Carnival of the Infosciences #42

Photo courtesy of ishrona under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.

A couple of submissions from last week got inadvertently overlooked due to various imps in the system so, in the spirits of fun, inclusiveness, and goodwill, here they are:

Kim Leeder at Park Ranger for the Intellectual Commons gives us Political "action" via email as "a consideration of the effectiveness of information technology (in this case, email) in advancing political action."

Eric Schnell at The Medium is the Message gives us Increasing Use of Technology Requires More Resources.

Few library director's would extend library hours without adding additional library staff to support that service. Yet, all too often no thought given to adding additional staff when adding more technology and electronic services. Too many fall into the thinking that an organization can keep adding technology without additional human and fiscal resources. The reality is the more an organization uses technology the more resources they need to invest into technology.

This week's submissions:

Rick Roche at ricklibrarian asks Do I Still Use Reference Books?  There's an awful lot written about the decline of the printed word and in particular that print reference works will be the first to go all electronic, but Rick Roche took the seemingly obvious step and kept track of what he used over a four week period.  Take a look at his results and conclusions and perhaps consider doing the same "experiment" yourself.

Steve Lawson of See Also... recommends John Blyberg's post, OPACs in the frying pan, Vendors in the fire, at blyberg.net as "a nice overview of the OPACs, vendors, and open source talk of the last few weeks, with John's own thoughts and defense of his ILS Bill of Rights."

Ringmaster picks:

Iris at Pegasus Librarian reminds us about "yet another glorious aspect of this wonderful job" with Libraries and Living Memories.  Amen, Iris!  This week's Carnival raises its glass in a toast to Eric the Archivist and all the others who strive to be the living memory and friendly face of their institutions.

Ellyssa Kroski at InfoTangle gives us a great introduction to microcontent with Sayonara Super-Size - It's Bite-Sized on the Web.  If you do not know what microcontent is or why it is important then this is the post to read; includes a list of useful sources.

Next week's Carnival of the Infosciences will be hosted at Grumpator.

Check the Carnival wiki for future hosts, to volunteer to host, and for other related information.