Background Readings and Resources

Books

__Forced Ranking: Making Performance Management Work__. Dick Grote. Harvard Business School Press. 2005.

__Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management__. Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton. Harvard Business School Press. 1-59139-862-2 ($27.50)

Resources

Current Cites. California Digital Library. http://lists.webjunction.org/currentcites/. Edited by the California Digital Library’s Roy Tennant, Current Cites is a monthly annotated bibliography of selected articles, documents and digital resources about information technology that impact the library and information science profession. Most annotations provide direct links to freely accessible resources.

Library Literature (LibraryLit). OCLC FirstSearch. This subscription database available through the library provides abstracts for articles from 360 library journals and publications since 1980.

Pew Internet & American Life Project. http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/133/report_display.asp. The Pew Internet & American Life Project produces reports that explore the impact of the Internet on families, communities, work and home, daily life, education, health care, and civic and political life.

Special Libraries Association. http://www.sla.org. The trade association devote to special libraries. Although most of the information on this site is for members-only, it provides a great resource for current job openings in the field. Drill down to the SLA divisions, and you will find that many have web sites with information about their sector.

TechCrunch. http://www.techcrunch.com/. A blog dedicated to “obsessively” updating readers on new Web 2.0 services, technologies and applications.

Articles

Abram, Stephen. "Web 2.0 - huh?! Library 2.0, Librarian 2.0." __Information Outlook__. Dec 2005 v9 i12 p44(3). General Reference Center Gold Database (use Journal Search). Good explanation of the role and impact of Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 in today's information environment.

Gandel, Paul. “Libraries: Standing at the Wrong Platform, Waiting for the Wrong Train?" Educause Review Nov./Dec. 2005. http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm05610.pdf. Widely discussed article by Syracuse University’s CIO that frames the debate about whether libraries can survive in the Google era.

Studies

OCLC. Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources (2005): A Report to the OCLC Membership. 2005. http://www.oclc.org/reports/pdfs/Percept_all.pdf. Seminal study by OCLC of 3,300 people’s information and library use patterns and preferences. Results show many people around the world have a favorable image of the library, which they associate with books. However, information searching is now dominated by search engines, with Google leading the pack by a wide margin.