November 8, 2002

National Book Award Winners I've ordered a couple of National Book Award Winners that the library had previously overlooked: Mountains of California by John Muir Desert solitaire : a season in the wilderness / by Edward Abbey 5:03:52 PM     [WEB4LIB] Cross-database Search Tools Summary On August 22 I posted a question regarding cross-database search tools. For this particular query I was interested in web-based services that can accept one query, send it out to multiple databases and returned organized results to the user. I was not interested in web-only applications such as metasearch engines, nor was I interested in client-side applications. Below is the summary of what I found. The first section are services created by libraries on behalf of their users, and the second section are tools that may be applicable for creating such services. Sorry. More desk cleaning. I hope to see some sort of pattern emerge from the chaos. 4:53:56 PM     Libraries as nonprofit entrepreneurs? More desk cleaning. In my notes from the Access 2001 conference I found in my notes a mention about how a publisher increased their (print) sales of books by putting them up online, in their entirety. I know I will want to remember this, so: The National Academy Press publishes reports for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, as well as the National Research Council. In his presentation, "Entrepreneurs of Social Value: Public Discourse in the Sciences," Michael Jensen talked about the structure, staffing, and publishing philosophy of the National Academy Press (NAP), focusing particularly on the balance the press is trying to achieve between free and cost-recovery information dissemination. He used the phrase "nonprofit entrepreneurs" to describe NAP's approach. While NAP sells paper copies of its publications, online versions are freely available. This availability has in fact increased sales. Mr. Jensen's slides are available at http://nap.edu/staff/mjensen/ifla2001 4:32:57 PM     Weblogs as online performances From the presentation Weblogs as online performances by Gary Thompson  What is performance theory and why use it in the teaching of writing? We should take what we do now and transform it: acknowledge writing as a performance, and use our classes to think through its implications. Performance theory is an interdisciplinary area of activity rising from work in drama and communication, but related to social sciences, animal behavior, and rhetoric, among other areas. Performance is an inclusive term. Theater is only one node on a continuum that reaches from the ritualizations of animals (including humans) through performances in everyday life–greetings, displays of emotion, family scenes, professional roles, and so on–through to play, sports, theater, dance, ceremonies, rites, and performances of great magnitude (Schechner, Performance Theory, xiii). Key term performance is contested: contexts range from engineering or business models to avant-garde art. Generally there are three areas: • Public display of technical skill • A recognized and culturally coded pattern of behavior • General level of success at meeting a standard of achievement (Carlson) To all these can be added performance as "all activity carried out with a consciousness of itself" (Bauman). Self-consciousness produces liminality, or the state of being in-between (ideal/actual, make-believe/real). [ jill / txt ] One of the reasons why I began this weblog was because all my ideas were getting all intertwined. My thoughts about chocolate were getting mixed up with my thoughts about peanut butter as it were. As illustrated above and elsewhere, weblogs are related to composition. Composition is related to critical thinking and both of these are related to information literacy. Does this mean that weblogs are related to information literacy? Well research blogs sure look a lot like the research journals that we librarians sometimes prescribe to our students in order to ellicit some reflection on their searching and to encourage thinking of research as a process of inquiry. Has anyone used blogs in an information literacy project yet? 11:42:45 AM

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