Thursday, May 15, 2008

Too Funny

Just a bit more Library humor to get you through the rest of this boring Thursday.

Friday, May 9, 2008

What are people thinking?

Now, this is interesting.

Honestly, at first I thought this was a joke.

For instance, check out this YouTube presentation on “Motivational Deficiency”. (I believe that I may have experienced a touch of this syndrome just last Monday morning)


But it turns out that these folks are quite serious;

“…the techniques of ‘disease-mongering’, in particular the expansion of the boundaries of disorders, the medicalisation of normal life events and the portrayal of risk factors as diseases is prevalent in the medical marketing world. Conference delegates expressed the hope that the public and media would become more skeptical of such claims and that health professionals would challenge the claims and recognise the marketing interests that attempt to shape their perceptions of disease.”

The Public Library of Science (An important, open-access science resource which really deserves a ‘blog entry of its own) has a collection of articles on “Disease Mongering” here.

Perhaps all these (ahem) patients really need is a bracing dose of bibliotherapy?

Searching “Librarian and syndrome” in Google returns:

“Systems Librarian Imposter Syndrome”

“Overprotective Librarian Syndrome”

“Tidy Librarian Syndrome”

“Silent Librarian Syndrome”

Finally, there must be a market out there among librarians for this sort of thing, Haworth Press has created a cottage industry out of it.

“Martyr-Librarian Syndrome”

“University-Library Syndrome”

Monday, April 28, 2008

The Downfall of Atlas Shrugged

I love the book (the part of it that I read).

I have only gotten a few hundred pages into it when I saw the book entitled "Honky" by Dalton Conley.

Since I do not like to read two books at the same time, I am taking a break from AS to read Honky.

Sunday, April 27, 2008

Sometimes,,,,Its just not worth it

Friday afternoon was a total waste of library work.

The copier was down, one of our employee's parent's passed a way and many attender her funeral, no one returned my calls and surprisingly, everyone who came into the library needed their research completed "right away".

Only a month to go.

Friday, April 25, 2008

Urban Hang-Out vs Traditional Library



Slate has an interesting photo essay exploring the question of how to build a public library in the age of Google, Wikipedia, and Kindle. The grand old reading rooms and stacks of past civic monuments are giving way to a new library-as-urban-hangout concept, as evidenced by Seattle’s Starbucks-meets-mega-bookstore central library and Salt Lake City’s shop-lined education mall. Without some dramatic changes, The Extinction Timeline predicts libraries will R.I.P. in 2019.”


Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Public Health Libraries Go National

On Friday’s Talk of the Nation, Harold Varmus was interviewed on the new policy requiring that NIH funded research be deposited in PubMed Central within a year.

Listen to it (22 minutes) at: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89562597