Amy Disch, library director of The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, sends along these links via the News Librarians' listserv (newslib@listserv.unc.edu).  This is a gentle reminder about how the foundations of good publications today rest, first, on the integration of library AND IT skills.

Watch them in the order listed:

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWY8OBMlroI
2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYwoHCdIDKU
3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFzHH5LRK2M&NR=1
4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6uWmT2TXlQ

The phrases "community journalism" and "convergence journalism" have been around for decades (in the case of the former) and at least 10 years in the case of the latter.  For a long time, "community journalism" referred to the publishing of "...a small daily, 20,000 or less, or maybe a larger weekly or twice- or thrice-weekly." And "convergence" most often talked about using various print and Audio/Visual media to deliver the same old reportorial product of traditional newspapers and broadcast.

Finally, some are starting to see that the real and much-needed "convergence" has to be implemented on the front-end of the reportorial process.  Paul Niwa, at Emerson College, has done just that with some graduate students who created bostonchinatown.org.  And we are grateful to Niwa for writing a "how and why we did it" piece for the current issue of the Convergence Newsletter.

Here's Niwa's lede, but do check out the entire piece:

"Community Embraces a Converged Journalism-Sourcing Project

By Paul Niwa, Emerson College

Boston’s Chinatown is one of the largest and oldest Asian American neighborhoods in the country. Yet, this community of 40,000 does not even have a weekly newspaper. Coverage of the neighborhood in the city’s metropolitan dailies is also weak. In 2006, The Boston Globe and the Boston Herald mentioned Chinatown in 78 articles. Only 16 percent of the sources quoted in those articles were Asian American, indicating that newspapers relied on information from non-residents to cover the neighborhood. With all this in mind, I created the bostonchinatown.org project as an experiment to build a common sourcebook for newsrooms." 

Yes, call us fickle and lacking in loyalty when it comes to note-taking and research organization tools.  Does anyone else remember the 5x8 cards with holes punched on all four perimeters?  You entered "tags" or keywords by clipping out the outer edge of the hole, and when you needed to find a particular note card, a knitting needle-sized wire was inserted into the whole pack.  Shake the cards and the desired note fell out.  Sometimes.

Since going digital 25 years ago, we've tried dozens of tools to try and bring some order to what we've turned up online and need to save.  Most were fine innovations and advances at the time, but there was often something that didn't quite meet all of our needs or desires.  That still might be true, but a new entry in the research management derby (thanks to the cite from The Scout Report quoted below) delivers up an impressive new tool.

Zotero

http://www.zotero.org/

"It can be hard to keep Tom Wolfe and Thomas Wolfe straight at times, and if you are working on an academic paper that incorporates both of these august characters, you probably want to keep those research sources in good order. Thanks to Zotero, it is very easy to do just that. Zotero is a Firefox extension that helps users collect, manage, and cite their research sources. Zotero can automatically capture citation information from web pages, store PDF files, and also export these citations with relatively ease. This very helpful extension is compatible with computers running Firefox 2.0." [KMG]

From O'Reilly Radar's Publishing blog comes this interesting item. See http://radar.oreilly.com/publishing/

The Traditional Future

"A prominent U.S. sociologist and student of professions, Andrew Abbott of the University of Chicago, has written a thought-provoking thesis on what he terms "library research" -- that is, research as performed with library-held resources by historians, et. al, via the reading and browsing of texts -- compared to social science research, which has a more linear, "Idea->Question->Data->Method->Result" type of methodology.

"The pre-print, "The Traditional Future: A Computational Theory of Library Research," is full of insights about library centric research, including intriguing parallels between library research and neural net computing architectures; a comparison that made me think anew, and with more clarity, about how the science of history is conducted. Armed with a distinctive interpretation of library research, Abbott is able to draw some incisive conclusions about the ramifications of large repositories of digitized texts (such as Google Book Search) on the conduct of scholarship..."