Time to start catching up on some of the reading piling up on my desk:

• "Strategic Positioning Options for Scientific Libraries in Markets of Scientific and Technical Information - the Economic Impact of Digitization" by Andreas Geyer-Schulz, Andreas Neumann, Annika Heitmann and Karsten Stroborn. (From FOS News) This is a weird little article written about the future of STM libraries written by people that somehow never seem to have been in one. There are some really interesting ideas in the article -- outsiders often have an interesting view denied insiders. But somehow they seem to think that document delivery is one of our core missions. The idea, in effect, is that we should be less like libraries and more like bookstores, publishers and insurance brokers, or some darn thing. Stimulating and probably all too prescient. This is from the most recent issue of the Journal of Digital Information: v4 i2.
  
• "Computer literacy: today and tomorrow" by Mark Hoffman and Jonathan Blake. Journal of Computing in Small Colleges, v18 i5. Now this is prescient! Now, I'm not sure if this is good news or bad news, but this article describes a model of IL that combines it with, guess what, computer literacy. The idea is that students learn computer skills when they need to and the authors see IL as really a component of those computer skills, which students will learn when they need to. Or maybe not.
  
• "Capricious Class of '94 takes long and winding road" By Michael Valpy from Saturday's Globe and Mail. Perhaps putting some context around the students we see every day. Link will probably decay in a week or so.
  
• "Adding up God's special numbers: Looking for the meaning of life? Do the math" by George Johnson. From Saturday's Toronto Star. I don't usually have much patience for the usual "math is the language of God" article, but this one is rather interesting.
  
• "Dinner with Simon: Featherless Bipeds" is an interview with Nobel winner and AI pioneer Herbert Simon on the Astrobiology Magazine website. And yes, there is a computer chess connection.