Library Stuff

The baby on the cover of Nirvana’s album Nevermind is 17 years old!! (via)

This is a no brainer for librarians (I hope), but a recent report comes up with the stats.

The LIB says:

“But we, as library folk, should care. It means we should be using metasearch engines. Or we should be using more than one engine at a time. We should try to educate our users about this. We should try to make it clear that if you’re looking for research, for comprehensive answers, one engine ain’t gonna do it for ya.”

Great advice. Despite the fact the report was commissioned by a metasearch engine which has a lot to gain from the results going in the direction that they did, I applaud it.

Librarians who put in one or two keywords into Google are unnecessary middlemen. Anyone can do that. We need to go beyond that.

One last point: In the past many metasearch engines did not incorporate the entire databases of the engines they purported to search. If you are going to use these engines, make sure you are getting results as extensive as those that would appear in a search of the engine on its primary site.

Powell’s has a review of two books. I’m going to add them to my “to read” list. Hallie will be a teenager before I know it. Then again, when she’s in her teens, her online world will probably be totally different. Scary.

Connie Crosby has a new piece up on LLRX.

She quotes me as dubbing “Time Suck 2.0″. I checked and it seems I’m the only one to have blogged that phrase. Cool. Consider it trademarked (kidding!)

BTW, Ask.com is broken too. Lots of spam. Ick.

I’m totally unTwittered lately, and that will probably continue for a while (definitely until after I get back from vacation). Just too much going on with work.

Dave Winer mentioned that a search for Twittergram this afternoon brings up 406 hits. Library Stuff has the top two spots. Dave’s posts are way down there.

Google’s algorithm is broken. No question about it. Oy Vey!