JOHN MEIER: November 2007 Archives

Academic Subject Guides: A Case Study of Use at San Jose State University Shannon M. Stately was a good read and well summarized by the abstract (link above). Though the results first seemed a death knell for Subject Guides, the Online Articles & Databases pages as well as E-Journals and Web Site Search Engines were familiar to over 50% of most students. The data was from Nursing, Journalism, and Organization & Management students, primarily undergraduate upperclassmen. Best point: Library instruction leads to greater subject guide use.

Analysis of a Decade of Library Literature Kelly Blessinger and Michele Frasier will be primarily useful when deciding what journals to browse or where to submit those pre-tenure papers, but isn't really a revelation about the subjects of contemporary library literature.

The book reviews were pretty good, I am now aware of a pretty significant book on The Economics of Attention

There is a new website (web 2.0 tool) called Liszen Trends that facilitates posting of library news (mostly via blogs) and voting less than 24 hours after I wished for a digg-like tool for library literature. So I didn't quite get my wish, since the topics sometimes discuss professional books but that is a review ON a blog.

What I want is to be able to tag and vote on both the Old Literature and the New since both are information sources for professionals and, believe it or not, the Old has good stuffs.

The final slides from the presentation at Internet Librarian on RSS Beth and I gave can be found on Slideshare.

Someone asked a follow up question about email delivery of RSS feeds. I see that Mozilla's Thunderbird as well as the latest Microsoft Outlook have RSS reading capability, so email readers do this as well as the idea of third party software to send RSS feeds as regular email.