Just as the virtual library is an enhancement and not a replacement of the physical library, so too the in-person conference is supplemented and not replaced by technology. This is the first ALA Annual Conference I won’t be attending in a while. I’m glad I’ll be able to keep up through blogs and wikis, but [...]

Have you given much thought recently to the amount of data your researchers generate? Probably not. Where’s it going and who’s archiving it? Thanks to digital technology, scientists are generating vast amounts of valuable data that, months later, may be irretrievable or indecipherable. This could be a job for the academic library. This week’s Chronicle [...]

Does it seem like the traditional (18-22) students showing up at your college or university are behaving more rudely than past generations of students? If you said yes it’s not necessarily an indicator that you are getting more crotchety. It appears there really is some truth to the notion that incoming students are more rude [...]

What Should We Call Them? Every academic librarian has their own personal preference for what to call them. At a library I once worked at one of the other librarians called them “readers.” Well, readers is probably less descriptive of the people who come into our libraries these days – it may have worked well [...]

Kate Wittenberg, Director of the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia, has an essay in the Chronicle Review urging scholars and their publishers to think about the implications of social networking software and student preferences when planning for the future. She thinks scholarly publishers need to stop spending their energies fighting the threat of losing control [...]