New Librarian of Congress is First in Many Ways

The 14th Librarian of Congress was sworn in this week. As the first woman and first African-American to hold the post, Carla Hayden will lead the national library. This exciting information came from ABC News in their article, “Carla Hayden Breaks New Ground as 14th Librarian of Congress.” Hayden grew up in Chicago and has been the…

Read More

New Resources for Scholars

EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) has introduced a new product to meet the increasing demands of scholarly research. The collection includes five multidiscipline databases, each offering an extensive amount of full text that brings a global perspective to research in each discipline. Knowledge Speak brought this news to us in their article, “EBSCO Information Services releases Ultimate…

Read More

Libraries, Open Source, and eBooks – Oh My!

An open source server-software developer is working on a project at the New York Public Library (NYPL) that is intended to liberate every part of the electronic book lending system, and thus make reading library ebooks a whole lot better. This interesting news came to us from Boing Boing in their article, “How the New York Public…

Read More

The Challenge of Costly Textbooks

It’s back to school season and that means school supply shopping, a task I have never heard a single person rejoice about, and each year I hear more complaints about supplies’ increasing cost. This year, the biggest complaint was from a friend whose daughter is starting kindergarten. One of her supply requirements is 24 glue…

Read More

The Role of the Library in Your Community

When is the last time you went to the public library? So it shouldn’t surprise you that there has been a significant decrease in the number of adults who engage with public libraries across all demographic groups. The Bookseller brought this news to us in their article, “Adult library usage falls ‘significantly’ across all groups.” A…

Read More

Grey Areas in Plagiarism

Throughout college, I would get anxious when I submitted papers to a professor who used plagiarism software. I always cited my sources, following the correct style format of the professor’s choosing, but there was always that shadow of a doubt whether the words I wrote were in fact my words, or if I had read…

Read More

Monographs in the Digital World

A daughter’s interest in monographs spurred her mother to learn more than she ever thought she needed to about this declining literary form. This interesting information came to us from Against the Grain in their article, “Reading and Writing Monographs: the Dual Role of Researchers and the Demand for Dual Formats.” The long-form scholarly monograph is…

Read More

New Words Added to the Oxford

The Oxford English Dictionary recently released their list of added words as part of their June update to the more than 150-year old publication. This interesting information came to us from ABC out of Australia in their article, “Budgie smugglers: Australian slang term officially added to Oxford English Dictionary.” Among the 1,000+ word list were budgie…

Read More