Carnival of the Infosciences #5 Welcome to the 5th edition and the beginning of the second month of the Carnival of the Infosciences.

Unfortunately, the main thing across the blogosphere this week has been the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. So many bloggers have posted requests for help and links to places providing more information and coverage. Our hearts and prayers go out to all those impacted.

Another meme about the 'sphere was the 3108 Day -- it's supposed to look like blog -- this was an opportunity to introduce 5 blogs of interest. You can look here or here in Technorati to get some great recommendations.


Joy Weese Moll of Wanderings of a Student Librarian posted on how library collection management is like emptying a house.

Mark Lindner of ...the thoughts are broken... posted an extended summary and discussion of the 1996 Library Trends article from his advisor, Carole Palmer, on "'boundary' work by interdisciplinary scientists, their information needs, and the impact on librarians."

Von Totanes of Filipino Librarian made some very interesting observations about the nature of leadership in Filipino libraries and library associations. While his post is mainly concerned with the situation in his country, I'm sure readers from all over will recognize a lot. I've worked in very hierarchical organizations heavy with individual leaders (obviously non-library) and I've recently been involved with associations in which the members, like he mentions, "just take turns at the leadership positions" or try to make all decisions by committee or concensus. Is there a leadership vacuum in the library world? Do we need to spend more time in library schools and in associations building leaders instead of just teaching management? hmmm.

Editor's Picks
Randy over at STLQ posted a review of MacLeod, Roderick A, and Jim Corlett, eds. 2005. Information Sources in Engineering. 4th ed. München: KG Saur. 'Tis the season for guides to sources in the sci/tech area with recent publications of two great math resource books, the new Walford, and and upcoming engineering book from Dekker. Save your pennies and Randy's review to see what you should get for your library.

Chris Sherman posted a series of articles this week describing what RSS feeds are, how to find them, how to read them, etc, on the Search Engine Watch Blog.

JohnT of Library Clips posts a great summary of the ways to search the internet ("Directory vs. PageRank vs. clustering vs. social search vs. personalised search vs. human-indexed web vs. social tags vs. computer processed tags vs. rss").

Amanda Robertson of Data Obsessed posted a summary of a document by Vivisimo's Raul Valdes-Perez on the changing role of corporate librarians. (btw- I'm on record hating this point of view!)

Gary Price points to an interesting post by Jim Hedger on Search Engine Journal about school kids and the major web search engines.

The Krafty Librarian posts information on podcasts for medical libraries.

Steven Cohen of Library Stuff did a small roundup of online collection management/home book collection cataloging tools.

Updated: 9/5 to add an editorial pick. I'm stopping now!

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Next week carnival #6 will be hosted by Mark Lindner at ...the thoughts are broken... . Please submit your posts via e-mail to mark dot lindner at insightbb dot com.

Here are the previous editions:
08 August 2005: Carnival of the Infosciences #1
15 August 2005: Carnival of the Infosciences #2
22 August 2005: Carnival of the Infosciences #3
30 August 2005: Carnival of the Infosciences #4  ¶ 8:30 AM| |cites (technorati) |