In today's Times Higher Education Supplement (soon to become the Times Higher Education) I was surprised to find two items of interest in among the tedious lists of establishment gongs. Michael Jubb of the Research Information Network discusses the differences between librarians' and researchers' ideas about what librarians should be doing. Subject expertise and information literacy training are best delivered by academics, the researchers believe, and while librarians have tried to find a place in the open access movement, and in the management of institutional repositories, Jubb reports that most repositories are 'short of content and little used'.
Elsewhere, Rebecca Knuth reviews Lucien Polasatron's Books on Fire: the tumultuous story of the world's great libraries*. Her review appears twice, on page 24 with the headline, 'a flaming injustice that destroys our records' and again on page 25, with the same headline but shorn of the initial indefinite article. The final paragraphs of the two versions of the review differ. Another review appears in full on page 24, and then its latter half is repeated on page 25 with the headline repeated and an accompanying picture. A pity; too much sherry at the THES sub-editors New Year party, I suppose.
*Polastron, Lucien X
Books on Fire: the tumultuous story of the world's great libraries
London: Thames & Hudson, 2007
9780500513842
Technorati Tags: judd, libraryhistory, Polasatron, RIN, THES
