Booklist Online: More than 130,000 book reviews for librarians, book groups, and book lovers - from the trusted experts at the American Library Association

I just returned from the Medical Library Association's annual conference in Minneapolis. Among the highlights was the celebration of the National Library of Medicine's 175th birthday, complete with a cake in the shape of the building. It seems fitting to share this library's wonderful digital collections, which reside at . These include Medicine in the [...]

An agreement between EBSCO and the National Library of the Czech Republic brings metadata from the Manuscriptorium Project to EBSCO Discovery Service. The Manuscriptorium--the European Digital Library of Written Cultural Heritage--contains more than five million digital images of manuscripts, incunabula, early print books, maps, deeds, charters and other pre-1800 resources held in libraries throughout Europe. Click here for the press [...]

Memorial Day weekend is traditional the beginning of summer vacations.  Gas prices are not declining significantly so the GasBuddy app will be useful for driving vacations as well as for traveling to work.   It is a companion to the web site GasBuddy.com which provides additional information including cities where gas is the cheapest and [...]

The New York Public Library is celebrating a centennial. The main branch (now called the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building) first opened it doors on May 23, 1911. Click here for the New York Times story, and here for a story from msnbc.

Check out the the new Mansueto Library at the University of Chicago. It's good to know the library includes space for actual books (albeit in the basement).

Gale and Library Media Connection are looking for submissions for the 2011 TEAMS Award--Teachers and Media Specialists Influencing Student Achievement. Gale, part of Cengage Learning, and Library Media Connection magazine are calling all media specialists and educators at K-12 public and private schools in the U.S. and Canada to share their collaboration success stories and submit [...]

Bowker has released its annual book production report. This is from the press release: Bowker, the global leader in bibliographic information, released its annual report on U.S. print book publishing, compiled from its Books In Print database. Based on preliminary figures from U.S. publishers, Bowker is projecting that despite the popularity of e-books, traditional U.S. [...]

This just in from SAGE: SAGE recently published its first articles in SAGE Open, the only broad-based open access journal featuring content from the social and behavioral sciences and the humanities. SAGE Open supports the growing number of authors who require their articles to be freely available on publication, either because of personal preference or because [...]

Last week the Library of Congress launched National Jukebox which contains more than 10,000 free historical recordings for streaming only and not available for downloads.  The first recordings are from 1901-1925 and were recorded by the Victor Talking Machine Company now owned by Sony. Searching for recordings is by title, artist, genre, place of recording [...]

Last week I moderated the latest in Booklist's series of reference-related webinars. This one was called "It's All about the Student: How Students Learn and How Online Reference Sources Help." If you weren't able to join us, you can click here to watch the video archive.

May is Jewish Heritage Month. Last week we commemorated the Holocaust on Yom Ha-Shoah and on Monday we celebrated the birth of the state of Israel on Yom Hatzmaut. It seems fitting to note two new relevant websites. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Ancestry.com have announced the launch of The World Memory Project [...]

Got apps? EBSCO Publishing does. They just released one that is available free from the iTunes App Store and provides easy authentication for users via a library's EBSCOhost profile. Here's the information they sent me: The iPhone app introduces new features including the ability to view content in visual landscape mode and the option to [...]

I recently made a two-week visit to The Netherlands and Belgium and came home wanting to know more about many of the things I saw and sampled  Here are a few of the web sites I've since found to satisfy my curiosity.  Essential Vermeer The Hague Justice Portal Anne Frank Rembrandt van Rijn Dutch Royal House CODART: Dutch and Flemish [...]

Perhaps librarians forget that web sites of magazines may be a good source for information without having to subscribe to either the print or online version.  TheAtlantic.com is a good example.  In addition to having articles from the current issue they have daily articles written by columnists and editors of the magazine.  Yesterday there were [...]

They may not be contagious, but noncommunicable diseases kill tens of millions of people all over the world each year. The incidence of cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other conditions caused by poor nutrition, tobacco use, alcohol abuse, and physical inactivity continues to rise. The World Health Organization has issued a new report "Global Status [...]

Those who enjoy reading mystery fiction will find much to enjoy on the web as well. Here are a few mystery-related sites for readers and for librarians involved in readers’-advisory service. Dorothy L This is one of the oldest mystery lover’s sites, founded by a group of ACRL members in 1991. It is a discussion [...]

Those of us  that were librarians in the early nineties remember the excitement of Encarta, the CD-ROM encyclopedia produced by Microsoft.  Now less than  twenty years later technology has progressed to the online encyclopedia. Wikipedia appeared in 2001 and many librarians (myself included), were skeptical.  How could a free online encyclopedia be written by anyone [...]