LISNews Librarian And Information Science News

Cites & Insights 8:5, May 2008, is now available for downloading.

This 28-page issue (PDF as usual, but each essay is also available in HTML form) includes:

• Bibs & Blather: One Book at a Time - A year's experience with self-publishing.
• Perspective: Offtopic or Not? Mill Creek & Libraries - Do 50-movie (and 100-movie and 250-movie!) packs make sense for public libraries?
• Making it Work Perspective: Changes in Liblogs: Slouching Toward a Study - How have 227 liblogs changed between 2005/2006 and 2007? Notes toward a possible study of 500+ blogs.
• Net Media Perspective: Citizendium and the Writer's Voice - Notes on Citizendium and how it's developing--and why I disagree with one fundamental tenet of both Wikipedia and Citizendium.
• Offtopic Perspective: 50 Movie Hollywood Legends, Part 1 - From the sublime to the ridiculous, from Good News to The Fat Spy, two dozen movies with big-name stars.
• Retrospective: Pointing with Pride, Part 1 - Looking back at "the 1s"--the first, 11th...91st issues of C&I.

An exhibit highlighting the rising cost of library journal subscriptions to support faculty and student research. The Cornell Libraries subscribe to over 60,000 journals in paper or electronic form. Five years ago the most expensive engineering-related journals cost $4,000 to $12,000. Now prices reach $18,000.

To get a better sense of what this much money is worth, please Enter the Exhibit!

Sticker Shock 2 (2007) updates the original 2002 Sticker Shock display.

Eric Lease Morgan sent out word that issue #2 of the Code4Lib Journal is out!

http://journal.code4lib.org/

Each article in this issue has a little bit of something for all who call themselves a librarian or work in a library. Each identifies some sort of library problem to be addressed, and offers one or more solutions.

For those of us who enjoy cataloging and metadata issues, Jonathan Gorman outlines how he modified VUFind to exploit Wikipedia and cataloging authority records to enhance information about authors in a library catalog. Chris Freeland, Martin Kalfatovic, Jay Paige, and Marc Crozier illustrate a different use of Library of Congress Subject Headings by integrating place names with Google Maps. Carol Jean Godby, Devon Smith and Eric Childress describe a technique for crosswalking just about any metadata format into just about any other metadata format.

Rachel Singer Gordon has a really thoughtfully written post about the title "librarian" and those with and without the MLS who use it.

Check out the comments too, a couple of interesting responses.

Cites & Insights 8:4, April 2008, is now available for downloading.

The 28-page issue is PDF as usual (or not as usual--I'm now using Word 2007 and Microsoft's free PDF-output download), but HTML separates are available from the C&I homepage

The issue includes:

• Bibs & Blather - a very short introduction to the issue and what got left out.
• Library Access to Scholarship - Harvard and Institutional Repositories
• Old Media/New Media Perspective: Thinking About Kindle and Ebooks
• Making it Work Perspective: TechNos and TechMusts

By the way, if you know anyone who's been getting issue alerts via email, let them know they need to sign up for C&I Updates or Walt at Random; Topica no longer accepts my posts (and entirely lacks help/contact info).

The Marginal Revolution Blog Says the partial monopolization of for-fee journals makes it possible to produce status returns to motivate both editors and referees. Returning to the free setting, refereeing will survive insofar as writing detailed referee comments on other people's work helps with your own research; it is interesting to ponder in which fields this might hold.

Abandoning Print, Not Peer Review: A recent announcement out of Indiana hasn’t received the same attention, but may represent a larger challenge in the end to the traditional model of scholarly publishing, which has evolved to a system with expensive print and online publications and limited access for readers. A professor at Indiana University who is editor of an anthropology journal published traditionally has started a new journal — online and free — using tools made available by the library. After a one-year experiment, the journal is now officially launched and is already attracting many more readers than the establishment print model ever did.

The chief of the Iraqi Journalists' Union Shihab al-Timimi died on Wed. after being fired upon by gunmen.

Through a partnership that marks a turning point in scholarly publishing at Indiana University, Ruth Lilly Dean of University Libraries Patricia Steele announced today (Feb. 21) the publication of Museum Anthropology Review, the first faculty-generated electronic journal supported by the IU Bloomington Libraries.

Cites & Insights 8:3 (March 2008) is now available.

This is the centenary issue--#100--a nice round number that I'm a little
surprised to have achieved. Naturally, that milestone affects the issue--but not as you might expect.

The issue's long--36 pages--and PDF as usual, although all but the last section (My Back Pages, always exclusively PDF) are also available in HTML form from the home page.

This issue includes:

• 100 Reasons for Doing Cites & Insights - an introduction
• Trends & Quick Takes - ink costs, life without software, the significance of good sound and more: six trends, ten quicker takes.
• Perspective: Tracking High-Def Discs - including a prediction for the
  likely winner in the format war.
• Making it Work - the biggie: 19 pages devoted to aspects of making libraries better, including reading (reader's advisory, slow reading, etc.), philosophy, hassles, balance, and "Library 2.0 debased."
• Interesting & Peculiar Products - flashy labels, green PCs, supercheap laptops and more: 19 items in all.
• My Back Pages - 16 mini-perspectives, none of them terribly serious.