In a post last week I mentioned my disappointment in being shut out of the Instruction Session’s discussion about teaching and outreach methods (two back-to-back sessions). No one in this jam-packed room was debating if information literacy was still relevant to the role of academic librarian or if there was still a need for library [...]

Fellow academic librarian blogger Jill Stover, of Thinking Outside The Book, shares some of her thoughts about the ongoing “simplicity vs. complexity” thread in a post titled “K.I.S.S“. After reviewing the business world’s current infatuation with simplicity as the new competitive advantage, she asks: “But is simplicity what librarianship is all about? Is our job [...]

Seems that misperceptions about what academic libraries contribute to their institution, and the need for librarians to lead them, are found in locations far beyond our own backyards. In this passionate editorial published in the Sierra Leone Awareness Times, Saa Mathias Bendu, a student at the Institute of Library, Information and Communication Studies (INSLICS) Fourah [...]

…in one basket without the risk of making a really big omelet. Interesting piece on fair use and the Google Book Search project over at Inside Higher Ed. While primarily about preserving fair use, it raises a very interesting debate: which is better (or worse), a single totalizing digital collection or a variety of separate, [...]

Jeffrey Young has a good article on the Open Content Alliance in the Chron this week. The selectivity of the digitization effort and the openness of the process is a contrast to the Google Book Search library project. So is the Alliance’s approach to the whole copyright question – they are not digitizing books that [...]