If you’re a lover of words and you haven’t already added the Oxford English Dictionary’s Word of the Day RSS feed to your aggregator, do so now. It’s tailor-made (today’s word of the day) for you. Also, keep in mind that your Free Library card number and PIN are all that you need to access all of the offerings of Oxford Reference Online, which includes dozens of searchable reference works on a wide variety of subjects. Just visit the Advanced Search page on the Free Library’s website and click on Oxford Reference Online under General Research.

In a comprehensive piece published in the current issue of the New York Review of Books, Sarah Boxer asks, “[What is] the effect of blogs on language? Are they a new literary genre? Do they have their own conceits, forms, and rules? Do they have an essence?” The short answer: Yes.

According to the New York Times, "Hundreds of men and a smaller number of women eke out a living scavenging books in Manhattan ."

"What if scholarly books were peer reviewed by anonymous blog comments rather than by traditional, selected peer reviewers?" So begins a piece by Jeffrey Young recently published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, considering the "experiment" currently taking place on the blog Grand Text Auto . In collaboration with MIT Press and the Institute for the Future of the Book , University of California at San Diego assistant professor of communication Noah Wardrip-Fruin is posting to this “group blog about computer narrative, games, poetry, and art” excerpts from a draft in progress of his forthcoming book, Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies.

At its peak, Grand Text Auto reportedly receives more than 200,000 visits per month. “This is the community whose response I want, not just the small circle of academics,” says Wardrip-Fruin, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. (Wardrip-Fruin’s editor at MIT Press approves of this experiment in unorthodox, blog-based review, but has insisted on a traditional peer review process as well.)

Last week the Library of Congress launched a pilot project with Flickr--the popular photo-sharing website--to publish more than 3,000 photos from its collections, including 1,600+ color photographs taken by photographers working for the United States Farm Security Administration, and later the Office of War Information, during the 1930s and 40s. “We want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo,” writes Library of Congress Director of Communications Matt Raymond , “which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves.” According to Flickr, this marks the website's first collaboration with a civic institution to facilitate giving people a voice in describing the content of a publicly held photography collection.