This is the second part of an article about database indexing practices. View part one Finally, the ERIC database serves a very different user group, so it features a fundamentally different indexing scheme. ERIC is the largest database of educational literature, so it focuses on issues in education research and policy instead of library and […]
Academic Librarianship
An Investigation into the Indexing Practices of Four Databases: Part One
After reading a paper by Gloria Leckie titled “Desperately Seeking Citations,” I assigned it three keyword terms I thought were representative of the subject matter. These terms were “information seeking behavior-undergraduates,” “scholarly research” and “academic libraries-role.” [1] After comparing these to four databases, LISTA, LISA, Library Lit and ERIC, results showed five very different systems […]
John Stuart Mill on Intellectual Freedom: His Thoughts Applied to Today’s Information Landscape
In his essay On Liberty, published in 1859, philosopher John Stuart Mill makes a strong case for the necessity of intellectual freedom in society, outlining four points that would have a profound effect on librarianship. He argued that any and all opinions that are not heard may in fact contain truth; that the “collision of […]
The Information-Seeking Behavior of Today’s Latin American Researchers
The article “Researching Latin America: A Survey of How the Next Generation Is Doing Its Research” by Potts and Mazurkiewicz in Latin American Research Review investigates the information-seeking behavior of a very specific population: advanced-level university students belonging to the Latin American Studies Association (LASA). In particular, the article examines how these students conducted their […]
Harper Collins’ 26 Checkout Policy Challenges Traditional Role of the Library
Harper Collins recently released a new library ebook policy in which the licenses to its content expire after 26 uses, forcing libraries to purchase them again. This represents a very dangerous trend affecting the very role of the library, and underscores a need for library and information science professionals to take a stand against competing […]
Metadata: Uniting Baseball Fans and Librarians
Metadata is fundamental to the organization of all types of information: attributes such as title, creator and topic help us identify different works as well as locate and access them through information retrieval tools such as a search engine or library catalog. Although it’s commonly boiled down to a simple definition of “data about data,” […]