Leddy Library Reference Desk Blog

Documents in the News:

"[Government] Documents in the News identifies issues about government making news headlines and web sources with additional information. The stories included and opinions expressed by a web link do not necessarily represent the viewpoints of this webmaster or The University of Michigan."

It includes Dick Cheney's hunting report: http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/dn06/dn06govt.html#cheney

I'm usually not so keen about libraries making a place for themselves in social networks such as MySpace and Facebook for a number of reasons that I won't go into here. But I'm seriously reconsidering this stand now that I've taken a glance at this page produced by the planning department for the City of Windsor: www.myspace.com/planitwindsor. I'm so impressed that they are successfully soliciting feedback from young Windsorites on Windsor's Official Plan.

Scott. Dickens. Milton Hugo.
These are the names on the carved stones of the (former) John Richardson Library of Sandwich.

A Portrait of "Generation Next" How Young People View Their Lives, Futures and Politics

This report from the Pew Institute is pretty interesting
"A new generation has come of age, shaped by an unprecedented revolution in technology and dramatic events both at home and abroad. They are Generation Next, the cohort of young adults who have grown up with personal computers, cell phones and the internet and are now taking their place in a world where the only constant is rapid change. "
Read it here: http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=300

For some time Factiva wasn't accessible to off-campus users because of proxy issues, but that's all fixed. So now I'm reading Ian Brown's article on weeding books from last Saturday's Globe and Mail.

My new favourite UWindsor professor.

I'm not a huge fan of Garrison Keillor but I have become quite taken by his Writer's Almanac daily podcast. And these daily missives are blessedly short - distilled literary history and poetry.

Here's an excerpt:

It was on this day in 1950 that the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas embarked on his first reading tour of the United States. Thomas (books by this author) had never finished college himself, and was terrified of academics. So he got terribly drunk at all the faculty parties, shouting obscenities and coming on to all the women. His behavior shocked the professors, but it only made him seem more exciting to the students.

And though Thomas always drank himself under the table, when the time would come for Thomas to give his reading, he would always go out on stage and stun the audience with his performance. He had a deep, sonorous voice, and audiences would hang on his every word. He didn't just read his own poetry. He recited a huge number of poems by other poets, and only finished the show with one or two poems of his own.

Creative Commons/ Copyleft
On the beautiful dropping knowledge site, Lawrence Lessig has an excellent commercial:
'In a culture that is moving from “read-only” into “read-write,” Lessig emphasizes the need for more flexible copyright law.'
Here's a great interview with Cory Doctorow on publishing, digital rights management, and creativity.

Testing testing... is thing on?
Hello Cleveland!

Ahem. SFX has made a number of Open Source Serials Management tools available for all under the name, CUFTS. My favourite tool is the resource comparison tool which can tell you the number of duplicates between two databases.