Musings of an Academic Librarian

This was a very surprising find on Trademe.  It was listed by a charity shop in Christchurch.  I narrowly won the auction after setting an auto-bid of $250.  What I like about it are the thick, hand-cut pages.  It is number 19 of a limited edition of 250 copies and is signed by the author, Paul Gallico.  As a child I read his book "The Snow Goose." The Whittington Press was started by my mother's cousin, John Randle in 1971 in the Cotswolds, England.  The books are printed on presses dating from the 19th century.  They are bought by collectors and libraries and Auckland Libraries have more than 30 of them in the special collections.  I have met John and visited the press on two occasions. 

Herbert Randle (1880-1973), my mother's grandfather, was a professor of philosophy, author and librarian and has a brief entry in Wikipedia .  One of his books, Fragments from Dinnaga , is available in Google Books.   His son, John Niel Randle, won the VC posthumously in WWII and also has a Wikipedia page and is mentioned in various books on the VC which I personally own.

This word cloud shows the current top search terms in EBSCOhost.  The most popular search is "child development."  I'm assuming that students are looking for an online version of Laura Berk's "Child Development."  Unfortunately this book has never been made available electronically (it's a large, illustration heavy book and doesn't suit that format).  The next top search is "early childhood education," a very broad search.  I'm not sure what exactly students are hoping to find?  Then there's "teaching techniques for young children," this is a very popular book that has unfortunately not been released as an eBook.  Students need to go to the library catalogue to find the hard copy of it.  "Beginnings and Beyond" is yet another book that is print only.  I'm not sure why students are looking up "te whariki curriculum." They are given a free copy of it and it is also available online.  "Action r...

I became aware of author mills or vanity publishers during my first secondment as a liaison librarian at AUT.  Author mills spam academics asking for the rights to publish their research using print on demand technology and sell them for exorbitant prices.  They also sell poorly produced books that are in the public domain and can be accessed in multiple formats in the the Gutenberg Project. One example is LAP of which VDM Verlag is a subsidiary. I discovered that we had some shoddy looking books published by VDM on the shelves, even one of their Wikipedia books which are just a collection of Wikipedia articles on a particular topic.  I made sure that book was weeded!  I became fascinated with this shady world of academic publishing.  I read blog posts about VDM.  I looked on Amazon for them where there were thousands of their books on the most obscure subjects.  I even chastised one of our suppliers for listing them for sale on their website.  ...

It's still very easy to find dirty data in Google Scholar since they don't rely on data from publishers or library catalogue records for indexing, instead it's done automatically.  For example go to advanced search and do an author search for "author."  Lot of articles by A Author will come up like the example below. Do a search for "book title" and there are even more random results.

I get the impression that Google doesn't want to promote Google Scholar (GS).  For example, there's no link on Google Search to GS which I find very inconvenient.  There used to be a long time ago, why did they remove it?  GS is not in Google Apps on the Google Search homepage, yet everything else is there like Google Books, Earth and Blogger, even Plus is still there.  Also GS has no presence on Twitter so there's no news about updates and so on, yet there's a handle for Google Analytics and Google AI.  Also the GS homepage has not changed for a long time, unlike Google Search where, for example there is now an option for searching in Maori.  At least advanced search is easier to find in GS, it used to be hidden.