Carnival of the Infosciences 31 is Open

(Queue Fanfare) Presenting Number 31 in the series Carnival of the Infosciences.  Ta da! 

Meredith Farkas at Information Wants to be Free sends along her post:  Why Google (or Ask or Yahoo) is Good for Reference Work. "I wanted to show how I use often use commercial search engines at work to supplement my database research and also to point me to things in the databases and our catalog that I would not likely have found through a regular search.  What's important is being flexible and knowing the range of resources out there; not whether you use a commercial search engine or a library database."

Joy Weese Moll of Wanderings of a Student Librarian was buzzed by work done by Brian Mathews of Alt Ref.  Joy's post is Monitoring student blogs, and points to the Distant Librarian who points to Mathew's announcement of his paper Intuitive Revelations: The Ubiquitous Reference Model which:

Describes a proactive approach toward interacting with college students. While the library world has just discovered blogs, these students have been keeping online journals for years. They use services like LiveJournal and Xanga, and even MySpace and Facebook to interact—often providing insight and commentary on their hectic lives. My interest was mining this data for educational opportunities.

 Says Joy: The concept is very exciting but the test was of 40 blogs and I would need it to scale to hundreds of blogs.

Lukethelibrarian points us to  Could HR 4437 criminalize certain reference transactions? posted at lbr weblog.  HR 4437 is an immigration bill and Luke doesn't think much of it.

In its unbounded zeal to criminalize absolutely anything and everything that might assist or sustain "illegal aliens," it uses language that is just insanely broad.

He's hoping to get Mary Minow's take on it. Mary writes at Library Law Blog.

Amanda Robertson's has been been "enjoying T.Scott’s discussion of his meeting with Elsevier bigwigs, and his latest post is as good as all the others chronicling it.  I especially like this chunk:  'With the increasing availability of large databanks & databases (cf., Genbank), the emergence of repositories of grey literature, and the burgeoning potential of blogs, wikis and their related social networks, there are many other avenues for consultation and collaboration among scientists.  Journal articles (even in the rich media, interactive format that they are slowly in the process of morphing into), will be competing for attention among all of these other sources of information.' Anyway, the post is located here:  and is called “Reinventing Scholarly Publishing.”

Stephen Francoeur, who came up for a breath of air during his immersion in "Ocean of the Imminently Due Master's Thesis" exhaled this piece on his blog, Digital Reference. Pattern library for library web site design?  Stephen was "inspired by the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library, I thought it would really cool if there were a site that would feature all kinds of solutions to common design issues for library web sites."

iPod and Podcasting Potpourri came from Michelle Kraft, aka the Krafty Librarian and looks at new innovations and uses for podcasts in the medical world and the medical library world.

Laura Crossett at lis.dom tells us how she got her job. (She attributes it to luck, but I suspect that excellent qualifications had more than a little to do with it.)

Editor's choice:  In homage to my soon-new home state, Wisconsin, here's an article about the Edible Book Festival held at the University of Wisconsin School of Library and Information Science. The opening reception is April 4.  "This festival invites participants to poke fun at literature, art, and food in equal measure by creating edible book-shaped or book-themed edible art," according to the school's  dean, Jane Pearlmutter  Here's the main website for the Seventh Worldwide Edible Book Festival.

And finally, writing at the Library Journal Tech Blog,  Matt Gullett points to a piece at eSchool News online titled States Erratic on IT Literacy.  Writes Matt

This is essential reading for those of us who lead after school technology type programs in our libraries, but it is also of use to those who work with tweens and teens. When putting together a program for youth that involves teaching technology skills, literacy and/or fluency it helps to have standards and guidelines to follow and present to administrators, outside groups, schools and organizations.

Tangognat will be next week's roustabout for Carnival #32.

Comments

[brian mathews]

I am over 100 blogs now....