Booklist Online: Book Reviews from the American Library Association

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

According to a survey conducted by the Pew Internet Project in 2007,  “62% of adult Americans have either accessed the internet with a wireless connection away from home or work or used a non-voice data application using their cell phone or PDA.”  Non-voice data applications include not only texting, e-mailing, taking a picture, and recording a video, but also [...]

Libraries using the wholesaler Baker and Taylor may now purchase eBook titles from Gale through B & T’s Title Source 3 ordering system .  B & T and Gale/Cengage announced today the new partnership.  Nearly 3000 GVRL titles, the Lit Crit series, and titles in Gale’s Directory Library may all be ordered.  This is a [...]

Our main library used to have four reference desks: science/business/social science/documents; art and music; history and literature; and periodicals. As the budget cuts came, the number diminished and we now have only one. There is still a separate desk for periodicals and the local history room still exists. A single desk means that all of [...]

People come into the library in search of information about anything that one can imagine. Often what they really want is advice. Of course as librarians, we cannot always provide it. This can be especially tricky when a patron wants medical, legal, or financial information. They want to know whether they should take a medication [...]

The P (print) vs. E (electronic) debate started with reference publishing, and for the past decade or so anyone  involved in publishing, writing about, and using reference sources has had to navigate a whole new territory. It’s been exciting to get immersed in this alternate universe, but at the same time I confess I’ve envied my colleagues here at Booklist who [...]

Today I was browsing through Janet Clarkson’s Menus from History, a fun two-volume reference set from Greenwood that offers, among other interesting bits of culinary lore (menus for a Medici wedding feast in 1368 and lunch on the inaugural flight of the Concorde in 1976; Pat Nixon’s meatloaf recipe) the bill of fare for an American [...]

Does correct English usage matter anymore? There’s plenty of evidence that no one cares, but for those of us who do, there’s the third edition of Bryan Garner’s Garner’s Modern American Usage.  When Garner’s was first published in 1998 it quickly became a standard guide, and the new edition continues to man the barricades against assaults on good grammar, word choice, [...]

October is both Medical Librarians’ Month and Health Literacy Month. The two are closely related. Health literacy is the ability to understand basic information about the body and health care, allowing a person to participate in his/her health care. The lack of health literacy skills is a major problem, leading to complications when patients do [...]

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 [...]

With the news that President Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, many people will have questions about the prize.  nobelpeaceprize.org is a good place to start.  The site describes the prize, who may nominate, prize laureates and the Nobel Institute.  It also provides a short biography about Alfred Nobel, the founder of the [...]