The 6th edition of the APA style manual caused a stir this fall when numerous errors and inconsistencies were revealed in the new edition. After publishing an 8 page list of corrections, APA is now issuing replacement copies to anyone who purchased the flawed 1st printing of the 6th edition.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Cumulative outrage finally carried the day. The association has just announced that it will “recycle” remaining softcover copies of the sixth edition. Anyone who gets in touch with the association between November 2 and December 15 and asks for a replacement will receive a free copy of the emended second printing, according to Rhea Faberman, director of communications. (She recommends that people contact the APA’s service center to submit those requests.)

“We heard loud and clear that there was disquiet about the number of errors in the book,” Ms. Faberman told me. “We understand that, although perfection is difficult to achieve, it is a style manual and therefore the bar is very high in terms of getting it right.”

If you purchased a copy of the 6th edition and would like a free, more accurate copy, here is the contact information for the APA Service Center:

Mailing address: American Psychological Association, 750 First Street, NE, Washington, DC 20002-4242
Telephone: (800) 374-2721 or (202) 336-5500M
Contact the Service Center, Monday through Friday, between the hours of 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

Some fun book-related links from the web this week include…

Poets “reading” their works on youtube, slightly weird, slightly addictive:

Book sculptures and oddities [via librarian.net]:

And, the New York Times discusses books that exist only within other books.

Can you guess which of these is the real subject heading?

• child cartographers – Montana – fiction
• girls – girls who like pop music – fiction
• gifted boys – Montana -fiction

Almost every book is assigned Library of Congress subject headings when published. As the LoC explains “Authority records enable librarians to provide uniform access to materials in library catalogs and to provide clear identification of authors and subject headings. For example, works about ‘movies’,'motion pictures,’ ‘cinema,’ and ‘films’ are all entered under the established subject heading ‘Motion pictures.’”  You can find the Library of Congress subject headings for a book on the back of the title page (the verso) or in the library catalog.

Very few authors add their own subject headings to their books. The image below shows the verso page for new book The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet. Scroll down for the catalog record and “real” subject headings. Who’s to say which makes more sense?  Is it time for the LoC to add “The Oregon Trail video game for the Apple IIGS – fiction” to the authority records?

Friday’s here!  Please enjoy some library and information-related stories from the week:

• We cover this in every class that visits the library, but apparently Wired editor Chris Anderson thinks it is ok to plagiarize, ok to plagiarize wikipedia in fact, and claims that there is no good citation system for web sites. You have to read it to believe it.
• Ray Bradbury to the New York Times: “I don’t believe in colleges and universities, I believe in libraries”. Wow!
• Summer reading list roundup, 2009. I found some promising reads on these lists, especially the NPR selections.
• What interesting stories did you find this week?

Fans of Wyoming mystery author Craig Johnson will enjoy this tour of his log cabin (with indoor pool!) outside of Ucross.  The Times managed to turn up some dirt and inconsistencies along with Johnson’s cowboy style.

[all photos by Jim Wilson, New York Times]

Heads up to all of our students using APA style for their References page. The American Psychological Association changed the guidelines for citing online scholarly articles. Basically the APA folks want you to include the Digital Object Identifier (DOI), a unique number assigned to scholarly articles, rather than the URL for the article.

Even if you consider yourself an expert at all things APA, it would be wise to ask your course instructors how they prefer your citations to be formatted. And, as always, the most important thing to remember when constructing a References page is to provide enough clear and consistent information that your readers could find articles themselves if they would like to read them.

To read more, click here for a nice summary from the folks at the ever-awesome OWL at Purdue.

Google unveiled its News Archive search this week, the product of a collaboration with several major papers to provide access to newspaper content from the past 200 years online. One fun feature allows you to create a timeline of news mentions for any search. For example, here is the timeline for my search for “DNA testing”:

As with Google Scholar, some of the News Archives results will direct you to licensed content which requires registration or sometimes payment. And as always, before you pay for ANY information on the web, double check to see if the library already owns it.

In the case of newspapers online, the library offers access to a huge pool of articles via the LexisNexis Academic database. Visit www-lib.uwyo.edu, Articles & Databases and you’ll find Lexis. There you can search national papers, international papers, tv and radio transcripts and more with full-text results.

We also hold a large collection of Wyoming newspapers on microfilm. You won’t find those in Google or in LexisNexis, but soon they will be available electronically through the very welcome Wyoming Newspapers Project.

And if it’s news-worthy photos you need, try searching the UW Libraries AP Images database, also available from the Articles & Databases page. You can access a whole world of AP photographs of major world and national events.

… what would it be?

A British website asked creative artists and designers that question and they produced some beautiful results. Jason Munn would stay in and draw, while Tom Gauld would go to space.

I’ll pose the same question to our blog readers on this hot summer day: if you could do anything tomorrow, what would it be?

[via cupofjoe]