Author Archives: Iris

15 Things About Me And Books

By Iris | Published: Wednesday, March 10th, 2010
A while back, some other librarians revived an old meme. Way back then, I started this list. Today, I found it in my drafts. I was a late reader. I don’t remember exactly how late (being home schooled at that point was probably a blessing). I do remember being a little mortified when my younger sister [...]
Posted in random thoughts | 2 Comments

Close Reading Data Visualizations

By Iris | Published: Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
As is often the case with such TED talks, I watched Gary Flake’s demonstration of Pivot with a mixture of awe and jealousy. I want that kind of thing for the deep web as well as the free web! Go watch it, then come back. … No, really. I’m about to reference a specific visualization, so you should [...]
Posted in random thoughts | 2 Comments

How Big Is My Library?

By Iris | Published: Monday, March 8th, 2010
I’ve been mulling over Steve’s latest post about some of the ways in which knowing the number of books in your library is either impossible or not very meaningful. And I imagine that for most of the parents on these college tours this number really isn’t very meaningful at all. For it to be meaningful [...]
Posted in random thoughts | 2 Comments

OAIster

By Iris | Published: Friday, March 5th, 2010
For those of you who don’t know OAIster, if you have any reason to search for digitized primary sources, you should check it out. It’s a union catalog of digital library holdings. It’s chief asset is wonderfully descriptive metadata. And like with other collections of collections, I recommend searching OAIster to find which digital collections [...]
Posted in search and discovery | Leave a comment

Budgets, Databases, and Trust

By Iris | Published: Thursday, March 4th, 2010
It’s been an interesting week. We learned that the Bibliography of the History of Art will die at the end of the month due to lack of funding (Carleton’s news item on the topic), and we learned that back in January, CSA/ProQuest stopped providing Biology Digest because it was a free database and therefore not [...]
Posted in random thoughts | 3 Comments