Points Of Reference

Web Site of the Week: YahooFinance

chris — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:47:59 +0000

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 front page gives the latest market summary and top stories of the day. There are also links to information on investing and personal finance. You may also create your own portfolio. Using the search for a stock quote you find a page full of information - current quote, a graph for the stock volume of the day, the previous and opening quote, the volume, day and year’s range, etc. Current news about the stock is prominent and there are numerous links to additional information. With all this knowledge you may make good financial decisions and will be doing your part to improve the economy.

Overheard at the desk

Jessica Moyer — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:20:12 +0000

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 patron ask so clearly and specifically for RA help. Turned out he wanted a fantasy book, “a nice big fat one,” and since he had never read the Eragon books, he was happy to take the first one home.

A few minutes later the same boy came back and asked, “Can you suggest a short nonfiction book?” When the librarian asked if there were any particular subjects he was interested he said, “No, just something really short.”

It is questions like these that make me excited about providing reference services, and optimistic about the future of our public libraries.

Going to the Dogs

Barbara — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 05:20:58 +0000

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 Web is full of dog sites. Using Petfinder and other dog rescue sites, I found local organizations involved in saving homeless dogs, looked at lots of adorable pictures, and became adept at deciphering the descriptive code. If a dog “uses his voice”, it will probably bark all the time. If it is “acquiring manners”, it needs lots of training. These organizations do good work, but their application process rivals that of an Ivy League school. I am waiting to find out if I have been accepted to adopt a two-year-old Labradoodle. In the mean time, I am also searching for local breeders who would like to find a good home for one of their older dogs. With any luck, the right dog will find me soon.

Royal Navy Logbooks Now Online

Mary Ellen — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:09:48 +0000

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 Colonial Registers and Royal Navy Logbooks) is cataloging and digitizing them to make them available to a wider audience. One of the objectives of the CORRAL project is the creation of a database of instrumental climatic data for researchers. Another is the creation of a library of images of the most important logbooks from voyages of scientific discovery, including those of James Cook’s Endeavor and H.M.S. Beagle.

This is a perfect example of one of the best uses of the Internet. Images of nearly 300 logbooks dating back to the 1760s are now accessible not only to scholars, but to students and teachers looking for primary source material, history buffs and Age of Sail enthusiasts, and even fans of Patrick O’Brian. Material that might seem arcane and of interest to just a handful of researchers now has the potential for a much wider application.

The National Archives (UK) will have a fully searchable version of the logbooks on its Web site in 2010.

Reference (Along with Everything Else) on Your Handheld

Mary Ellen — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 21:22:49 +0000

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 accessing digital information.

The first Handheld Librarian Online Conference was held in July and offered a snapshot of the current handheld landscape. All the sessions were recorded. Of particular interest for reference are the presentations on various text messaging reference services, including the Alliance Library System Infoquest Project, the Skokie (IL) Public Library’s mobile library platform, and Cornell’s Textalibrarian. Another Handheld Librarian Online Conference is scheduled for February, 2010.

In September, Gary Price of ResourceShelf presented a report, Mobile Access to Information, at Web Search University in Washington, D.C., that provides a good overview of terms and trends. As Gary points out, more publishers are going mobile, and reference publishers are among them. Just two examples: last month, Schlager Group released “DocNotes: Presidential Speeches,” its first applications for the iPhone and the iPod Touch. And subscribers to the online version of the Berkshire Encyclopedia of China can download an Exact Editions Exactly APP from iTunes in order to access the encyclopedia on an iPhone.

Librarians and publishers take note: athough a lot of our focus has been on going mobile to reach younger people, the Pew report documents a high rate of wireless handheld use among African Americans and English-speaking Hispanics, groups that have traditionally lagged behind in desktop online access.

Baker & Taylor and Gale/Cengage connect with ebooks

Sue Polanka — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:34:52 +0000

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 real convenience for libraries wishing to expand their ebook collections, or renew titles already owned. Here’s a clip from the press release:

“GVRL offers nearly 3,000 reference sources from some 50 authoritative publishers on a
stable, easy-to-use platform. Libraries have the flexibility to buy one e-book or multiple ebooks
and to search across a single e-book or an entire e-book collection. The collection
grows weekly and covers a wide variety of topics and subjects — ranging from current
events to classics and from arts and humanities to small business management.
Literature Criticism Online brings together 10 of the most acclaimed literary series
representing a range of modern and historical views on authors and their works across
regions, eras and genres. Gale Directory Library is an online collection of crosssearchable,
authoritative directories of companies, publishers, associations and more.”

Web Site of the Week: webexhibits.org/daylightsaving

chris — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:32:59 +0000

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 and where in the world Daylight Saving Time is observed. This exhibit is also displayed in a new techonology called “Spicy Nodes” in which clouds float around the screen with some of the information. Webexhibits.org is produced by IDEA (Institute for Dynamic Educational Advancement) and uses examples to show the connection between art and science. Other current exhibits are Calendars through the Ages and van Gogh’s Letters.

Changes

Barbara — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 04:43:53 +0000

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 us (and there are fewer of us!) must handle reference questions in all subject areas. Our collections have been merged into a single reference collection. The merger of the desks was not something that we wanted, but we had no choice. Now that we have been working in the new environment for awhile, most of us enjoy it. It is nice to stretch the mind with a wide variety of questions. I enjoy doing a bit of reader’s advisory and sharing my favorite mystery writers with fellow afficionados. I also enjoy answering music questions. It was fun when a woman called on the phone, ran to her piano and played a few bars of Mendelsohn’s “War March of the Priests” from Atalaia and asked me to tell her what it was. She had forgotten. She also wanted the sheet music, which we had. Having played it at graduation for many years in my high-school orchestra, I remembered it well. We still maintain our subject specialties and help each other as needed. We have kept our collection development and training duties although we have much less time for the latter due to staff reduction. Staffing a single desk has also brought us together as a team. We have always been collegial, but separate desks created some distance. Now we have one desk and one schedule, so we spend more time with each other. This is for the most part a good thing. We learn from each other and back each other up when faced with problem patrons. The weak links are more obvious, but they are few.

New Contextual Encyclopedias for American and World Literatures

Sue Polanka — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:34:43 +0000

Gale announced the release of two new 4 volume encyclopedias - Gale Contextual Encyclopedia of World Literature and Gale Contextual Encyclopedia of American Literature. According to a Gale Press Release, the encyclopedias discuss an authors work/s in context including:

Circumstances in the authors’ lives that are reflected in their work
Historical Events affecting their work
Other authors and artists active at the same time
Common human themes - relevant globally - that appear in their work and what other works address those themes
How the author’s works were critically received over time

Both titles will be available in print and as eBooks in GVRL.

Stanislaw Lem and Reference Books

craig — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 23:53:37 +0000

In a world in which a single issue of The New York Times (October 20, 2009) can report that artificial memories have been created in the brain of a fruitfly; wild fish have learned to “discriminate among colors, patterns, and shapes, including new ones”; and radioactive isotopes in the whiskers of Antarctic fur seals contain a record of the seals’ migration patterns, some of the Polish philosophical and science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem’s wilder imaginings may not seem so wild after all.

In the introduction to Eruntics by one Reginald Gulliver (published by George Allen & Unwin Limited at some indeterminate future date), Lem introduces the apocryphal Gulliver, in the latter’s own words, as “a philosopher-dilettante and amateur bacteriologist who one day eighteen years ago decided to teach bacteria English.” Eruntics is one of five remarkable works collected in Imaginary Magnitude, translated from Polish by Marc Heine and published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1984. Lem’s Wikipedia entry credits the writer with coming up with the concept of “electronic paper” but also notes his aversion to the Internet. On the title page to Golem XIV, in the same volume, Lem has Indiana University Press still existing in 2047. Let’s hope so! Also in Imaginary Magnitude are Lem’s prospectus and sample pages for Vestrand’s Extelopedia (in 44 Magnetomes), a parody of the “and if you act now…” school of television commercial, but in this case in print and extolling the virtues of the solution to the nagging problem of your encyclopedia being out of date even before it is published. Vestrand’s Extelopedia, you see, predicts the future (entries printed in black exceeding 99.9% probability, those in red having less than 86.5% probability). Editors are in continuous remote-control contact with each Extelopedia, to ensure that probability changes are registered as color changes in the text. Lem foresees for 2011 publication this 44-volume set to which, at the sound of one’s voice “the desired volume slips off the shelf, TURNS its own pages, and STOPS at the desired entry.” Hilarious.

Not so hilarious is the title piece in One Human Minute, a collection (translated by Catherine S. Leach and published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1986) which also contains “The Upside-Down Evolution” and “The World as Cataclysm.” All three are reviews of nonexistent books. The 36-page title review imagines a reference work which “presents what all the people in the world are doing, at the same time, in the course of one minute.” It is a dystopian vision wonderfully written and translated. At several points Lem compares and contrasts the apocryphal work he is reviewing to the Guinness Book of World Records.

I highly recommend these and other books by Stanislaw Lem.