Reuters is reporting that the new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has dropped the hyphens from over 16,000 words. The AskOxford Ask the Experts website even goes so far as to say that hyphen usage "doesn't really matter." Oxford reviewed over 2 billion words published after 2000 before making their decision. They noted a lack of use in journalism and online (formerly on-line). Casual writers expressed a lack of confidence in knowing when to use a hyphen, while professional writers and publishers avoid using hyphens because they are now considered ugly and old fashioned (formerly old-fashioned). Will you miss the hyphen? Check out some of the examples provided by Reuters:
Formerly hyphenated words split in two:
fig leaf
hobby horse
ice cream
pin money
pot belly
test tube
water bed
Formerly hyphenated words unified in one:
bumblebee
chickpea
crybaby
leapfrog
logjam
lowlife
pigeonhole
touchline
waterborne
via LISNews
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Monday, September 24, 2007
Beyond Wikipedia
The blog scholastici.us has posted 20 information resources besides Wikipedia that you can't live without. They have some great suggestions like ePodunk for city information, Scholarpedia for peer reviewed articles and Religion Online for religious primary texts. Some sites that weren't listed:
Internet Movie Database for all of your Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon needs.
THOMAS for free information on Federal legislation.
PubMed for published medical articles.
LifeHacker for daily productivity tips.
What are some of your favorite information sites?
via LISNews
Internet Movie Database for all of your Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon needs.
THOMAS for free information on Federal legislation.
PubMed for published medical articles.
LifeHacker for daily productivity tips.
What are some of your favorite information sites?
via LISNews
Friday, September 14, 2007
Bring your own cup, help save the planet
The first 24 people who bring their own cup to Cafe Biblio today, (Friday, September 14) will win a nifty prize! Just stop by the circulation desk to claim it!
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
An e-book tries some DVD like special features
Book publisher Harper Collins is releasing an e-book, Lady Amelia's Secret Lover by Victoria Alexander, that features author video commentary that pops up while you read. Is this interesting or annoying? I know that novelty of behind-the-scences features on DVD's has worn off for most people. Will e-books fare any better? Do you want the author popping up as you read to give her interpretation? Didn't she have her chance when she wrote the book in the first place? Or is this interesting and exciting? I suppose it depends on the author and what she has to say.
This reminds me of the hypertext novels at the turn of the millenium. (See The Unknown for example.) Only back then the authors seemed to be trying to do something more with the electronic book format. Hypertext novels allowed the reader to click on key words that interested them to find out more about that subject. In some ways it was like a hybrid of Wikipedia and Choose Your Own Adventure books.
Traditional books have long included maps, diagrams, figures and illustrations. Wouldn't it be cool to read Lord of the Rings and be able to reference a map that "updates" with the locations of characters depending on what page you access the map from? Maybe you could launch any song that is mentioned in the text just by clicking on it. There is a whole world of cool things you can do with electronic books, by far the least of which is author commentary. Let's hope that Lady Amelia's Secret Lover is a baby step in the right direction.
via Travelin' Librarian
This reminds me of the hypertext novels at the turn of the millenium. (See The Unknown for example.) Only back then the authors seemed to be trying to do something more with the electronic book format. Hypertext novels allowed the reader to click on key words that interested them to find out more about that subject. In some ways it was like a hybrid of Wikipedia and Choose Your Own Adventure books.
Traditional books have long included maps, diagrams, figures and illustrations. Wouldn't it be cool to read Lord of the Rings and be able to reference a map that "updates" with the locations of characters depending on what page you access the map from? Maybe you could launch any song that is mentioned in the text just by clicking on it. There is a whole world of cool things you can do with electronic books, by far the least of which is author commentary. Let's hope that Lady Amelia's Secret Lover is a baby step in the right direction.
via Travelin' Librarian
Thursday, September 6, 2007
The mindset of incoming freshman
Every year Beloit College issues a mindset list to help professors relate to incoming freshman. Here are some of the highlights:
1. What Berlin wall?
Once Germany was divided into East Germany and West Germany and the city of Berlin was divided by a literal wall. The infamous wall was one of the last and best-known symbols of the Cold War. The ideology that divided Germany crumbled as the Cold War played out and finally on November 9, 1989 East Germany announced that it would stop enforcing the boundary at the Berlin Wall. The German people on both side of the divide showed up in droves to tear down the wall by hand. Pieces of the Berlin wall ended up in places like museums and history departments, but perhaps the most interesting place to see pieces of the Berlin wall is in the men's restroom at the Main Street Station Casino in Las Vegas, where you can demonstrate your feelings about repressive communist regimes by urinating on a piece of history.
4. They never “rolled down” a car window.
This item has been subjected to much criticism on the Web already. First, this is an arbitrary and bizarre distinction to draw. Secondly, there are still cars manufactured with hand cranks for the windows. If you, like many students, didn't hop into a fresh-off-the-lot new car the second you got your driver's license, you probably have some experience with cars from past decades as well.
19. Classmates could include Michelle Wie, Jordin Sparks, and Bart Simpson.
Ay carumba! Unless you are a fictional cartoon character it is very unlikely you could have been classmates with "the" Bart Simpson. Even if you ignore the not so fine line between fiction and reality Bart's birthday is April 1, 1981.
32. They grew up in Wayne’s World.
Shyeah, right. If you are 18 this is probably news to you. Wayne's World was a popular Saturday Night Live sketch in the late eighties and early nineties about two metalheads who hosted a community access television show. With any luck you are only vaguely familiar with the phrases like "schwing," "blow chunks," and "...and monkeys might fly out of my butt." Should you wish to see what you were spared, Memorial Library has both Wayne's World movies on DVD. Party on!
44. Thanks to MySpace and Facebook, autobiography can happen in real time.
Some might argue that Twitter is the preferred method for real time autobiography, but I digress. Is there such a thing as Too Much Information anymore?
58. They get much more information from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert than from the newspaper.
The ever present debate over form vs. content. Is infotainment information or entertainment? Does adding comedy to news make it more digestible or simply trivialize serious matters? Don't forget that you can go beyond the sound byte by reading the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Wichita Eagle, Arkansas City Traveler, and Winfield Daily Courier at the library. (Not to mention all of our great databases.)
66. The World Wide Web has been an online tool since they were born.
E-mails, MySpace, Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, Wikipedia, Blackboard... you probably spend half of your day using technology that would have seemed like science fiction to your parents when they were 18.
Do any of the items on this ring a bell. Dead on? Totally off? The Beloit Mindset List is a fascinating insight into what people of your professors' generation think of people of your generation.
1. What Berlin wall?
Once Germany was divided into East Germany and West Germany and the city of Berlin was divided by a literal wall. The infamous wall was one of the last and best-known symbols of the Cold War. The ideology that divided Germany crumbled as the Cold War played out and finally on November 9, 1989 East Germany announced that it would stop enforcing the boundary at the Berlin Wall. The German people on both side of the divide showed up in droves to tear down the wall by hand. Pieces of the Berlin wall ended up in places like museums and history departments, but perhaps the most interesting place to see pieces of the Berlin wall is in the men's restroom at the Main Street Station Casino in Las Vegas, where you can demonstrate your feelings about repressive communist regimes by urinating on a piece of history.
4. They never “rolled down” a car window.
This item has been subjected to much criticism on the Web already. First, this is an arbitrary and bizarre distinction to draw. Secondly, there are still cars manufactured with hand cranks for the windows. If you, like many students, didn't hop into a fresh-off-the-lot new car the second you got your driver's license, you probably have some experience with cars from past decades as well.
19. Classmates could include Michelle Wie, Jordin Sparks, and Bart Simpson.
Ay carumba! Unless you are a fictional cartoon character it is very unlikely you could have been classmates with "the" Bart Simpson. Even if you ignore the not so fine line between fiction and reality Bart's birthday is April 1, 1981.
32. They grew up in Wayne’s World.
Shyeah, right. If you are 18 this is probably news to you. Wayne's World was a popular Saturday Night Live sketch in the late eighties and early nineties about two metalheads who hosted a community access television show. With any luck you are only vaguely familiar with the phrases like "schwing," "blow chunks," and "...and monkeys might fly out of my butt." Should you wish to see what you were spared, Memorial Library has both Wayne's World movies on DVD. Party on!
44. Thanks to MySpace and Facebook, autobiography can happen in real time.
Some might argue that Twitter is the preferred method for real time autobiography, but I digress. Is there such a thing as Too Much Information anymore?
58. They get much more information from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert than from the newspaper.
The ever present debate over form vs. content. Is infotainment information or entertainment? Does adding comedy to news make it more digestible or simply trivialize serious matters? Don't forget that you can go beyond the sound byte by reading the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Wichita Eagle, Arkansas City Traveler, and Winfield Daily Courier at the library. (Not to mention all of our great databases.)
66. The World Wide Web has been an online tool since they were born.
E-mails, MySpace, Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, Wikipedia, Blackboard... you probably spend half of your day using technology that would have seemed like science fiction to your parents when they were 18.
Do any of the items on this ring a bell. Dead on? Totally off? The Beloit Mindset List is a fascinating insight into what people of your professors' generation think of people of your generation.
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