Brian Croxall has described on Profhacker how he hacked his 120 mile drive between home and campus, finding ways to make his commute both less painful and more productive. Two hours of driving each way pushes at the outer limits of sanity, but many academics have similar commutes or even longer. It might be family reasons, geographic preferences, or of course the current academic job market, but it seems that every department has at least one faculty member whose commute is so long that a car just isn't enough.

I happen to be one of those faculty. For several years now I have flown twice a week, leaving home early Tuesday morning and flying back late Thursday night. About 400 miles separate work from home. And no matter how many audiobooks I could consume, if I had to make the six hour drive (each way) every week, I would go crazy. Or worse, as this sign at a rest stop on I-81 cheerily...

My previous post on ProfHacker highlighted a few ways to hack your library's catalog using SMS and RSS. But as someone pointed out in the comments to that post, SMS and RSS seem destined to be marginal tools. Few faculty, for example, are clamoring for their libraries to add RSS feeds (though I still maintain RSS can be an incredible workhorse for academics).

Today, I want to showcase a tool that does seem to be a harbinger of what's to come with library catalogs: the catalog as a mobile app.

Many of the examples in my last post came from the Washington Research Library Consortium, so it's not surprising that the WRLC also offers a mobile-optimized version of its catalog at m.wrlc.org. I honestly hadn't used the mobile site until Bruce Hulse, the Director of Information Services for the Washington Research Library Consortium, told me about it. The site is quite stunning on an iPhone or...

It's probably been a long time since any of us have used an actual library card catalog, standing in front of the long wooden drawer, searching for a book by author, title, or subject heading. You don't need to hear it from me that there's been a revolution in the way we search our libraries for material.

I'm not so convinced, however, that what we do after we find our results has changed much. Do you still jot down call numbers on sticky notes before heading over to your institution's library? Do you still rely on library slips to keep track of due dates? Do you still print a hardcopy list of your dozens and dozens of check-outs?

Many ProfHacker readers already know that Zotero can capture citations directly from an online catalog's search results. But you don't need a laptop and a browser to make the most of your library catalog. I want to highlight several lightweight tools that can...

The recent debates over whether the Internet makes you dumber (as Nicholas Carr argues in The Wall Street Journal) or smarter (as Clay Shirky counters) both simplify what is in fact an astoundingly complex question.

Regardless of your own answer to the question, though, the latest research (as reported in the New York Times) does indeed suggest that we don't multitask as well as we think. Furthermore—and this should really be no surprise—all the attention we pay to our screens, both large and small, distracts us from other important things in our lives.

How wired are you? How do you manage to multitask? How distracted are you by email, Twitter, IM, Facebook, Foursquare, RSS, and YouTube?

Could you quit, cold turkey, for a day?

Are you willing to take the Great ProfHacker Offline Challenge?

This is your challenge, should you choose to accept it: Go offline for 36 hours. Then come...