Early review of my next book

The manuscript of my next book Searching 2.0 has been reviewed by an outside (non-publisher) reviewer and things are looking good. Although the reviewer agreed to allow her comments to be used in  pre-publicity I've not asked them about quoting here so I've removed identifiable details. This isn't the full review but you'll get the point.

Truly, this is one of the most useful books I’ve read this year... It came just in time for me personally to continue my own professional development. The information is accessible for Web 2.0 tool beginners. However, the application of the tools and the full information he provided about the ways in which the tools work was clear enough to give me the extra bits I need to know about and organize the ideas for me. I’m recommending this book to my friends at [a large well known academic institution] as I type this up.

One thing I really found useful and will consider adapting for my own teaching are his ‘mental exercises’ to explain what he is trying to say.

He convinced me to try Delicious again – I’ve tried it but find it a pain to share so now with his instructions I’m going to re-attempt the idea.

...if this were a workshop I’d attend somehow. I really want a final copy of this book – I have printed out the draft rather than just reading it online because I want to go back through it and find some quotes and ideas that I will use in my own workshops. I will cite properly.

I will be adding it to the reading list for the...courses I teach. I will – and have – recommend it to my colleagues as well.

[ChapterOne] is a short workshop in the basics in itself. The discussion of folksonomies vs. taxonomies clarified the issue for me in a way I can make use of in my teaching and research. Convergence, Remixability, and Participation discussions place the whole big Web 2.0 snarl into neatly understandable justifications for using Web 2.0 tools in the providing library services. Most other justifications I’ve read or listened to at conferences emphasize only the participation piece and that is not enough to justify extensive time and labor spent on these tools. Convergence is a great concept for justifying it. Remixability gave me some neat ideas that I hope I have time to implement in my own work this winter.

[Chapter Three] will be very effective in clarifying for librarians when and why to use Web search engines and when and why to bookmark or otherwise create a knowledgebase of what they find when they do use them so they can more efficiently re-use good results.

Wikipedia [Chapter Four] is such a touchy subject for librarians – [a certain listserv] has an ongoing argument when the topic is re-broached. Next time it comes up I will post a citation for this book and chapter for those who are confused or being fed bad information to use to learn the facts.

[The rest of the book contains] good discussions of specific search tools. Again even though I am not a beginner at this I picked up either some new information about each tool that will be useful in my work and teaching, but also good thoughts and ideas to use in my teaching. I never thought about teaching students to search their own desktop… good idea. Not sure how I’d teach it web-based though.

Just when I thought the long dark tunnel that has been the writing of this book was never going to end I read this. This has totally made my day!

I've been peer-reviewed

My first peer-reviewed article "Firefox Search Plugins: Searching Your Library in the Browser" has just been published in Volume 1, Number 1 of The Journal of Web Librarianship. I'm not specifically excited over the fact that it's a peer-reviewed journal. I'm not an academic so that's not exactly a requirement for me. I've written eight previous books and dozens of articles so I'm not exactly lacking in the publication category. Yes, I'm glad to have another article published (it has been a while and no, Christie, I haven't forgotten that podcasting article we talked about at CIL) as always, but the peer-reviewed thing at this point is just fitting into that "nice, added bonus" category.

However, I do have one, not so much complaint, as a concern over this whole experience: the fact that an article I submitted to the journal back in July 2006, wasn't published until July 2007. One year for a technology article to see print. These day's that's not even vaguely fast enough. In my specific case, at the last minute (December 2006), I had to get an extra few sentences added to the beginning of the article to say that the code I'm talking about was replaced with a different code/method with the release of Firefox 2.0 but that my code would still work. (Given the opportunity I would have re-written the whole article but the process was too far along for that to happen.)

The world of peer-reviewed journals is not mine. I don't have suggestions for fixing this, nor will I spend all that much time on it. I just needed to say all this, as I'm sure I'm not the only author with these concerns.

I'm in Walt's index

I just got our copy of Walt Crawford's Balanced Libraries: Thoughts on Continuity and Change and lo, what do I find in the index, but my name!

"Do you have a carefully developed acceptable use policy for internet access within the library? Why? What makes internet resources different from books or magazines, in terms of acceptable use within a library setting? Wouldn't it be more straightforward to have an overall acceptable-use policy that applies to all library resources? Eliminating redundant policies saves time and makes application more consistent and defensible. For that matter, you might be able to simplify library policies in general by taking a different approach. Read "Don't doesn't work" by Michael Sauers. I find his case for consistent, simplified, behavioral policies compelling—and almost certainly time-saving."

Thanks Walt! I can't wait to read the rest of the book.

Book signing @ CIL2007

For those of you that still don't own a copy of Blogging and RSS: A Librarian's Guide and will be attending Computers in Libraries in April, I will be doing a book signing at the Information Today booth. It will be during the afternoon coffee break on Tuesday from 2:30-3:15pm. See you there!