Links of interest 23/11/09

Crowdsourcing
Library Society of the World brainstorms library terminology:

• Unhelpful library terminology....and GO.
• Translate unhelpful library terminology to something more useful/usable/understandable?

Unshelved (the library webcomic) has launched Unshelved Answers, where librarians can ask question and get answers from fellow librarians. There's a nice system of voting and rewards points to ensure quality control by the community.

Digitisation
The National Digital Forum 2009 conference is in progress; the hashtag on twitter is #ndf2009. Announced there, Make it Digital is offering two $10,000 awards for organisations wanting to digitise NZ content.

Due to popular demand, DigitalNZ announces Collaborative digitisation of the AJHR.

Google Scholar adds full-text legal opinions from various US courts.

Post-digitisation
The Ithaka report on What to Withdraw: Print Collections Management in the Wake of Digitization "analyzes which types of journals can be withdrawn responsibly today and how that set of materials can be expanded to allow libraries the maximum possible flexibility and savings in the future."

The Swiss Army Librarian writes (with photos) about printing a book from Google Books on one of Google's Expresso book-on-demand machines.

Links of Interest 4/11/09

Resources
New Zealand Electronic Text Centre has posted a list of online texts for current courses at VUW.

The Dept of Internal Affairs has launched Government datasets online, a directory of publicly-available NZ government datasets (especially but not exclusively machine-readable datasets).

Complementary Twitter accounts:

• APStylebook (Sample: Election voting: Use figures for totals and separate the large totals with "to" instead of hyphen.)
• FakeAPStylebook (Sample: To describe more than one octopus, use sixteentopus, twentyfourtopus, thirtytwotopus, and so on.)

Information Literacy
There was a lot of interest at and after LIANZA09 about the Cephalonia Method of library instruction (basically, handing out pre-written questions on cards to students to ask at appropriate times during the tutorial). A recent blogpost by a librarian worn out from too many tutorials wonders "what if the entire class session consisted of me asking students questions? What if I asked them to demonstrate searching the library catalog and databases?"

Scandal du jour
A document by Stephen Abram (SirsiDynix) on open source library management systems (pdf, 424KB) appeared on WikiLeaks. The biblioblogosphere saw this as evidence of SirsiDynix secretly spreading FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) against their open-source competition. Stephen Abram replied on his blog that it was never a secret paper and he's not against open source software but it's not ready for most libraries. Much discussion followed in his blog comments and on blogs elsewhere; Library Journal has also picked up the story.

For fun
Also at Library Journal, The Card Catalog Makes a Graceful Departure at the University of South Carolina - rather than just dumping it the library is hosting events such as a Catalog Card Boat Race and What Can You Make With Catalog Cards?

Things Librarians Fancy.

Deborah