The Semantics of Words

Do you have one of those friends who has words they can’t stand to hear? Or maybe you are one who shudders at hearing words like “moist”? This interesting information came to our attention by SF Gate in their article, “Here’s why you hate the word ‘moist’. So is it the connotation of the word or…

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Recent Acquisition Has Some Concerned About Access

The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) has been acquired by Elsevier with the promise that it will be further developed with Mendeley, Elsevier’s scholarly collaboration network, to provide users with leading content, data linking, enhanced metrics and researcher workflow tools. PR Newswire brought this interesting news to us in their article, “Elsevier Acquires the Social Science Research…

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The Next Generation

Sci-Hub is the piracy network for academic journals and it has many a publisher and author pointing fingers and calling names. Researchers are likely calling names as well, but they might actually be repeatable. This interesting information came to us from The Chronicle of Higher Education in their article, “What Do the Authors of Sci-Hub’s Most-Downloaded…

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Organizing Knowledge

Humans classify and categorize everything from types of writing instruments to breeds of animals. Marjorie Hlava in her Taxobook states “you could even say that taxonomies and thesauri exist to further the objective of organizing knowledge.” It seems it is in our nature as humans to try and classify things. One example of human classification…

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Special Libraries Association Conference Features Taxonomy Cafe

The Taxonomy Cafe is taking place at the Special Libraries Association (SLA) annual conference in just a few weeks. In this unique workshop, presenters will give 30-minute case studies of taxonomy implementations. They will cover how and why their organizations decided to implement taxonomies, their approaches to implementation, lessons learned, and current status. Janice Keeler is one…

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New Director of World’s Largest Library

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has announced the appointment of Dr. Patricia Flatley Brennan as the next director of the National Library of Medicine (NLM). The American Library Association’s publication, District Dispatch, brought this news to us in their article, “New director named for the U.S. National Library of Medicine.” As director, Dr. Brennan will…

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The Taxonomy Cafe

In order to continue preparing Special Libraries Association (SLA) taxonomists for more advanced implementations, we have asked a number of people to share their real-life experiences with us in an interactive presentation and discussion format. In the first section of this course, each presenter will give a 30-minute case study of a taxonomy implementation. They…

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Strengthening the Data

A leading index of open-access journals may shrink by more than one-quarter after an effort to exclude questionable and inactive publishers. This interesting information came to us from Nature in their article, “Open-access index delists thousands of journals.” The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is following up on its promise of two years ago that it would…

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