Great News!

A post on the blog, Resource Shelf, caught my attention this morning--"Webcast, Google's Vint Cerf Talks to Info Pros at Internet Library Conference." The Vice President of Google spoke at an Internet Library Conference and there is a link for the video on the page. Google has been the topic of discussion many days in my Reference course. So many people, including students, tend to go to google first when they need to find information, especially when they need to find it quickly. However, the problem is that generally, google comes back with way too many hits to really sort through, so it's not really faster to go to Google, unless you know what you are looking for.

Also, another post that caught my attention was the one titled, "University of Illinois Press Signs Agreement with JSTOR." The post talks about certain content fromUniversity of Illinois Press-published journals will be available on a re-designed JSTOR in 2011. The blog states, "This will offer faculty and students around the world access to current issues alongside back issues and a growing set of primary source materials from libraries easily and seamlessly. JSTOR’s nearly 6,000 library participants worldwide will be able to license the Press’s current journals, either individually or as part of current issue collections, together with JSTOR back issue collections in a single transaction." This is good news for users who like to use JSTOR for thier information needs; JSTOR is a fairly friendly bibliographic database to use and for there to be access to more information through JSTOR will make many users extremely happy.

Interesting library stuff

I found something interesting when I was sifting through blog posts on Bloglines. There was a blog posted under Library Stuff weblog that caught my attention, titled, "School chooses Kindle; are libraries for the history 'books'? The post was saying that schools are choosing to make their collection available on kindles and that a particular library in Massachusetts has noticed that only a small percentage of their collection was being checked out, making the decision to go digital quite easy. This caught my eye because just this semester in my Reference class, this very discussion arose. I think as a whole, the class decided that, while having things available electronically is nice and convienent, some still like to have the actual book in hand as they read rather than sitting at a computer or holding some other electronic device in thier hands while they read. I tend to agree, especially when it comes to long documents. I'd much rather have the actual item in my hands rather than try to read something electronically, especially when the reading requires quite a bit of time to finish.

Something else that caught my attention was a post discussing document rental online service for scientific, technical, and medical research. You pay a fee per article and you can have access to the articles through DeepDyve, sort of like what Netflix does with movie rentals. It sort of makes me wonder what will come out next as far as information technology is concerned.

Reading and posting blogs for SLIS S401 is not a new experience for me. I was required at least one other time to post to a blog for a course at IUPUI, though it was for an English course while I was an Undergrad. My feelings on blogs is that I am not really a fan of using them, though I know that there are others that do and use them quite frequently, especially the younger students--high school and 1st year college students. So, if libraries want to keep up with the times, keeping a blog would be a good idea, as long as someone keeps up with them. It is a good way to get information out to subscribers in a quick and rather orderly fashion. Sending out a mass e-mail may take time and that only works if the library has the patrons e-mail address. With a blog, it would be up to the user to gain access to the blog--which makes it easier on the library because all they have to do is type up the post and submit it.
The problem I have about blogs is finding things that are relevant. Some posts are just sort of random musings or go on for a long time. In my opinion, blogs should be kept as short as possible, depending on what is being blogged about.