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 ...

A UCLA study carried out on 24 middle-aged and older adults has found that Internet searching increases brain function. Study participants performed Web searches and book-reading tasks while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans, which recorded the subtle brain-circuitry changes experienced during these activities ...

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 ...

When I worked full-time as a taxonomy designer for a big international database company, one of my key learning experiences from our user testing was that, no matter how good the browse options you offer, the majority of people will always prefer to search rather than to browse. I was, therefore, unsurprised but very interested by this finding ...

Thanks to Pamela Ben-Eliezer for pointing out Richard Horton’s opinion piece on libraries in this week’s Lancet In it, he provides an entertaining tour of the library’s historical purpose as custodian of knowledge and argues that today’s medical libraries should band together to provide a global digital storehouse of ...

Thanks to Guus van den Brekel for highlighting the latest tracking report from the Center for Studying Health System Change , which charts an 18% rise in Americans using the Internet to look for health information since 2001: In 2007, approximately 56 percent of all American adults—more than 122 million people—reported seeking information [...]

I didn’t make it to the HLG Conference, having chosen to attend the Health Statistics User Group Conference instead (More on that once the slides are online). Posters and presentations from HLG are available from the Cilip website, of which these caught my eye: The role of the information specialist in the topic selection process at [...]