Category Archives: crimes and misdemeanors

Libraries: Be careful what your web sites “Like”

Imagine you’re working in a library, and someone with a suit and a buzz cut comes up to you, gestures towards a patron who’s leaving the building, and says “That guy you were just helping out; can you tell me … Continue reading

Posted in crimes and misdemeanors, data, libraries, people, privacy | 2 Comments

Getting bugs out of our systems

Very soon after we start learning to program, we start learning to deal with bugs.   Folks who have programmed for a while might forget that effective bug handling, like effective programming, is a skill that doesn’t come entirely naturally. Many … Continue reading

Posted in crimes and misdemeanors, people | 3 Comments

What you’re asked to give away

If you’ve published an article in an Elsevier journal, you might have missed an interesting aspect of the contract you signed with them to get published.  It goes something like this: I grant Elsevier the exclusive right to select and … Continue reading

Posted in copyright, crimes and misdemeanors, open access, publishing, serials | 1 Comment

What are the marketers of EndNote afraid of?

If you write papers on a regular basis, you’ll find it worthwhile to keep track of sources you might cite. When I was in grad school, I manually edited a BibTeX file to keep track of the references for my … Continue reading

Posted in citations, copyright, crimes and misdemeanors, formats, sharing | 1 Comment

Why Banned Books Week matters

It’s Banned Books Week again, and Amnesty International, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression and the American Library Association are among the groups noting the occasion. I’ve also updated the links on my ongoing exhibit Banned Books Online in … Continue reading

Posted in censorship, crimes and misdemeanors, libraries, online books, reading | 8 Comments

Don’t shade your eyes

Back in 2006, Paul Collins wrote an article in Slate asking “Will Google Book Search uncover long-buried literary crimes?” Now that we have large corpuses of texts searchable online, he argued, it will become much easier to find words lifted … Continue reading

Posted in crimes and misdemeanors, online books | 1 Comment