Librarian Way

Gerry Mckiernan, Science and Technology Librarian at Iowa State University Library, posted the following to lita-l@ala1.ala.org and several other lists of interest to librarians.

I’m pleased to announce the launch of Friends: Social Networking Sites for Engaged Library Services, ‘a blog devoted to application and use of online social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace for any and all types of library-related programs or services.’

Friends will include announcements, general news, as well as citations and links to significant articles, books, and other publications about online social networking in general and their use by libraries and librarians.

The Friends blog is at: onlinesocialnetworks.blogspot.com/

Their FeedBurner feed is:
feeds.feedburner.com/FriendsSocialNetworkingSitesForEngagedLibraryServices

Library students studying Web technology at the San Jose State University School of Library and Information Science in a library 240 class taught by Debbie Faires are creating blogs. The main page, which I expect will stay around, has links to the individual student blogs in the sidebar: 240 Things.

I just discovered O’Reilly Labs Code Search. This is a search engine that locates code in “nearly 700 O’Reilly books.” For example, you can search for “ajax” and you will get a Web page that lists code that has been identified with the word “ajax.” There is a one-line string from the book that contains the keyword searched. They give you the book name, author, and page number, in addition to other things. You can view the code by clicking on “Full View.” There is also a “Similar Code” at the bottom right of the code.

This is really useful because I own a lot of O’Reilly computer books. It is really time-consuming to try to track down some code I vaguely recall. Of course, this is to sell books, as it helps to identify which books have the kinds of in-depth details that a programmer often needs.