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Showing posts from December, 2010

Paper, scissors, e-ink?

My second Christmas in the Graduate School Media Zoo has made me aware of the growing popularity of e-book readers, with the most popular request to Santa being for Amazon's new Kindle . I have been using the Library's Kindle 3 (and the 2nd generation Kindle that came before it) for some time and have formed a largely positive impression of its usefulness as a tool for scholarship. The Kindle is a small device, but its capacity to store a large amount of text is liberating for someone used to carrying around a backbreaking quantity of books and papers. The Kindle 3's native support for PDF files makes reading journal articles easy, although the fixed format sometimes means that articles from some of the larger journals are best read with the device on its side (zooming means scrolling). The ability to highlight and annotate text is essential for the academic market, and the Kindle allows hightlights, notemaking, and even sharing of passages via twitter and facebook for thos

Blogging for researchers

If you're at the "blogging for researchers" session today here are some of the links you will need: The GSRR blog http://gradschoolreadingroom.blogspot.com Postgraduate student blogging communities at Leicester http://attic-museumstudies.blogspot.com/ http://www.newhistorylab.org/ PhD blogs http://thethesiswhisperer.wordpress.com/ http://findsandfeatures.wordpress.com/ http://malenel.wordpress.com/ http://www.jobs.ac.uk/blogs/real-life/ http://www.prospects.ac.uk/p/articles/phd_blog_43.jsp Blogs by academics at Leicester http://www.microbiologybytes.com/blog/ …and elsewhere http://mat.gsia.cmu.edu/blog/ http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/