I’m leaving the University at the end of today for a new adventure, and this blog probably isn’t far behind. I’ve exported the contents of this blog to a newly created one at http://ealling.wordpress.com. If and when I resume blogging, I’ll either do it there, or point to my new blog from that site. Like [...]
A post from Language Log today (shades of Donald Norman) fit in well with a recurrent theme in my work life lately: the desire to cultivate more of an awareness of usability issues in my library. Confounded by confusingly designed objects, Geoff Pullum pleads: I appeal to young, talented people everywhere: get trained in a [...]
This morning I was poking around the Apple website, pretending like I was going to buy an iPod touch (so very tempting, so many reasons not to right now…). Anyhow, I was struck by a few things. First, I was interested in whether the 8 GB Touch was in stock in my local Apple Store. [...]
A coelacanth is a hollow-spined fish. So how come when you do a keyword search for coelacanth in our library catalog, the first result is: The Best women’s stage monologues of 2003 / edited by D.L. Lepidus. (NB: we do own books on coelacanths.) Also, that link will stop working real soon. That’s reason #232 to [...]
Came across a nice pithy illustration of how major search engines tend to privilege commercial results this morning. Try Googling “philosophy.” Maybe a nice example for an info lit session…
Hello, faithful readers–and if you’re still there, you are indeed faithful. I’m back from a leave of several weeks from the University during which I’ve been working on a non-library related project, code name Effie. That project will continue for the foreseeable future, but we are now at a point when I can devote half [...]
Interrupting radio silence to kvetch a little… Just got an email via a listserv which contains what promises to be an interesting recap of a session that I didn’t get to attend at ALA Midwinter. But…the recap is attached to the email as a Word document. Grr. Why would this rankle me? Well, there’s the [...]
The color white can be interpreted as the absence of color (pigment) or the simultaneous presence of all colors in the prism (light). So can it be with silence. I’ve written little here in recent months, more because too much has been going on than because I have nothing to say. A few factors have [...]
Two reports in the past few days of institutions restricting access to social networking sites… Middle Georgia College blocks Facebook, MySpace (via the Kept-Up Academic Librarian) Facebook Banned in Library (via Library Stuff) Both the library and IT department on my campus are dead-set against policing the type of content that can be viewed on [...]
I recently had my first peer-reviewed journal article published. The publication cycle was extremely slooooow…my co-author and I reported on work that was done in 2003, submitted the article to a special journal issue that was announced in 2005, and only now (late 2007) has it appeared. Since the pace of technological evolution is quite [...]