Blog

My article on NYAM’s Grey Lit Report has been accepted for
publication in the Journal of Electronic Resources in Medical
Libraries! (Woot for me! Woot, I say!) This will be the first
library-based article I’ve ever gotten in print, and I’m really looking
forward to it. More as events unfold.  And second . . .

Click here and listen to what these incredibly creative guys have to offer.  Then click here and take a look
at who’s material they made available on the website ("About the
Authors").  I am in the company of David Brin and J. Steven York.  I
ask you, how cool is that?

The reputation of the reporting news agency aside, two words fit here: no kidding.  (Buy the book.)

I like the idea very much. It’s the execution I have doubts about. I mean, the human brain is hands down the best computer ever to see the light of day. The one thing that mechanical brains have on us is speed. But in terms of managing disparate, highly variable (and varied) inputs, people win every time. A human driver can get out of most problems that he gets into without resorting to calling police or actually damaging the car, himself, or his passengers.  But historially robots are not great at that particular kind of problem solving. For it to work propoerly, a robot needs to exist in a very specific environment: a clean, clear hallway with an evenly tiled floor, as opposed to a typical city street. I can see a robot car following a highly distinctive pattern of starts and stops, for example, a tram that goes in straight (or mildly curving) lines down a number of streets in sequence and never does anything else, stopping at predetermined points along the way for a set time to pick up and drop off passengers. But such a system requires that the track never break, the passengers never dawdle or crowd each other, and the position of the stops never change. But the world, outside of very highly selctive environments (say, the monorail at Disneyworld or a internal track at an airport passenger terminal), does not generally work that way.

So, yes, I like the idea. I have questions about the feasability and expense. And the necessity, for that matter. Why not just reinstate the public transportation systems many cities in the U.S. abandoned in the 1930s and 40s? It’s the same basic idea.

On to library stuff: the latest edition of the NYAM Grey Literature Report (vol. 4, no. 8, July 2006) is now available here.

As the headline said:

Worldcat.org is now available (yea!)

Very little to write about today, as we’re in the process of picking out shelf list cards and processing the tomes we unearthed from MLCNY last year, and there are quite a lot of them. I’m told that NYPL is taking some of them off our hands, but there are more available. On the chance that you may be interested in acquiring some of this material, I invite you to email me. I’ll make sure your request gets to the correct people.

In other news, my crash course in reference training is about donbe, so I’ll start doing shifts on the desk next week.  (Yea me!)

Just a couple of articles from picked from OCLC Abstracts this morning:

OCLC, LIBER Exchange Bibliographic records to Support Digital Preservation Efforts

Google’s Anti-social Downside

Enjoy!

The good news is this: an article discussing the peer review process in Nature.

The bad news is this: your tax dollars are being used to roll back the Freedom of Information Act. Granted, it’s at the research phase right now, but I find it difficult to believe they would have funded it had they not a strong wish to actually go ahead with it. Anyway, here’s an excerpt:

‘Tax Dollars to Fund Study on Restricting Public Data
by Richard Willing, USA Today

Beginning this month, St. Mary’s University
School of Law in San Antonio will analyze recent state laws that place
previously available information, such as site plans of power plants,
beyond the reach of public inquiries.

Jeffrey Addicott, a professor at the law school,
said he will use that research to produce a national "model statute"
that state legislatures and Congress could adopt to ensure that
potentially dangerous information "stays out of the hands of the bad
guys."

"There’s the public’s right to know, but how much?" said Addicott, a former legal adviser in the Army’s Special Forces.’

How much, indeed?

I’m putting the finishing touches on my article for the Journal of Electronic Resources in Medical Libraries’ eJournal  Forum and the deadline is Monday, which means that before then I need to actually finish it, then send my proof to the other co-authors to see what needs fixing, and then over the weekend finish the second draft. (Wish me luck!) That done, I might actually post here two (even–dare I say it? three) times a week.

While that’s going on, if you care about the possibilities of practical space travel for those of us without $20 million to spend on a ticket to the stars, take a look at Alan Boyle’s Cosmic Blog.

And when you’re done with that, you can take a look at this. This bit was written by Chip Ward, who is the assistant director of Salt Lake City’s public library system on the subject of the Pentagon’s intention to set off what might be the biggest fertilizer bomb in history as a faux nuclear test in an area that has seen continual nuclear testing since the 1950s. I don’t understand the logic behind the government’s plans to do much (that goes double, nay, triple for the Pentagon) but the article is worth a read.

If, on the other hand, you want a proper window into anything the Pentagon has in mind, do a fast Google search for anything written in the past few years by Karen Kwitakowski, a retired Air Force Colonel who use to work  there, and now writes for Military Week.