ABSTRACT
The ‰rst edition of this book opened with the sentence: Pick up a newspaper or a magazine and odds are that there will be an article about the role of information in our lives. Now, 2011, there are even newer means of getting information that are topics of the articles. It seems that almost everyone tweets and there is a Twitter tag for almost every person or topic imaginable. Libraries are using tweets to get their messages out, they are on Facebook, have posted videos on YouTube, and use all the varieties of instant messaging. Just after the publication of the ‰rst edition of Using Engineering Literature, Second Life® took off. There was a lot of buzz about Second Life, virtual libraries, and avatar librarians. The lure of creating a new persona and answering questions via this virtual world was intriguing and many jumped in eagerly. Interestingly, there is much less talk about it lately and a search of Library Literature and Information Science shows few articles on the subject. A search on the descriptor Second Life on December 13, 2010, and limited to each year showed 33 articles in 2007, 31 in 2008, 14 in 2009, and 5 in 2010. There can be several reasons for this decline, but one that needs to be considered is the role of fads in information delivery and the rapidity of rise and fall of these means of communications. What is “the hot way to deliver reference” may be frozen out by the new in-thing in a blink of an eye.
