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With Thanksgiving and Black Friday in the past, it is definitely time to start thinking about shopping for the holidays. consumersearch.com will help.  Owned by the New York Times and part of About.Com, the mission of consumersearch.com is to help consumers make intelligent purchases.  It is similar to Consumer Reports (by subscription in print and online), starting with a [...]

I worked at The Chicago Public Library for almost 20 years, so I was interested to stumble across the fact that Digital Collections at The Chicago Public Library is one of OCLC’s CONTENTdm Featured Collections for November. CONTENTdm was new to me until I went to the OCLC site and learned more about it. In a nutshell,   [...]

It’s almost Thanksgiving, so everyone is cooking turkey or tofurky. Kids have to do reports about what was served at the first Thanksgiving dinner and someone lost Grandma’s recipe for sweet potato pie. Working the desk can make you hungry these days! The gorgeous new Larousse Gastrnomique and the ever faithful Joy of Cooking will [...]

This month’s (11/15) issue of Library Journal features a Reference Bestellers list.  Many of the titles will not surprise librarians, as many of the top spots are claimed by perenial ready reference favorites of dictionaries and fact books.  And least surprising of all to this former academic librarian is that the MLA handbook claims the [...]

A recent article in The Chicago Tribune about how traditional maps have been vanishing from classrooms got me thinking about one of the staples of the print reference collection, the atlas. While print dictionaries and encyclopedias have crumbled under the onslaught of digitization, it has taken awhile for the atlas to be replaced by online sources, partly because [...]

Following Oxford‘s recent announcement of its Word of the Year (unfriend),  Merriam-Webster has revealed it own WOTY, which is based on actual lookups in the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary and Online Thesaurus.  The word that received “the highest intensity of searches over the shortest period of time” is admonish.  Among other words in the top 10 [...]

With Thanksgiving looming on the horizon and the first of several upcoming holidays, here is an overview of several sources for cooking help and inspiration. New York Times food writer Mark Bittman covers 101 Head Starts on the Day, a cornucopia of ideas for getting ahead. Epicurious, one of the web’s premier food and recipe [...]

Whenever I see cool products for children and young adults, I’m always envious of the librarians and teachers who get to work with these tools.  What’s gotten my envy this time is World Book’s new product, Dramatic Learning.  It is a classroom tool to help with reading fluency and comprehension, based on play scripts, skits, [...]

I discovered Epicurious.com in the late 90′s when I was preparing for a class and looking for examples of reference books on the web.  Much to my surprise, Sharon Herbst’s then new edition of  The Food Lover’s Companion  (1995) was part of the site.  Well, it is still there but there is much more.  If you are cooking [...]

As more people turn to the Web to find health and medical information, a new ailment has emerged: Cyberchondria. An article in the Washington Post on November 10th defined this condition as “baseless fueling of fears and anxiety about common health symptoms due to Internet research, or …Googling oneself into a state of absolute clinical [...]

The New Oxford American Dictionary has announced its Word of the Year: unfriend.  Also announced were 2009′s Notable Word Clusters, the majority of which have to do with President Obama: Obamanomics, Obamanation, etc.  Although there were Word of the Year contenders from the economy (freemium, for example), politics (death panel) and other categories, Oxford seems to draw most of [...]

For those of you who, like me, didn’t make it to the Charleston Conference this year, here’s a video of R. David Lankes’ presentation on the future of librarianship. Links to other videos from the 2009 conference are here.

This winter I’ll be starting up the first ever book club at my local public library. As a veteran book club member I’m excited about starting a new group and getting to meet some fellow readers. But the librarians here have never done a book group and have lots of questions and I’d like to [...]

With some of the busiest travel days coming in less than two weeks, flightarrivals.com is another way to find out if a flight is on time.  (See also HelloFlight.com.)  Flightarrivals does not track flights on a map but does supply other useful information.  The main page gives a number of options – search for arrivals, departures, delays, airport [...]

Alexander Street Press has been producing outstanding research databases for years. Most of them are best suited for academic libraries (or large public libraries with research collections), but some of Alexander Street’s newer databases would be great resources for high-school students and a more general library clientele. One example is American History in Video, a collection of archival films [...]

Those of you who subscribe to Credo Reference can now purchase nearly 70  SAGE Reference titles in your subscription.  The titles look great and include the very popular Ency. of Global Warming, Ency. of Disability, and the Ency. of Counseling. In the Credo Reference press release, John Dove, Credo President said “Librarians have long called [...]

Ths week, EBSCO Publishing and Alexander Street Press both announced that they are going mobile for patrons of subscribing libraries EBSCO has released EBSCOhost Mobile, allowing people to search EBSCOhost databases using smartphones and other handheld devices. Features include search modes, full text limiting, and date ranges,  plus limiting by peer-reviewed content or publication. Scrollable results lists have citations, Image [...]

We have all had patrons who are reluctant to tell us what they really want to know. They begin with a vague question such as, “Do you have anything about diseases?” When you begin a reference interview, they get impatient or even hostile, so you explain that you are asking because you want to find [...]

Oxford Handbooks Online launched in November, bringing over 65 handbooks to the platform.  The handbook series provides scholarly articles and chapters on a wide range of topics.  At site launch, business/management, philosophy, religion, and political science handbooks were online, with plans to add over 8 new topic areas between 2011 and 2013. The platform provides [...]

When someone like Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, makes predictions about what the Web will look in five years, it’s worth our attention. Schmidt delivered his prognostications at last month’s Gartner Symposium/ITxpo (“the world’s most important gathering of CIOs and senior IT executives”). Among them: in five years most of the content on the Web will [...]