The Other Librarian

Heather Morrison discusses what she calls an “access gap” for scholarly journals in public libraries.   She claims:
The local public library will have interlibrary loan service; however, with limited staffing looking after everything from storytime for preschoolers to special services for teens, adults, seniors, and more, not to mention buying books and running the library, the [...]

And it’s not as if you haven’t already read about it on the Britannica blog.   I’ve made my comments already at the source where it belongs.   And I commented too on Andrew Keen’s “me too” post.
But I decided I don’t want to write a blog post about the Michael Gorman thing.   I want to [...]

At the CLA Emerging Technologies Interest Group Pre-Conference, Mark Leggott presented something he titled “Library 2.0: Threads in the Tapestry.” If you have ever seen or heard Mark talk, you would know that he appears to enjoy using metaphors to organize his talks. This time it was the “Lady and Unicorn” [...]

Margaret Somerville (2006). The Ethical Imagination: Journeys of the Human Spirit. Toronto: House of Anansi Press.
In ethics class, I was taught about the deontological and utilitarian approaches to moral behavior. The utilitarian looks at ethics specifically in terms of outcomes. That is, the most appropriate behavior is the [...]

The Popular Science blog has an entry about an invention by Melanie Rieback called the “RFID Guardian.” Like a regular Firewall, it blocks attempts to access information via RFID unless you want them to.
It sounds like a neat invention, but the thing that struck me was this:
a personal firewall she’s [...]

A neat little whiteboard drawing simulation tool to technolust over! Very cool.

I was doing some research on the use of the internet recently, and I’ve decided to write a paper on the ethics of providing public access computers to the public by public libraries.
Clearly, looking at the issue from a strictly professional standpoint, one could easily say that access to the Internet is a core [...]

I was working with a family member and I had the opportunity to be a librarian next to him/her.
The good or bad thing about being a librarian to a family member is that all that professional stuff goes out the window. This person did not enjoy a great reference interview, nor did they get [...]

Introduction

There is a tension between finding knowledge through experience on the one hand, and building consensus on the other.
The ideas of science (experience knowledge) and politics (normative knowledge) are not mutually exclusive, but they can contradict each other. A scientist can develop consensus on a theory by establishing that multiple experiments over time [...]