Good Luck, Mr. Weiss!
Stephen C. Weiss, documents librarian at Utah State University Library announced his retirement in a June 13, 2007 govdoc-l posting. Bernadine Abbott Hoduski, someone I consider to be the institutional memory for the profession of documents librarianship had this praise in a govdoc-l post of her own:
Steve is a truly dedicated, courageous documents librarian. He has taken on many a government agency to persuade them to send their publications to depository libraries. He helped build one of the finest documents collections in the country. Thanks for your lifetime of work Steve.Indeed, FGI thanks you as well for your life of service. And we're glad to hear that you will keep up with Internet Quick Reference. Continue reading
Open WorldCat Lists – What are implications?
I'm likely the last to know, but in case I'm not: Open WorldCat lets registered users build lists that can be shared with anyone on the Internet. The lists can have notes. See an example I created at http://www.worldcat.org/profiles/dcornwall/lists/204 on tidal power in Alaska. This looks like a great way to build bibliographies intended to be shared with wide audiences from many institutions. I could see it being helpful in government documents or state depository programs. Do you see any use for it? If so, what? Continue reading
What some documents librarians are tagging
Because we've become aware of state and federal depository libraries tagging government information resources, we've started a new library page to show the latest three items some institutions are tagging. You can find the page through our library or by going to http://freegovinfo.info/node/1255. If you know of government documents libraries or individual librarians tagging government resources on del.icio.us or somewhere else, please let us know and we'll add them to our list. Continue reading
What Some Documents Librarians are Tagging
Government Documents Librarians and some depositories are starting to use the del.icio.us tagging service to highlight resources and quickly build lists of annotated resources. Below are some highlights from librarians and libraries we know are tagging federal and state resources on delicious or other social tagging services. If you know of others, please send them our way! What are Documents Librarians Tagging?
- Alaska Agency Databases
- Government Publications Library University of Colorado at Boulder
- McNeese Library Government Documents Department
Google mashup: books and maps
According to AllPoints Blog, there will soon be connections between Google Books, Google Earth and Google Maps.
Google has posted locations found in some texts (Michael Jones' demo at the New York State Geospatial Summit showed only publicly available ones) to Google Earth. When you click on a placemark you jump to the book's page and to the exact page on which the location information was found. And you get a Google Map of all the places mentioned in the book.Here are 2 examples. Scroll to the bottom of the book's "about" page, and you'll see a google map of every place mentioned! This is definitely an indicator of where the net is going. As David Weinberger posits (and I'm seriously paraphrasing!), in his new book, Everything is Miscellaneous, the seemingly paradoxical idea of opening up or giving away your library's metadata to the world is what will drive users to your library. Continue reading