Genie Tyburski mentions problems with Google's pop-up blocker in Research News for 30 October 2003.
Another reason to be wary of pop-up blockers of all types relates to an issue with Westlaw's Find and Print.
Select records from OCLC's Worldcat are soon to be included in Google search results according to "OCLC Project Opens WorldCat Records to Google"
Books have been getting a lot of attention on the web this week. And for good reason. There is, obviously, a tremendous amount of information contained in books. But finding out which book has the information you need has almost always involved getting your hands on a copy of it. In this electronic age, this is not very efficient. Whereas journal information has been accessible in full-text electronically for many years. My guess is that, for that reason, journal literature gets much more use.
Leave it to Amazon to be the first to offer full-text searching of books.
If you don't get Law Technology News, you need to visit their web site and sign up. They publish some excellent articles, and it's free!
There are several good articles in this month's issue. One article of particular interest is Knowledge Management: U.S. or U.K.? Who Really Rules?" (Requires registration.)
Sally Gonzalez has some very interesting insights into how KM is evolving in both countries.
Are virtual resources starting to successfully replace print? Are attorneys making strides in switching to virtual research? You may know the answer to that question for your own institution/firm, but perhaps you've wondered what the overall trend is in this area. If so, you may want to read an article recently published in the Law Library Journal, Feasibility and Viability of the Digital Library in a Private Law Firm
While some of the results were fairly predictable, there are some surprises.
Spotted on excited utterances, there's a new book out on knowledge management for lawyers, Knowledge Management and the Smarter Lawyer
What a great book! Get a Life - You Don't Need a Million to Retire Well, is easily the best book on financial planning I've ever read. Ralph Warner disputes many standard financial planning assumptions and discusses the factors important to a happy retirement that have nothing to do with money. I'm going to start giving this book as a gift to my family and friends. (Just don't tell them!)
After many years of waiting, Pasadena finally has train service to downtown Los Angeles! I love taking the train to work. It gives me another hour a day to read! So I'm doing better keeping up with my professional reading.
This morning I read Knowledge Services and SLA's History: An Interview with Guy St. Clair, in SLA's Information Outlook, September 2003. I know, it doesn't sound like fascinating reading, but I was on the train and figured why not. Turns out, the entire interview is worth the read. But what particularly struck me was his description of the differences between special librarians and "other" (academic-type) librarians.
Violation of copyright in the for-profit environment became a difficult to control problem with the advent of the photocopy machine. But now that many newsletter-type publications are available in electronic form, it's even easier than for a recipient of copyrighted material to "duplicate" the material by sending it on to small or large groups of people, without permission of the publisher. And, in fact, there are still publishers who are reluctant to issue electronic versions of their newsletters for that very reason.
So this news should strike fear in the heart of all risk-management types.
For better or for worse, web searchers are used to going to one place to search - Google. So is there a way we can make our systems more google-like by building systems that will search more than one source? Yes, according to this article in Library Journal - Trumping Google? Metasearching's Promise
