Rhodarian

Over at Providence College, the Class of 2009 is embracing the new IM reference service. Librarian Beatrice Pulliam reports in her blog edifice ref that “the new kids are sooooooo plugged in”. Find out how this year’s freshman class uses technology in their college library.

The Internet Public Library just turned 10. In celebration, there’s an interesting timeline of IPL’s development.

Many academic libraries are finding that students want their libraries open 24/7. Andrew Albanese talks about the reasons and how some academic libraries have responded. It’s interesting that “library as place” is seen in a different context. Read the article in Library Journal.

Library Journal now has four feeds available. LJ News, Infotech News, and Book News are now available via RSS as well as the original RSS feed, the Tech Blog. Add them to your aggregator!

The American Library Association has established a fund to provide assistance to affected libraries in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Donations can be made online at https://secure.ga3.org/03/alakatrina. ALA’s Libraries and Hurricane Katrina has an extensive list of resources about the disaster.

SearchEngineWatch reports that Google has launched Industrial Strength Blog Search. While RSS and XML feeds have been included in Google search results for a while, this is a specialized tool and makes Google the first major search engine to launch such a tool. The beta Blogsearch tool is available at http://google.com/blogsearch

A notice from RI Multitype Library Outreach for Health Information Grant coordinators Mary Ann Slocomb (Rhode Island Hospital) and Tovah Reis (Brown University):
“Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM): no longer a fad” is the next course in the consumer health series. This class will provide an introduction to the vocabulary, research, and trends in the […]

Earn CEUs at Persistence of Memory Conference

LibriVox is a relatively new (since August 2005) movement to bring books in the public domain to life through podcasting. Inspired by the success of wikipedia, LibriVox selects books from the Project Gutenberg’s database of public domain books. Volunteers read and record one or a few chapters at a time to mp3 format. […]

The Providence Journal reported today that workers at the Providence Public Library voted in favor of unionizing. The vote was 53-39. Twenty professional librarians, who had the option of forming a separate union, voted 14-6 to create a single union with other staff and clerical workers. Read the Providence Journal article.