Booklist Online: Book Reviews from the American Library Association

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: Obamanimics, 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 its winners [...]

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 [...]

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 for [...]

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 Quick [...]

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 cross [...]

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 [...]

Now that the government is assuring us that the recession in ending,  more people may be interested in getting back in the stock market.  My financial advisor recommends YahooFinance.com as a great site to get concise information on a stock and check quotes.  Yahoo!Finance is also available as a free app for the IPhone.  The [...]

Last night I was visiting with the librarians at my public library discussing some ideas for a new bookgroup when a boy came up to the desk and said, “Can you suggest any good books?” I knew they did a lot of readers’ advisory at the library but I had never before heard a [...]

My beloved canine companion died in August at the age of 16 and my house is too quiet. The quest for a new furry friend is in fact a search.  Visits to local shelters were depressing and unsatisfactory. Since they were full of Pitbulls and Chihuahuas, I knew that I needed a new strategy. The [...]

I heard an interesting story about climate change on NPR a few weeks ago. A British team is looking through Royal Navy logbooks in order to track climate change over the past 200 or 300 years. The logbooks, along with the meteorological registers of British colonies, contain valuable weather data, but most of them have been lying untouched in archives for years. CORRAL (UK [...]