Booklist Online: Book Reviews from the American Library Association

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 [...]

If you are busy with the hype of Halloween you may forget that Sunday morning, November 1 is when Daylight Saving Time ends.  webexhibits.org/daylightsaving has a detailed history of this event.  It explains why we change our clocks twice a year, with the rationale, opposition, obstacles and some interesting anecdotes.  There is also a world map showing when [...]

Dan Kraus, Booklist Associate Editor, Books for Youth, made this video for National Library Week last year. 

There’s a very active discussion going on right now on LIBREF-L regarding proper etiquette for a reference librarian. To find it, go to the archives and search for etiquette as a subject. The discussion started with a question from a LIS student about whether a librarian should get out from behind the desk and take a [...]

Featured as this month’s Reader’s Corner, the review for the 2nd edition of the Readers’ Advisory Guide to Genre Fiction appears in the October 15 Booklist.
As previously mentioned, this is a classic readers’ advisory and staff development tool and the 2nd edition has been eagerly awaited by librarians and educators.

Gale/Cengage announced today the launch of the digital Grzimek’s Animal Life Encyclopedia.  Grzimek’s covers over 4,000 species and includes thousands of images, maps, videos, audio clips, and links to articles and real-time web sites.  According to the press release, features of the newproduct include:
•    Articles written by scientists and subject experts, peer-reviewed by world-renowned authorities [...]

Selected Web Sites for Audio Books Readers’ Advisory
Audible, Inc. http://www.audible.com
A subsidiary of Amazon.com, Audible is a subscription service and the leading provider of spoken audio materials (books, newspaper, magazines, original work, radio and television programming). Works with Apple and Microsoft programs. Also available for use on Amazon Kindle. The complete catalog (over 60,000 [...]

Encyclopedia of Life was first funded by a MacArthur Foundation grant in 2007.  The goal of the site is to have a webpage for all 1.8 million organisms on earth.  After two years there are now more than 150,000 pages of  “expert-verified”  text and images.  A search for the domestic cat returned Felis catus Linnaeus,1758, accompanied by [...]

This week Goggle introduced Fast Flip which attempts to recreate print reading online.   Google has partnered with three dozen diverse publications including the Atlantic, New York Times, Cosmopolitan, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Post, Slate, Seventeen and Good Housekeeping .  The publications will get revenue from ads on the site which will hopefully help the struggling industry. Searching by key word, publication, [...]

I recieved so many wonderful responses from my post last week about my essential reference websites that I wanted to share them all.
Here the are the 4 favorite sites of Points of Reference Readers:
Mariann says: “As a law librarian, I love http://thomas.loc.gov/ and http://www.gpoaccess.gov/CFR/INDEX.HTML

Laura uses the free version of Hoover’s - http://www.hoovers.com/free/ and says it [...]

There are now a number of web sites that give information on flights so you (or your friends and relatives) can see where you or they have been.  These sites also provide departure and arrival times, weather conditions, and of course, delays.  Tracking flights has become an avocation for me and I have found that each site [...]

The Federal Citizen Information Center provides a number of useful publications including 66 Ways to Save Money.  It is a subject list of simple, common sense suggestions. Examples are #11 - “Don’t decide to lease a car just because the payments are lower than on a traditional auto loan.   The leasing payments are lower because you [...]

Recently I was doing research on the chef Thomas Keller and also wanted to know what farro and broccolini are.  Unknowingly I compared traditional reference sources to Wikipedia.  I began the search for Keller using Academic Search Complete and Lexis Nexis Academic.  Through these two subscription databases, I found reviews of his books and restaurants and an interview with Keller [...]

Atlas, the database of the collection of the Louvre is now in English as well as French.  The collection of 35,000 works of art may be searched by keyword, artist, title, technique, medium, department and even room.  For each work there is a high-resolution image, a description and the location of the work in the Louvre.  A [...]

The first time I taught the required introductory course on reference and information services I only briefly mentioned library instruction and information literacy.  In hindsight, this felt this was a serious oversight as instruction had always been a large and important of my work as a reference librarian.  Now I’ve added an assignment and class [...]

govfresh.com is a commerical web site that was launched on May Day 2009. It aggregates all US Government news feeds through various social media outlets including Flickr, Twitter and YouTube.  The feeds include news from the White House and US departments, agencies and the military.  Congress and the Supreme Court are not official feeds since they come through Twitter and RSS [...]

This morning in the McCormick Center RBB hosted a lively and informative program, “Rethinking the Reference Collection,” in a packed room in the new West wing of the convention center.  Dave Tyckoson, head of reference services from Fresno State spoke from the academic libraries viewpoint; Barbara Bibel, reference librarian from Oakland Public Library spoke from [...]

You can usually find a particular recipe by googling it, but cookstr.com provides a weekly newsletter with recipes specific to the week.  The current newsletter provides “Ten Dishes for the 4th of July.”  The recipes are from chefs and authors of cookbooks and include Marcella Hazan’s Grilled Bread with Olive Oil, Garlic, and Tomato, Steven Raichlen’s Mango Grilled [...]

Questions keep us in business.  I am sure that most of us became reference librarians because we love looking for answers. We would be excellent detectives if we ever decide to change careers. Our patrons expect us to find the answers and even hope that we will do their assignments, but there are some questions [...]