YouIdiot.com

While researching something else, I ran across an item in a business journal my eye ran across another item. In research this is called serendipity, something we do not hear so much about any more these days.

Peer Review

The perils of peer review come home to roost in academe.

Vestiges

Can intelligent design be found?

Librarians Are the New Polymaths

Belle Greene may have been small in stature but her legacy is great.

Libraries in the Cyberage

Carol Clancy, Senior Council for the National Center for Children and Families, makes a scholarly plea for libraries to filter pornography.

Libraries in the Cyberage--Part I

First Amendment issues heat up with the advent of the digital age and its ability to bring pornography to every library, free of charge.

The Future of the Book: Does It Have One?

While the book has been with us for two millennia, digital artifact threaten its permanence. Now we being to wonder if it has a future at all.

Filter-tipped Libraries

Is it possible to say something positive about Internet filtering in libraries and not have everyone, including your mother, call you a wild-eyed, hidebound, neo-Nazi bashi-bazouk? No, of course not, but I'm going to try to anyway.

Here Lies The Book, R.I.P.: The Report of Its Death Has Been Greatly Exaggerated

The declaration that print books are dead may have been premature.

Oh! The Tangled Web

Now before hundreds rush in with that inane, “One man’s Mede is another man’s Persian” argument, permit me to define Internet pornography. It isn't difficult at all.

Giving Thanks

Indulge me for a few moments, will you? I write this column just as we approach the Thanksgiving. You will read it having spent the last few weeks recovering from the Christmas Holidays. It seems appropriate at this time, even conventional, to spend a few moments looking at what we all have to be thankful for, even joyous about. All too often the quotidian cares of life weigh us down unceremoniously, and we forget that we have much to be thankful for.

Libraries-As-Sex: The New Paradigm?

“Libraries are a lot like sex.” There just had to be a way, I kept telling myself as I watched somnambulant freshperson after somnambulant freshperson (is that what we’re calling them now?) drag his or her soporific self into our library research classes.

Ah, Libraries: How I Love the Smell of... Electronic Access?!

In the olden days, we Baby-Boomers would walk into our university or college libraries and pause just long enough to take in that wonderful smells of high grade cowhide leather and aging papyrus before rushing off to study. There was something about opening any leather bound edition of anything and being transported by the smell to some distant land, not unlike Charles Swann in Marcel Proust’s famous French novel, A La Recherché du Temps Perdu, Remembrance of Things Past.

Libraries in the Cyberage, Part IV

Is the book dead? Are libraries obsolete? Did the Internet murder both?

Bordering on Disaster?

Borders, the bookstore, provides us with an instructive case study regarding our collective futures. While Amazon and Barnes & Noble made changes that both streamlined and changed their services, Borders followed the “business as usual” model. That led to Chapter 11, the closing of nearly a third of their stores, and a complete restructuring of all that’s left. Not many industry analysts think even this will be enough to keep the company afloat.