I’m currently taking Diane Kovac’s course Electronic Collection Development for the Academic E-Library from ACRL, and in one of the lectures she posted a link to John Kupersmith’s best practice guide to using terminology that patrons understand. Note that “Database,” “E-Journal,” and “Catalog” are all terms that patrons report not to understand.
I first heard about Sony’s new Portable Reader System on ComandN, and then found this write-up about it on The Handheld Libriarian. It’s a portable e-book/PDF reader that seems to address a lot of the problems previous handheld e-book readers had. The screen on the Sony PRS is supposed to be much easier on the eyes because the screen refreshes itself only when you turn the page. The memory also sounds like it is pretty good. I can see a lot of potential for these in libraries, particularly as more of our reference books are being purchased as e-books.
For all of you GMail people, Lifehacker is reporting on a new applet that will allow you to keep track of your bookmarks through your Gmail account:
At first glance, the bookmarklet doesn’t work any differently from the original. If you click the bookmarklet, it’ll open up a compose window in Gmail with the page’s title in the subject, along with the link and any highlighted text quoted in the body. But it gets more fun from there. Once set up as a keyword bookmarklet, you can use this bookmarklet to add tags to the subject, re-write the subject altogether, add text to the body of the email, and add a recipient to your email all from your address bar.
The De Lange Conference on Emerging Libraries is underway, and it looks like there’s some pretty interesting stuff there. You can access the program here. They have a link for webcasts, but so far nothing is there. It would be great if some of this stuff ended up online.
If you haven’t already seen this, Jonathan Lethem has an article in Harpers called The Ecstasy of Influence, about the nature of plagiarism, copyright, and the artistic process that I think has a lot of interesting implications for academia and the changing way informationg is being used and propagated.
