Recently one of our authors asked me for a list of of ALA Presidential Themes, 1990 to the present. I knew that our in-house library staff would have the answer, and I could have walked or called upstairs to the library, but I’m all about the multi-tasking, don’t you know. So I pasted the question from the author’s e-mail message into the Ask-the-Librarian VR chat box on ilovelibraries.org, which is staffed by our very own librarians.

Snip, snap, and the answer is served up, easy as pie. A great service for our authors and our copy editors! Thanks!

This week I’ve been immersed in reviewing the chapters of a forthcoming contributed volume from ALA’s Government Documents Round Table. Ably edited by Andrea Morrison, Managing Electronic Government Information in Libraries: Issues and Practices fully covers the territory, from collection development to cataloging to reference to preservation and many topics in between.

Yesterday I was particularly pleased by the usefulness of the chapter on integrating government resources into information literacy instruction. Chapter authors Barbara Miller and Barbara J. Mann point out that government information, particularly electronic government information, is perfectly suited “to illustrate principles of information literacy such as determining and differentiating between primary/secondary sources, developing critical thinking skills, determining bias, understanding issues of copyright and intellectual property, evaluating Internet sources, and understanding freeware databases versus restricted (or copyrighted) information.” They follow with concrete examples and suggestions for incorporating government information sources into the framework of information literacy standards, as well as tips for promoting awareness of government resources among nonspecialist staff and the public.

Holly Koelling, editor of the forthcoming third edition of YALSA’s Best Books for Young Adults, weighs in on trends in Young Adult Lit at MSN.COM: “Life after ‘Harry Potter’?”

No doubt everyone who’s anyone will have devoured Book 7 long before the summer is over. Readers and parents are certain to ask “Now what?” The new edition of BBYA (due out in August, but available for ordering now) is just the resource you’ll need for post-HP readers’ advisory.
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If you haven’t been watching the TED Talks that are now being posted online, you’re missing out. I’ve started watching one every (well, nearly every) Monday morning. These talks from the annual TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference are sometimes related to library or publishing issues, but they are always related to thinking big and taking risks. Plus I get a nice motivational kick in the pants when I see how much these speakers are accomplishing in their lives.

I watch the streaming video versions, but you can also download the video or just the audio to your desktop or to iTunes. Here’s a great one to get you hooked: Jeff Hawkins on how brain science will change computing. These should make for great patron recommendations: for students in search of a good paper topic, for commuters tired of trying to read on a bumpy bus or train, for joggers no longer inspired by “Eye of the Tiger”…

Pictured above: Hmm…what do you think? Leave a comment with your best out-of-the-box guess. I’ll post the answer next week.

Last night a non-librarian friend of mine was telling me about a project involving streaming video of live music concerts. I asked him what the company plans to do with the concert library. Would customers be able to search for old concerts to view? Had they hired a librarian to create the metadata? “Metadata? Who needs it when you have PodZinger?” he said.

I disabused him of that notion.

But PodZinger, which uses speech recognition technology to “create a text index of the words in audio and video and to categorize content” is nonetheless exciting, because much of what it is indexing wouldn’t otherwise have any sort of index at all.