As it turns out, librarians aren’t the only ones competing with Google. In fact, we’re not even the only ones offering an alternative to Google when it comes to helping people find information. There’s Microsoft’s Bing, of course. And Yahoo! Search, at least until 2012, when Bing will begin providing Yahoo’s search results (though some [...]

Only a few information technology organizations predict the future by inventing it.1 One of the canonical examples is Xerox PARC, which in the early 1970′s produced the first mouse, pioneered Graphical User Interfaces, invented Ethernet, and developed the first laser printer, along with dozens of other innovations. Among contemporary organizations, the inheritor of this lineage [...]

Since October something has been weighing on my professional mind: my abusive relationship with Google. I love Google, I don’t ever want to leave my Gmail, my Gchat, my GoogleDocs, my web searches, my Google Reader, but right now I wish I weren’t so dependent on it. The weight to which I am referring is [...]

Depending on books can feel like relying on snail mail. “Now that I’ve showed you how to find some articles,” I say to people at the reference desk, “I’ll show you how to use our website to find some books you might want to check out. And after that, wouldn’t it make your grandmother’s day [...]

As a teenager, I never tried drugs because I didn’t like the idea of any substance affecting the processes of my brain. It never occurred to me that the long hours I spend working, reading, and researching in front of a computer could have a similar effect. Recently I found out that it could be [...]