Brett Burney recommends and demonstrates an application from which we can all benefit: Text Expander – its saves you time immediately because it can type for you. And not only does TextExpander save you time, but it’ll also make you a better typist because it’s 100 percent accurate every single time. No typos or misspellings.
Katherine Daniel, Joseph J. Esposito, Roger C. Schonfeld: Several years ago, we set out to better understand how both library acquisition practices and the distribution patterns of publishers and vendors were evolving over time. Within the academic publishing community, there is a sense that academic libraries are acquiring fewer and fewer books and that university presses are struggling amid declining sales. The latter may certainly be true—a recent UK study found that between 2005 and 2014, retail sales of academic books dropped by 13 percent—but what if the academic libraries that constitute part of that market were in reality not making fewer purchases? As new vendors and acquisition methods disrupt customary means of acquiring books, Joseph Esposito, Ithaka S+R’s frequent collaborator and consultant, was inspired to ask whether book sales were actually depressed, or if they only appeared to be because academic libraries were bypassing the traditional wholesale vendors whose metrics are used by university presses to assess sales to libraries for companies like Amazon.
Nicole Black advises lawyers on a range of applications and technology from which they can choose to establish standardized secure, encrypted email communications for all but the most extreme case-related interaction.
Stacy Nykorchuk’s article documents significant facets of determining organizational knowledge strategies, creating the appropriate architecture for the content, managing content creation by subject matter experts, aligning systems with objectives, understanding user, stakeholder and client feedback, and acknowledging associated risk based on work product.
Journalist and librarian Marcus Banks discusses the role, relevancy and impact of librarians in all sectors as we are increasingly overwhelmed with information and yet access to actionable resources is often blocked by fees and paywalls, and the goal of knowledge sharing is subsumed and often ill served by conflicting agendas. Librarians remain critical advocates for open access, teachers of digital literacy skills, proponents of services to all Americans, and touchstones for identifying truth in an increasingly growing sphere of fake news and information that fails to serve democracy, education, and commerce.
Debbie Rabina, Ph.D., Professor, Pratt Institute, School of Information posted this blog that merits sharing for both its intent, the use of Twitter to attract the attention of the President-Elect, and the crowd sourcing concept. Rabina states: America deserves a president who is well versed in the history of this nation and the documents upon which that history was built. Let’s present those documents to the President-Elect through his favorite medium–Twitter. Tweetathon began at 9am (central) on December 1, 2016. You are welcome to join at any time. Feel free to use whatever government related document (Supreme Court decisions, inaugural addresses, speeches, early American papers, etc.) strikes your fancy. Tag each tweet with the hashtag #GovDocs2Trump and please send them to @realdonaldtrump. This way we can fill his feed.
David Rothman is a consistent, expert advocate for funding a national digital library endowment, and his enthusiasm has been strengthened with the appointment of Dr. Carla Hayden as the new librarian of Congress.
At the beginning of the spring semester, Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law school transitioned to a new website with a more modern look but a much more rigid architecture. As often happens with new website launches, there were obstacles to overcome – 404 errors to fix, a new navigation to learn, resources to update – as well as old website simply not transferring to the new site. In this article Ashley Ahlbrand describes some key issues her team faced and how they were addressed as a Lessons Learned for other groups pursuing the same transition.
Author, librarian, and professor Bruce Rosenstein’s article clearly articulates key deliverables that librarians and information professionals can frame, communicate about and deliver – specifically expert knowledge services, data curation, research, training and leadership skills – to organizations in a wide range of sectors.
Marcus Zillman’s comprehensive, actionable guide provides links to hundreds of resources that assist students of all ages to leverage free and low cost resources to facilitate more efficient, effective learning – either as an individual, as part of a team, in a classroom, or as a member of a project oriented group. Whether you are seeking best practices for individual or team study – including guides, apps, wikis, tutorials, links to free courses and academic topical and subject guides, or how to locate e-text books and how to correctly create bibliographies and citations, this guide has all this information and so much more. If you are a student, an educator, a librarian or a researcher, these resources, many of which are from colleges, universities, libraries and schools, will expand your horizons and support your effort to be a creative, innovative, successful learner.