I get to see a lot of new books about library / information science: part of the perks of being a journal editor, and part of the penance of being a postgraduate course tutor. Some are good, a few are very good, a few are bad, most are ordinary. Just occasionally a strikingly unusal one… Continue reading The library at night
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Dark Side: is the news fit to print ?
I wrote a while ago about our new paper on the dark side of information: information overload, information anxiety, information avoidance and the like. Subsequently, the University's press office picked this up as something likely to have mass appeal, and a short piece has appeared in the University newsletter. The process by which this appeared… Continue reading Dark Side: is the news fit to print ?
Emerald editors
Last Friday I went to a editor day at Emerald Publishing; one of the few perks of the job that I get for editing the Journal of Documentation. I'm not sure what the collective noun for editors is, but there were certainly a lot of us there; more from Emerald's business and management journals than… Continue reading Emerald editors
Eating in the Library
We have become used to the idea that libraries of all kinds are adding on coffee shops and the like, and no longer necessarily barring food and drink being brought in. This increasing linkage between food and libraries seems to be taken a stage further in London, where a number of former libraries are being… Continue reading Eating in the Library
Libraries and the law: show-down in Wirral
I have been following with interest the furore following Wirral council's decision to close half its public library branches, and to transform the remainder into multi-purpose centres. This is not just because I come from this part of North-West England, but also because the issues have led to a new form of intervention from the… Continue reading Libraries and the law: show-down in Wirral
The attraction of lost libraries
Sometimes it seems that libraries are at their most alluring when they are lost forever, or even when they never existed. Jorges Luis Borges' infinite library is surely the best known of his many imaginative creations, while Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night devotes a good few pages to libraries which are no more, or… Continue reading The attraction of lost libraries
Is our worth the only thing of value ?
I presented a one-day training course earlier this week for Aslib, the London-based Association for Information Management. I present a few professional development courses for them, and this was a new one, run for the first time. Called Assessing our Worth, it looks at ways of measuring the impact and value of library / information… Continue reading Is our worth the only thing of value ?
Keitai and novel, medium and message
In my last post about browsing arXiv on the iPhone, I mused about the use of mobile devices for information access. By the sort of happy coincidence which afflicts the blogger, the following day's London Metro free paper carried an article about novels written for the mobile phone. The keitai shousetsu, as moblie phone novels… Continue reading Keitai and novel, medium and message
Of Archives and iPhones
A new posting on Gerry MacKiernan's Mobile Libraries blog tells us about a new application for Apple iPhone. We can now search and display recent additions to the arXiv repository of preprints in the physical sciences. A clever, and logical enough no doubt, development in the trend towards mobile information. And something more for me… Continue reading Of Archives and iPhones
On Space and Time, a bit informationally
A very nice new book On Space and Time, edited by Shahn Majid (Cambridge University Press), gives accounts of the current state of play in fundamental physics. Six authors, including a philosopher and a theologian as well as the expected physics/cosmology/mathematics representatives, give personal accounts of their take on the developing frontiers. Not very much,… Continue reading On Space and Time, a bit informationally
The Occasional Informationist 