According to Facebook, many students at a certain liberal arts college don’t know how to use ILL (interlibrary loan), and are woefully unprepared when they get to their thesis.
I suppose I could blame it on the lack of instructional services, so I’ll fill in now.
Know this word: WORLDCAT. It is an amazing resource. You can get any book/recording/video/whatever in the world. That’s why it’s called worldcat. You’ll have so many more sources for your papers/projects. Also, no one’s going to judge you if you use it to ILL obscure graphic novels, or whatever else piques your interest. If Wells College had it, you institution probably has it. Go forth and ILL!
Jay Jordan
So, librarians and those library-ish, my class attended a presentation by Jay Jordan today, the CEO and President of OCLC this afternoon.
Let me tell you: it was a treat. He’s bound to be an impressive man, but I was taken by the practical application of his six-point presentation and his absolute, genuine humility as he shared what his company has done during his tenure.
Briefly, he reviewed six points libraries/librarians should get on board with: student-produced applications, mobile devices, evolution of search engines, cloud-sourcing collections (Google Books, Haithi, etc), cloud services (WorldCat Local) and linked open data.
With each point, Mr. Jordan offered simple examples exhibited by OCLC/WorldCat and other innovators.
A couple points I found particularly useful were:
-Student Apps, cooperative app devlopement (which led directly to mobile devices)
-Search engines with tailored relevancy rankings: Wolfram Alpha (computational knowledge) and Yebol (semantics based, tracks librarian search terms/patterns)
-Espresso Book Machines (yeah, sorry all, I just didn’t know about it before!)
-WorldCat Local (solution for small libraries) and WorldShare
-DBpedia, an example of link based data, DBpedia mines Wikipedia pages
It was a lot. It was fun. There was beer afterwards. More tomorrow, perhaps?
WorldCat.org: The World's Largest Library Catalog
worldcat.orgI don’t think enough people know about this wonderful tool. You don’t even have to create an account to use it.
WorldCAT x DMNDZ - Lock It [FREE DOWNLOAD]
WorldCAT x DMNDZ - Lock It
Second track off the Pop, Lock, and Drop EP
THE TRAP MiX
THE TRAP MIX — worldCAT
- GOES SO HARD!! FORTY MINUTES OF STRAIGHT RAGING!!
DMNDZ x WorldCAT- Lock It (Grabbitz Remix)
This kid is just 20 years old!!! he murdered this track, buried it, and resurrected it!!!
DOPENESS!!!!! Like right at the 1-minute mark, it gets DOPER!!!!
WorldCat
worldcat.orgYesterday I took an entirely unintentional survey of several intelligent friends, most of whom are involved in academia in some capacity. A surprising number of them had never heard of WorldCat. WorldCat is essentially a collected catalog of all the items in all the libraries in the world. Obviously, it is entirely bad ass. You should be ashamed of yourselves.
Worldcat
worldcat.orgfor when you want to rent a book/DVD/whatever that your local library doesn’t have. you can find out who has it and do an interlibrary loan.
just requested Moolade and Emitai by Ousmane Sembene…for research purposes…from Connecticut and my Alabama school better come through.
Christoper Hitchens on Leonard Cohen
When you fall ill, people send you CDs. Very often, in my experience, these are by Leonard Cohen. So I have recently learned a song, entitled “If It Be Your Will.” It’s a tiny bit saccharine, but it’s beautifully rendered and opens like this:
If it be your will,
That I speak no more,
And my voice be still,
As it was before…
I find it’s best not to listen to this late at night. Leonard Cohen in unimaginable without, and dissoluble from, his voice.
Hitchens, Christopher. Mortality. New York: Twelve, 2012. 48-49. Print.
Hitchens’ recent memoir recounts his bout with cancer. I know many people who have suffered from what Hitchens calls “The Big C,” yet after reading Mortality I realized that I had never fully understood how debilitating cancer is, how it affects all aspects of the body and psyche.
Hitchens’ insightful account is philosophical, witty and irreverent, yet still formal. He wrote the end of the book during his final days, so the story ends on sad a note, but it’s beautifully told:
Find Mortality at your local library:
http://www.worldcat.org/title/mortality/oclc/776526158&referer=brief_results
