Having worked in the Alcohol and Other Drug sector before moving into more general health librarianship this year, I’ve been interested in the growing literature on network theory within medicine. As a non-clinician, it can be a little bit difficult to follow some of the debate - especially at the genetic level. A recent article in [...]

This week on AUTOCAT, Judith Kirk (Western Michigan University Libraries, Kalamazoo) shared the results of her recent informal survey of authority control practice.  Although the opt-in sample size was small (12 libraries) and entirely US-based, it included some interesting snippets. These two comments on the management of authority control caught ...

In a recent article in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, Lynne C. Howarth and Jean Weihs provide a history of one of the hottest topics in the RDA draft - the demise of the Rule of Three. Beginning with some historical background on the main entry concept generally, referencing Cutter and the ALA Rules of 1941, they [...]

Preparing this week’s lecture, I came across an interesting paper by Ling Hwey Jeng questioning the necessity and cost-effectiveness of authority control. After a brief synopsis of the main aims and objectives, Jeng concludes that In cataloging, accuracy means authoritative, standardized, and consistent accuracy. It means both completeness ...

One of the highlights of Elisad was hearing metadata expert Karen Coyle speak. Her paper Future of the Catalog was unusual for Elisad in that no reference was made to AOD, but it was no less riveting for that, and probably very healthy for subject specialists to be faced with a wider perspective. Beginning with stats [...]

I arrived on the red-eye flight from London>Turin just in time to catch the end of Bonaria Biancu’s workshop at Elisad, Do It Ourselves: Social Technologies for Information Retrieval, so I’m really pleased to see that she has posted a brief synopsis on her blog, The Geek Librarian (Google English translation here, with all the ...

Not everybody likes what they work with. Still, it’s always a bit of a surprise to realise quite how much many career librarians hate books and reading. And silence. ~ David Sexton. The sound of silence is all we want in our libraries. Evening Standard, 26 September 2008 ; quoted in Library & Information Update’s new [...]

Busy week this week (hence the lack of posts here), culminating in leading a workshop at Brentwood Library last night as part of the Essex Poetry Festival. The theme of this year’s National Poetry Day is “Work”, so I designed some activities on “Finding Inspiration in Your Library” exploiting Brentwood’s ...

Rooting around in some citation analysis papers, I’ve come across a neat synopsis of the issues surrounding the use of citation count to determine the impact of an individual author’s work . Lee A. Vucovich, Jason Blaine Baker and Jack T. Smith give an account of a library enquiry to determine the impact of various members of [...]

Preparing my paper for Elisad on the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, I’m grateful to the Blogging Section of SLA-IT and resource shelf respectively for highlighting articles on how to generate and limit User Generated Content. As governmental organisations or NGOs, Alcohol and Other Drug (AOD) information providers ...