Wednesday, January 24, 2007

C&I 7:2 Available

Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large volume 7, issue 2 (February 2007) is now available for downloading.

The 22-page issue (PDF as always, but each section is also available as an HTML separate from the C&I home page) includes:

  • Bibs & Blather - Cites on a Plane and other oddities

  • Perspective: Predictions and Scorecards - Back to a roundup of some other people's forecasts and outcomes, after missing a year

  • Perspective: Conference Speaking: I Have A Little List - Conference speaking arrangements have become a bit more transparent, and it's time for a Lobachevskian job on the Gordon/Salo/West works.

  • Finding a Balance: The Balanced Librarian - Discussing a prerequisite for balanced libraries.

  • Following Up and Feedback - three items.

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Cites on a Plane

If you've been reading Cites & Insights all along (or at least for the last 18 months), and if you have no curiosity about the miracle of Word XP's AutoSummarize, you can delete this message.

If not--well, as promised, there is not a Midwinter 2007 issue of Cites & Insights. (The next issue should come out shortly after ALA Midwinter, around January 24-26. I'd like to keep to 12 issues this year...)

But there is a phantom edition, designed for those who've told me they read C&I on the plane to Midwinter or Annual.

Cites on a Plane 2007 is available for downloading

HTML separates are not available, because there's nothing new here.

The 38-page thing--it's not an issue--will disappear on or about January 23. So far, I haven't figured out how to make printed copies do a Mission:Impossible, but...

Other than three introductory paragraphs under the heading "This Issue Does Not Exist," and a single line above each section saying where it originally appeared, there is no new material in this thing.

There's also no table of contents--after all, it's not an issue.

If you've read all the stuff, but you *are* interested in how Word AutoSummary handles a long, complicated pair of texts, you could just print out pages 32-38, "Library 2.0 for Short Attention Spans"--an unmodified 10% AutoSummary of "Library 2.0 and 'Library 2.0'" and "Finding a Balance: Libraries and Librarians."

The rest of the issue is essays from the last 18 months that appear to have had relatively low readership, but no more than one essay from any given issue.

  • From C&I 5:9 - Perspective: Predicting the Future of Academic Libraries
  • From C&I 5:12 - Net Media Perspective: Analogies, Gatekeepers and Blogging
  • From C&I 6:7 - Perspective: You Just Can't Understand
  • From C&I 6:11 - Trends & Quick Takes
  • From C&I 6:5 - The 40 original "facets" from the full-issue smorgasbord. (OK, 39 original and one from Walt at Random.)
  • And "Library 2.0 for Short Attention Spans."

A caution about that final section: Word clearly favors the first paragraph under headings, which means that lots of paragraphs aren't indented. It also appears to favor standalone paragraphs--most of the one-sentence quotes appear. Otherwise--well, I swear I didn't change the results at all. Maybe you can come to conclusions about how AutoSummary works.