Congratulate me: this is the 100th post of the Rogue Scholar. (Yea!) I started this silly thing last year as a way to help me develop how I thought about library-type work and the issues that relate to it: it gets lonely in the back office sometimes, and it pays to put pen to paper…
I know, I’m a day late (again). I came back from vacation yesterday to dive right into integrating our new electronic journal list from our new serials vendor into our catalog, which process includes verifying the back files of each title and making sure that the overlapping databases (our general link resolver, whatever we get…
Google has a newsletter for librarians now, which looks like they’ll make into a regular service. Unfortunately, all I have to go on is the link, which doesn’t link to subscription services or even any real information. It might just be an experiment, or there might be pages that I haven’t found yet. I’ve been…
Normally when someone talks about how much damage librarians are doing the American Way of Life, you figure it’s just more talk radio hyperbole. Not this time. This time it comes from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. First, we have an article in the New York Times ("At FBI, Frustration Over Limits on an Antiterror…
This got a mention in this week’s ResourceShelf Newsletter: "Wikipedia, an Internet encyclopedia written entirely by volunteers, claimed that a prominent journalist might have been involved in the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, a false charge that has highlighted the Achilles’ heel of such do-it-yourself Web sites. The journalist, John Seigenthaler Sr., 78 — who…
The Daily Reckoning has a great tidbit on the history of "Uncle Sam" today, including the fact that there is no copyright on the image used by Army recruiters in World War 1 (government documents generally are not copyrighted, so yeah, that makes sense even though I’ve never really thought much about it. More fool…
It’s a short work week this week, so I have no excuse not tp post at least an article or two. In that spirit, here’s something I picked up by accident. THOMAS, one of the more amazing government legislation research tools available to internet users, has gotten a significant face-lift. You can still search for…
BusinessWeek has another article on the trials and tribulation of Google as they continue to implement their Print for Libraries program. It’s interesting to watch this story develop over time, not the least reason for which is that Google’s big move in this direction was the subject of a serious panel discussion between David Ferriero…
A couple of things caught my eye today. First, I found this article by David H. Holtzman in the Oct. 25 issue of BusinessWeek. It’s called "Share the Knowledge, Expand the Wealth" and makes the case that copyright, while still an incredibly valuable legal protection against intellectual property theft has been badly abused by the…
Google Alert just dumped a link in my lap that I’m a bit conflicted about: it’s called "Metacrap" and it’s an angry and obnoxious attempt by Cory Doctorow to make what should be an excellent point. Namely, that not all meta-data is reliable and the level to which it is unreliable necessarily degrades its utility…