AALL Gallagher Award recipient Mary Whisner, Public Services Librarian, University of Washington, Marian Gould Gallagher Law Library, has updated her 2008 guide about choosing a career in law librarianship. With more than 30 years of experience in the profession, Whisner discusses important topics to review when considering a career as a law librarian.
Marcus Zillman’s new guide provides a wealth of information to enhance your efforts in conducting expert research on a wide range of subject matters. The guide is also another reminder that Google should not be your go-to subject search engine by demonstrating how choosing to use reliable topic specific sources can deliver greater scope, breath and depth of information for your analysis and reporting. These sites include metasearch, semantic and Deep Web search, with many sources offering advanced search functionality, unique and comprehensive data sets and repositories, dashboards and tools from around the world, all of which are updated and curated effectively and consistently. These sources represent the work of academic, government, consortium, firms and industry.
Jerry Lawson shares the preface to his upcoming book about knowledge management for law firms in which he highlights indelible lessons his high school Geometry teacher Miss Frieda Riley taught him to make a point about efficiency and lawyers.
Naomi House was inspired to do this series because of the drastic changes to the availability of traditional library jobs during this pandemic. She highlights library and information professionals who work outside libraries but use their skills as well as many who have lost their jobs or been furloughed. These interviews are an introduction to transferable skill sets as well as resources for those looking for work in those fields.
This bibliography by Charles W. Bailey, Jr., the publisher of Digital Scholarship and a noncommercial digital artist, includes over 800 selected English-language articles and books that are useful in understanding the curation of digital research data in academic and other research institutions.
Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and security, often without our situational awareness. Five highlights from this week: Electric Cars, Smart Refrigerators Pose Cyber Risk To US Utilities, GAO Finds; Supreme Court Sides With Facebook Over Unwanted Automated Texts; Hunting the hunters: How Russian hackers targeted US cyber first responders in SolarWinds breach; National Weather Service Digital Infrastructure Is a Disaster; and CRS In Focus – Biometric Technologies and Global Security.
Marcus P. Zillman’s guide comprises an extensive listing of resources and sites for students, researchers, teachers, infopros and parents, on multiple study areas. Sourced from academic, public, private, association and corporate sectors, the subject matters include: distance learning; MOOCs, lecture guides and study notes, study skill resources, online tutoring and homework help, free e-learning videos, scholarship resources and PhD, Dissertation, thesis, and academic writing resources.
David H. Rothman, cofounder of LibraryEndowment.org, discusses the new Panorama Project report that covers a variety of topics, ranging from piracy to synergies between books and other media. Specifically significant to Rothman is the report’s data indicating that avid book engagers (4+ books/month) are more ethnically diverse and younger than the general survey population.
John Mark Ockerbloom elucidates the significance of promoting and protecting literature, the public domain and open access to publications In the age of COVID-19.
David H. Rothman advocates on behalf of the Panorama Project which he says is not just an effort of librarians even though it’s benefiting from the input of Alan S. Inouye, the ALA’s director of public policy. Among the others involved have been people from the Book Industry Study Group, independent booksellers, Penguin Random House, and OverDrive, the largest supplier of books for libraries and schools. One of the recurring themes in the project’s research is that synergies can exist not only between books and other media, but also between the library and retails models. For example, among several thousand readers surveyed, “38.31% of respondents had bought a book online that they first found in a library (within the last 12 months.” Local bookstores also benefited, and the project intends to explore this further. The findings are just preliminary, but based on earlier work by researchers for OCLC and OverDrive, Rothman doubts there will be surprises in regard to synergies between libraries and retail.