Records as Spoils of War

This is just depressing.
http://chronicle.com/free/2008/01/1335n.htm
The Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank associated with Stanford University
…signed a deal on Monday with the Iraq Memory Foundation—a private, nonprofit group that has had custody of the documents since just after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003—for the transfer of about seven million pages of records and other artifacts [...]

Enough already with the “boys left behind” shtick

Any of you in North America who work in public libraries, college libraries, schools, or who are raising kids have probably heard the refrain. I see it in the news all the time. I see it in our provincial library association’s children’s division newsletter. I see it in the flyers that are [...]

Library School and Information Ethics

An interest group within the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) has released a statement advocating for inclusion of courses on information ethics in all North American LIS curricula: http://www.libraryjuicepress.com/docs/iesig_statement.htm.
ALISE draws on ethics from the “universal core values” attributed to the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), as well as the [...]

CHN Part III – Petition Deadline

The Friends of CHN have put out the word that they are planning to ask the PM and Minister of Health to “have a heart” by delivering their petition to save the Canadian Health Network on Valentine’s Day, Feb 14.
The Conservative government has pulled the funding from the CHN as of March 31, 2008. [...]

Another one bites the dust: Publish & Perish

A press release from January 7 announced that Raincoast Publishing will soon bite the dust. Apparently this branch of Raincoast Books has been brought down by a stronger Canadian dollar (and the soon-in-sight end of the Harry Potter bonanza), they have decided to kill their publishing program in order for their wholesale/distributing business to stay [...]

Interface changes are stressful, kind of like dating

Like many of you out there, I am currently being forced to overcome my resistance to change and explore the new OvidSP interface (nice tutorial here). Argh! So, like some fellow health librarian bloggers I am putting my opinions out there. I’ll warn you now that some grouchiness ensues below…
First of all, [...]

Tagging in Archives

The U.S. Library of Congress’ new Flickr photo tagging effort The Commons is getting lots of attention from info studies folks and the wider blogosphere. The upload of historical photos owned by LC onto such a popular “Web 2.0″ site has generated talk about possibilities for incorporating user tags into library and archive collections. [...]

Neat, Free Tools for Info Professionals – and Others

As part of a small project I’m working on for the Council on Library and Information Resources, I’ve been evaluating online tools produced by “Digital Humanities Centers.” These are academic centers focused on bringing computing into humanities research.* The tools they’ve developed have a variety of primarily humanities research functions: 3d animation technology for virtually [...]

Freedom of expression lawsuit irony

I’m still planning to deliver a post talking more in depth about the freedom of expression claim CanWest Global is making in their DTCA lawsuit, as I promised here, but this week’s commencement of the British Columbia Supreme Court case in which Adbusters is suing Global Television, the CBC and the CRTC begs my attention.
Who?
[...]

Longwoods Press rolls out Open Access policy

Longwoods Press, publisher of Healthcare Quarterly/Longwoods Review , Nursing Leadership (CJNL) , Healthcare Policy / Politiques de Santé , World Health & Population now has an OA publishing option. I guess this is a super-soft launch of the policy, as there’s no note of it on their homepage, and the only people who seem [...]