Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts database now FREE

This may be one of those things that everyone knows but me, but it looks like EBSCO has made their Library/Information Science & Technology Abstracts available now for free. The sexy URL redirects automatically to the longer internal URL. The press release with the announcement is here. [update: fixed link, thanks everyone]

ask the librarian column by Alice Maggio

Ask the Librarian is a well-written question-answering column written by Alice Maggio in the web publication Gaper’s Block. Can you say “reading list sidebar“? We should all have this sort of presence.

“Excuse me, can you help me?”

I heard this question as I sat, hunched over a book, on an overcast afternoon at a Brown Line platform on the Northwest Side. But a single woman, alone on an El platform, enjoys few things less than solicitations or unwanted advances from strangers. I steeled myself for a confrontation as I lifted my eyes from my book, the automatic “sorry” already halfway to my lips. But the word died on my tongue when I saw the young man standing in front of me.

email != domain name and other gaffes

You know how there are people who like to act like they know what they’re talking about, but sometimes don’t really know what they are talking about? This happens with technology issues a lot. I have students who will report to me “And then I clicked on the Microsoft and the Internet turned off and I got an error saying ‘Can not find it’ but then it started to go again.” They sincerely believe they are communicating their tech support issues to me, but to my ear they are speaking gibberish. I can usually untangle the meaning with a few well-placed questions however. This is also the case with the ALA press release hyping the 2006 election and the electronic voting procedure they are forever refining. I am concerned that neither the person who wrote this press release, nor anyone else who read it before it was sent out and posted on the web site, knows the difference between an email address and a domain name.