and the Librarian Clue by Four of the Day Award goes to:

Chris Anderson, author of Free and The Long Tail and editor in chief of Wired.

Plagiarism? Lame.
Plagiarizing from Wikipedia, which openly grants re-use of its content as long as you follow straightforward Creative Commons licensing rules? Lamer.
Using this as your defense: "All those are my screwups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources..."

That's beyond lame and into actively stupid. There does not EXIST a recognized citation format that DOESN'T address web sources; if the Modern Language Association has taken to assuming online as the default (which it has) then there really is no excuse.

(Okay, "good" is subjective. But good god, man. The citation formats for web sources are no more egregious than those for print. If you can do one, you can do the other.)

(On the upside, this'll make a great object lesson in library instruction sessions for freshman writing seminars.)

newsbit: Zotero suit dismissed

As per this post from one of the project's directors. Excellent news!

Badda-bing!: an experiment

A friend of mine in the dev biz has done some quick-n-dirty comparisons between Google and Bing (Microsoft's LiveSearch, re-branded and apparently substantially redeveloped as well) and been surprised by the results--in Bing's favor.

So much so, that he's switching to Bing for a week to see if the bloom on the rose lasts. I think I might give that a try, too. As he says, no matter how much we might love Google, competition is healthy and ensures a robust ecosystem.

Aesthetically, I'm not sure that I'm crazy about the background image, even with the embedded links. It does save the page from basically looking like Google with a different logo on it, though.

Notes on the invisible library

One of the things I think about a lot is how the library is changing as the physical facility decouples from the collections it has traditionally housed. In my own personal taxonomy these thoughts group under the heading "Invisible Library", largely because I occasionally encounter students who use the library without knowing it--discovering a journal we subscribe to while using Google, for example. I gave a presentation on campus around this topic last fall and one thing that came very clear to me is that, somehow, we have to stop treating our digital resources in a way equivalent to our physical resources. Publishers do this, but libraries do, too, and it's in danger of killing us.

An article in the latest Journal of Academic Librarianship addresses this issue, adding a third dimension: namely, the people providing library services. It also highlights the phenomenon I mention: patrons can discover library resources through avenues other than the library, and often do. (This is one reason why it would be really nice to somehow handle library patron authentication at the vendor's end, rather than the library's. If there's a nice big banner across the top of the e-journal index page that says "SUBSCRIPTION PROVIDED BY PACIFIC LUTHERAN UNIVERSITY", does it matter whether they got there through the library website or through Google? I submit that it does not.)

A lot of what it talks about here--transformation of library space, digitization of information resource, and a service emphasis on outreach, information literacy, and value-added technology--is already happening; according to long-range plans at some institutions, by fits and starts at others. Some of the technological dimension was addressed in my MLIS program, especially the information architecture side, and some of the Web development and resource management components. But much more, such as data mining, scripting, and technology-dependent aspects of information use (I've been asked how to make charts in Excel so many times in the past month that I've lost count) was not.

The article makes it sound like MLIS programs should become computer science lite degrees, and I'm not entirely convinced that they shouldn't. I love our IT crew, but if certain parts of what we do pass into their domain, it'll be frustrating for them, tragic for us, and a loss to the institution as a whole.

And the MPAA continues its slide into irrelevance

MPAA says teachers should videotape monitors, not rip DVDs.

I think they're actually serious.

Are you following the Elsevier thing? You should.

To bring you up to speed:

Ghost Management: How Much of the Medical Literature Is Shaped Behind the Scenes by the Pharmaceutical Industry?

Merck’s Ghostwriters, Haunted Papers and Fake Elsevier Journals

Heuristics and Wikipedia — not directly related, but relevant. Besides, Caveat Lector is awesome.

Dear LITA:

I just added you to my ALA membership renewal for the first time last month. For, I might add, a pretty penny. (Although ALA's maddeningly useless membership renewal confirmation does not tell me how much I actually paid for the package deal. Dear ALA: some of us itemize our tax returns. What kind of receipt doesn't include an amount paid?)

So, when the very first bit of communication I receive from you is, first of all, close to a month later, and secondly, includes "Former ALA member ID" in the header, and thirdly, is a solicitation for me to RE-JOIN a division I joined FOR THE FIRST TIME less than four weeks ago, it doesn't fill me with confidence.

THIS is the ALA division chiefly concerned with technology in libraries?

I'm still waiting to be impressed.