Tales of a Librarian

Hi there, it seems it has almost been a week since my last post - that would have been unheard of back in January when I started the blog so I hope that I am not falling into the track of gradually forgetting about it, as I still think it is a really great way to put all my thoughts about my work and stuff together in one place.

I have been adding to my list of rss feeds almost daily - there always seems to be new ones i have not heard of popping up in various posts. The best ones I have recently discovered so far include Caveat Lector and Info Career Trends. The former is written by one librarian/information professional/self-confessed geek about various aspects of her work - it’s really interesting and her writing style is very entertaining! Indeed, her post on Google books was unlike anything I’ve seen anywhere else (in a good way, of course!). The latter feed is from an online journal which publishes relatively short articles by practicing librarian on a whole host of career related issues. One particular post that caught my attention was written by a librarian who used to be a bookseller, and she was discussing the various positive influences that the retail service side of her previous job had upon her work as a librarian (see ‘Confessions of a Reformed Bookseller‘). All very relevant and interesting stuff.

Walt Crawford released the March edition of his Cites and Insights online journal, in which the main article was a piece discussing the notion of ‘folksonomies’ and whether they should be used in place of tradition cataloguing (OR) or along side (AND). He of course, was fighting the corner of the AND people, which is something that I also agree with. I quite enjoy putting my own invented tags on things like these blog entries, technorati and del.icio.us but it is constantly on my mind to make them relevant, accurate descriptions and to try and be consistent throughout. Scanning various people’s tags on del.icio.us shows that most people generally just use a tag once, and they are highly personal and there is no linking related terms in any way. It’s just no use for proper searching and retrieval. But for fun, for sharing and so forth, well, I’m confident that it is fairly acceptable (although work to improve it wouldn’t go amiss). You can’t really imagine someone sitting down with AACR2 guidelines to fully catalogue their bookmarks can you? Bit too much effort, even for me and I LOVE to organise things… The paper is well worth a read. And Mr Crawford also makes reference to another paper discussing the whole folksomony debate from Guy and Tonkin (2005) ‘Folksonomies: Tidying up Tags‘, in DLib Magazine, which is also worth a read.

Technorati Tags: blogs, rss, folksonomies

I’m absolutely gutted… I can’t access the Emerald journals any longer - not sure why I could in the first place but now it seems as if my magical access has gone. Sigh. How I long for those articles of scholarly goodness. Hmmm, now where am I going to get all of my professional readings for chartership from? Help!

Technorati Tags: articles, access, distress

The Spoken Word Matters blog yesterday pointed to the University of Liverpool library webpages, which is advising students of the benefits of subscribing to rss feeds of table of contents of their favourite journals (see page). They also provide information on installing an rss reader and a list of journals that currently have rss feeds. This is very similar in to the JISC-funded TOCRoSS project that I discussed last week (see post), however, in this instance the library itself does not appear to have been involved in the development of the feeds, simply the sourcing of those which are available and the promotion of the benefits of these to students. This will no doubt become increasingly useful as more and more ejournals distribute their ToCs by RSS. Currently I have only found one ‘academic’ publication (i.e. those expensive peer-reviewed ones!!) to which I have access that allows RSS feeds (the Journal of Information Science) and a couple of other electronic-only publications such as Ariadne and D-Lib magazine. I’m sure, however, that eventually, organisations such as Emerald etc. will develop RSS feeds as part of their subscription service for all their publications (eventually!). In the meantime, I think that the way in which the University of Liverpool is utlising the facilities that are already on offer and promoting them to students in this way is a really effective (and cost-effective!) method of increasing the usability and accessibility of their electronic collection.

Technorati Tags: rss, cataloguing, catalogues, table of contents, library, opac

A research paper by Rowlands and Nicholas (2005) has found that academics now place very considerable reliance on a wide variety of electronic resources for finding relevant journal articles. Google and other search engines were the fourth and fifth (respectively) most depended upon sources of this information. And whilst chasing up references in papers remained the most depended upon method of finding other relevant articles, the library was rated in 11th position out of a possible 12!.

They reflect that “the convenience and speed of electronic tools was highly appreciated but the role and importance of the physical library merits serious reflection… Clearly, libraries need to consider their position/visability in a digital world where their users are removed from them and not even conscious they are the ones who pay the access bills. We have found in our log studies that usage depends highly on visability and libraries are facing real problems maintaining their visability in an increasingly digital world”

[Source: Rowlands, I. & Nicholas, R. (2005) Scholarly Communication in the Digital Environment: The 2005 Survey of Journal Author Behaviour and Attitudes, Aslib Proceedings, 57 (6), pp481-497]