In the Library with the Lead Pipe – Page 29 – An open access, peer reviewed journal

By Brett Bonfield It’s interesting how many people don’t really understand the concept of open source. People often describe freeware as open source, or they’ll describe free web-based applications as open source, or applications with APIs that allow for mashups. There are articles all the time, on some of the most popular websites, that recommend free...

By Annette Day and Hilary Davis Talk to any librarian or library vendor and you’ll hear the same thing – the global economic downturn is hitting hard. Libraries everywhere are taking an axe to their collections; libraries are cutting book budgets, canceling serials subscriptions, allowing institutional memberships to lapse, and letting go of databases. Libraries and their stakeholders...

By Editorial Board This week we decided to do a “collective wisdom” post about job hunting mistakes. This is an issue affecting every librarian, whether you’ve got a job, you’re in the market, or you’ll begin looking five years down the road. We’ve all made errors in selecting jobs to apply for, drafting our cover letters...

Welcome to a special audio edition of In the Library with the Lead Pipe. Ellie Collier talks to Char Booth, E-Learning Librarian at the University of California at Berkeley and author of Informing Innovation: Tracking Student Interest in Emerging Library Technologies at Ohio University, a book length research report recently published by ACRL and available...

By Kim Leeder If you want to start a passionate conversation, ask a past Emerging Leader (EL) about their experience in the ALA Emerging Leaders program. Created by former ALA President Leslie Burger as one of her presidential initiatives in 2007, Emerging Leaders was initiated to put new librarians “on the fast track to ALA and...

By Emily Ford So ALA has joined the ranks of two point oh. Last month it rolled out ALAConnect, a service influenced by Ning, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Docs, and other online networking platforms and shared work spaces. Despite the hoopla about the system I hadn’t even heard of it until one of my working groups was...

By Brett Bonfield Only a few information technology organizations predict the future by inventing it. ((The full quote by Alan Kay: “Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do… The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn’t violate...

“The indicators that served as benchmarks in the past, such as number of volumes and number of journal subscriptions, are no longer sufficient because of the more expansive role that the contemporary library has assumed” (Weiner, 2005). “The measurement of quality will come back to the questions of who are the users, what are the...

By Ellie Collier Working in an academic environment, the majority of my student interactions are based around a specific assignment. Every semester there is at least one assignment that comes across my reference desk that makes me throw my hands up in exasperation (such as: a scavenger hunt that was written before we moved much of...

W-E-B-S-I-T-E, Find Out What It Means To Me

A Look at Librarianship through the Lens of an Academic Library Serials Review

Editorial: What Not to Do When Applying for Library Jobs

A Conversation with Char Booth

All Dressed Up with Nowhere to Go: A Survey of ALA Emerging Leaders

Why We Should Adopt ALAConnect: A brief review and rumination on ALA’s new online community

A Conversation with Kristin Antelman

Are You Worth It? What Return on Investment Can and Can’t Tell You About Your Library

Stepping on Toes: The Delicate Art of Talking to Faculty about Questionable Assignments