetadesk works fine if you want to fire up another application, but I want something really, really simple.

Via Blog Without A Library.

| posted by Simon at 8:26 pm

 
The Kinky Librarian takes aim at some library myths.

| posted by Simon at 7:21 pm

 
Google Scholar is Google's search tool for scholarly literature, including journal articles, theses, books, abstracts etc. Since a "large fraction of scholarly literature is still offline", quite often it links to citations for books, rather than the full text (well, you could have guessed that, anyway, right?). But what it does do is take you seamlessly to WorldCat, so you can try to locate the book in a library in your area.

I've only had a *very* brief play with this, but it looks like it could be very useful. Not a substitute for proper bibliographic or full-text databases, but there's an awful lot of us who don't have access to those.

| posted by Simon at 12:45 pm

 
Over on Wired News Xeni Jardin interviews Jeff Tweedy of the wondrous Wilco. Most of the discussion is about Wilco's support for filesharing, and retells the story of how having their album available online before its official release helped their sales.

It's nothing new to me, but I'm a fan...you should definitely check out the interview (and the band). Tweedy's argument is that filesharing helps bands get heard, which helps them sell albums and concert tickets. I think he's right, as I've said before - I've spent a fair bit of money buying albums that I'd already downloaded - because I wanted to give something back to the artist....

| posted by Simon at 8:16 pm

 
Somewhat hyperbolic article from Tech Central Station on Wikipedia, written by Robert McHenry (a former editor of the Britannica). It's perhaps unsurprising that someone with his background would be critical of the Wiki model, but frustratingly he doesn't offer much in the way of hard evidence - Wikipedia must be bad by its very open-source nature. He does finish by examining a specific Wikipedia entry in detail (that on Alexander Hamilton, which does seem from his comments to contain some weaknesses.

This, I think, is the key to evaluating the Wikipedia...not abstract arguments as to whether a large enough group of editors can compensate for the fact that any idiot can edit it, but actual analysis of the site's content. It is, though, instructive that the errors he pointed to have already been corrected.

| posted by Simon at 10:49 pm

 
Following on from the revelations that Google was censoring search results within China comes another disappointing piece of news: Google Image search is censoring pictures of Abu Gharib, reports a poster on AnandTech.com .

I saw this on Metafilter, where posters have pointed out that Abu Gharib related results are turning up fine on Altavista and Yahoo.

We should, of course, all know not to trust one search engine or information source. But when the other engines are returning relevant results this is a little disturbing.

OK, as I was typing this, a few other MeFi posters pointed out that it could be a failure to keep current when indexing the net, rather than a deliberate act of censorship. Still not good for Google, though.

| posted by Simon at 8:23 pm