The iPad and other tablet computers aren’t laptops and they aren’t smartphones, so many people are wondering why they’d ever need a new device that sits awkwardly in the middle. You can’t put it in your pocket but it doesn’t have the full capabilities of a “real” computer. But Apple sold over 15 million iPads […]
Technology
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 […]
Differences Between Library Catalogs and Amazon.com
Introduction: Users may begin their search for information on a topic with a known item, but be interested in expanding their search to locate related material. In a physical collection, they can do this by locating an item on the shelf and then browsing the titles in proximity to that item to look for other […]
What Are Apple’s Textbook and Educational Publishing Goals for the iPad?
For many, print textbooks are a vital and unchanging part of education. Writers and editors craft the books under the direction of a publisher. Teachers (or states) pick from the top titles on the market to be used in their classrooms. College students buy from their university bookstore, lug large volumes around in backpacks, and […]
Concerns Over Google’s Social Features and the Loss of Objective Search
Google’s key feature has always been simplicity: a clean, uncluttered search interface that returns the most relevant webpages for any query. The search giant would weigh a variety of factors to measure a page’s authority, most importantly its inbound links, and rank the list of results accordingly. But recently, Google’s quest to increase personalization and […]
Is Siri a Threat to Google and Search Engines?
With Google’s current dominance over search, it’s natural to speculate about possible threats. Microsoft’s Bing, for one, is investing big time resources in hopes of gaining market share, and up-and-coming services such as DuckDuckGo are also intriguing. But the strongest competitor might not be a traditional search engine at all, but rather a fundamental new […]