As librarians we constantly strive to ensure that our websites are easy to navigate and our language is relatively jargon-free. This can be a challenge when there are so many resources and services to highlight and also a wide variety of users such as underclassmen, grad students, research faculty and members of the wider community. We […]
Blog | Information Literacy, Research, Dayton History
How to Organize Your Story Ideas
When you’re attempting to write a novel, an involved short story or a non-fiction book, you need some way to organize your ideas. None of us write very effectively by starting with the opening sentence of page one and proceeding in a perfectly linear fashion. As with any creative process there’s no one “right” way […]
Is Amazon Poised for World Domination? Is It Even Profitable?
Amazon is often portrayed in the media as an unstoppable behemoth indiscriminately crushing everything from indie bookstores to big box stores on its way to world domination. But recently more have started to question that narrative. Amazon’s July attempt at entering the smartphone market was a highly-publicized disaster, but critics are pointing to far more […]
Is Staring at Screens Too Long Harmful to My Health?
These days, not many of us earn our paychecks by laboring out in the fields or at a factory. The transition to a knowledge economy has resulted in some great advantages, but it also means that more and more jobs now consist of sitting at a desk all day starting at a computer. New research […]
Is Amazon’s eBook Subscription Service a Big Deal?
Last week Amazon launched a subscription service called Kindle Unlimited, immediately dubbed the “Netflix for ebooks” by just about everyone. It costs $9.99 per month to subscribe, which works out to be $120 per year. For that reasonable price you get unlimited access to a library of over 600,000 books as well as around 2,000 audiobooks. That […]
Can Smartphones Better Connect Us To, Not Distract Us From, the Real World?
Recently I wrote about location-based mobile apps and their ability to allow us to interact with our surrounding environment. Examples of this trend include “checking in” to a business, finding other people nearby or redeeming a special deal. Beyond possible issues with surveillance and ad targeting, this business of walking around using our smartphones raises another crucial […]