Writing in the Toronto Star, Michael Geist argues that when Canada gives public money to scientific researchers, that it should require that the research be made available to the public through open-content publishing, rather than locked up in expensive journals that require Canadians to buy the research they’ve already paid for. Boing Boing: Canadian-funded research [...]

It’s one of my favorite soapboxes that we need to publicize ourselves more. With the sheer amount of options members of our society face today, just offering excellent service isn’t enough to make them think of us. Plus, there is the common preconceptions of what librarians do. While the way we are characterized is fairly [...]

September’s JoDI: Journal of Digital Information is all about digital libraries with several interesting articles.

Cory Doctorow’s talk on DRM has been formatted as a print-centric PDF. Perfect for educating people without getting too mixed up in the tech terms. as a print-centric PDF

I’ve actually responded in detail to the article.

Under its program, for a fee, BMC will �build, launch, maintain, and populate� repositories for institutions that could not otherwise afford to, or may lack the infrastructure or technical capacity in-house. Institutions can choose to pay a �one-off set-up fee,� to BMC, which will then build a repository to an institution�s requirements. They can hire [...]

Paul Chiao and Christian Schmidt, Open Access gains attention in scholarly communication, Molecular Cancer, September 6, 2004. An editorial describing the OA policy of this OA journal, published by BioMed Central, and enumerating seven benefits of OA. Excerpt: “[1] All articles become freely and universally accessible online; so an author’s work can be read by [...]

LibraryTechtonics: Creative Librarian reads my mind……or my blog. Actually both . First there was the Library Juice article, which made a great point. Next was the Wired News article where the idea of the stereotype not really fitting seems to finally be moving into the press. (While mainstream media have blandly stood by as the [...]

OJOSE (Online JOurnals Search Engine) is a new academic search engine. It covers a large number of free and priced journals and databases, and even some books. When a search brings up priced content, you will usually see a citation and abstract; clicking for full-text can bring up a pay-per-view offer, the full-text (if you [...]

…realize about the librarian stereotype. Every human trait has a valuable and a less-functional face to it. We tend to talk about the librarian stereotype strictly in terms of its undesirable aspects. But it is related to our strengths as librarians also – to our thoughtfulness, our focus, our desire to help. Library Juice 7:18 [...]