Sneaky, that whole hyperlinking thing.

OK. </pontification>

• Black Sheep
• Cavalier Stitches
• Crafty Librarian
• Detroit Diva
• Hairball
• Knit with Me
• Knitnick’s Studio
• Knitting from Outer Space
• KnittinK
• Librarian Knits
• Step into My Thimble
• The Knitting Revolutionary
• when usually it’s nothing
• Yarn Lust (who has a lovely guide to knitting Web rings on her site)

My hope is that these brilliant and arresting links will distract you from that other thing, of which I cannot speak, for I am heartsick.

If you can’t get the file to work (as I could not), perhaps you should read the Harper’s article Klein wrote in September 2004, called “Baghdad Year Zero: Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neo-con utopia”, which touches on much of the same?

And, is it just me, or is this CNN pulse-of-the-blogosphere entirely vacuous?

Turns out that that wasn’t the last time I saw the chapter before publication and officaldom after all. My editors & I have been going back and forth over style details for the past week and I’ve enjoyed the process a whole lot, niggling details have the potential to annoy a lot of people, but I like monkeying with them. It’s what made me think I might make a good bibliographer, but that’s for another day. In the last round of revisions, completed a few hours ago, I was checking endnotes, filling in missing URLs and retrieval times, verifying the completeness of citations, dates and page numbers. Good work is what it is, I’m just not sure I feel that way because it’s my work.

So, in one particular endnote I had left out a page number, and it happened to be for a citation in a book, instead of one of the many online journal articles I’d used, so no way to verify it until I got home to my copy of the book. Being on a roll, I tried to think of ways to get the details without losing time and I just about stopped short of e-mailing the author since no one likes to feel like they’re doing someone else’s homework, even if it means finding out about all the curious and interesting ways people are citing one’s work (my citation was neither curious nor interesting, just plain factual).

Then I remembered amazon.com. There are many reasons why I don’t like and refuse to shop at amazon, not the least of which is that, despite their innovative business model, their success is completely predicated on pill-popping consumerism (i.e.: don’t feel well? take a pill; need something? buy & receive it almost instantly from amazon) which is antithetical to everything I believe in as a librarian (the consumerism part, not the fast part; I think libraries have a distance to go to catch up with the fast and format-efficient information delivery that patrons are demanding).

Still, credit where it’s due & all that, you have to admire anyone (person, company) who is not content to rest on their laurels, and there certainly is no laurel-resting going on at amazon. As you may or may not know, they introduced a full-text search capability last Fall to some initial resistance (publishing industry) and mild controversy (libraries). I personally thought it was brilliant and I’ve even used it at the reference desk to assist patrons in full-text searching edited volumes for their research topics (that’s right, amazon at the reference desk. This is fodder for a whole other post, surely).

Before today, the “Search Inside” feature hadn’t made any significant impact on my own research habits, I had merely played with it to quality-test for words I knew were in certain books (it faired well). Today I got a first-hand look at what a powerful research tool it can be when I called up the book for which I had an incomplete citation, performed a full-text search for the phrase I quoted and insufficiently cited, got the page number complete with search results in-context, and viewed the page to verify it. I can’t imagine that there is a single undergrad, grad student, or faculty member who wouldn’t be delighted to find out about this invaluable resource.

Personally, it saved me a bunch of time — maybe 24 hours (turnaround time). But am I, as a library user, put out that my library does not offer this sort of thing in the catalogue? Not really, especially if I know where else I can get it (besides, librarians are probably bad people to ask because we don’t have the same one-stop-shopping/single-click-info-retrieval impulse that a lot of library patrons/consumers do). As a librarian, I’m happy that you’re hard-pressed to find another librarian complaining about the feature anymore because full-text searching of scanned books is a resource that I’m glad I have access to, and I’m happy to teach students how to exploit it at the reference desk or in the classroom. I say let the rich corporations spend the money to do this, especially if the rest of us can keep taking advantage of it.