Library News

George Washington's $300,000 library book fine

2010-04-18T23:03:00.000-07:00

From: http://news.bbc.co.uk

Librarians in New York's oldest library have uncovered a surprising borrower with overdue books: George Washington.

The first president of the United States of America borrowed two books from the New York Society Library in 1789 but failed to return them.

Adjusted for inflation, he has since racked up $300,000 (£195,000) in fines for being some 220 years late.

The New York Society Library says it will not pursue the fine. It would simply like the books back.

He famously never told a lie, but it seems George Washington was not without his faults, the BBC's Madeleine Morris notes, reporting from Washington.

Two small losses

On 5 October 1789, the first president borrowed two books from what was then the only library in Manhattan - "Law of Nations," a dissertation on international relations, and a volume of debate transcripts from Britain's House of Commons.

George Washington did not even bother to sign his name in the borrower's ledger. An aide simply scrawled "president" next to the title to show who had taken them out.

The two tomes were due back a month later but were never returned and have been accruing late fees ever since. Librarians uncovered the misdemeanour as they were digitising the library's ledger from that time.

The New York Society Library says it will not pursue the fine but it would like the books back.

Sadly for fans of 18th-Century political literature, they appear to have vanished. On the balance sheet of George Washington's achievements for America, mark down two small losses, our correspondent says.

The borrowed books have vanished

Sad and True. 200 years of shared knowledge Salem Athenaeum’s model faces modern challenges

2010-03-09T11:07:00.000-08:00

From: www.boston.com
...
“Once I get to know someone andtheir reading interests, I make direct recommendations as soon as theycome in,’’ said Procious, director of the Salem Athenaeum, whichcelebrates its 200th anniversary with a fund-raiser on Saturday. “I’mcultivating the community if I get people excited about what they’rereading.’’

Since 1810,Salem-area residents have paid for subscriptions to the athenaeum - oneof only about 16 membership libraries left in the United States - andhave welcomed nonmembers to read free of charge. A 50,000-volumecollection testifies to the membership’s evolving, idiosyncraticpassions for topics from theology to botany and world travel.

Nowas the athenaeum enters its third century, this historic institutionfaces sobering challenges to its venerable traditions. A $20,000deficit is the athenaeum’s largest ever, representing 15 percent of itsannual budget of about $130,000. Officers strive to recruit newsubscribers, but persuading people to pay $90 per year per householdfor the privilege of checking out books and sustaining a Salem iconisn’t an easy sell in a tough economy. Meanwhile, rare volumes datingto the 16th and 17th centuries are gradually decaying in the absence offunds needed for preservation.

“They’regoing to turn to dust,’’ said Francie King, president of the board oftrustees. “We just can’t afford to do what it takes to preserve them,unless someone were to give us millions.’’
...

Nearly one-third of Americans do not have high-speed access to the Internet

2010-02-24T20:02:00.000-08:00

F.C.C. Takes a Close Look at the Unwired

By BRIAN STELTER and JENNA WORTHAM

Published: February 22, 2010

For many Americans, having high-speed access to the Internet at homeis as vital as electricity, heat and water. And yet about one-third ofthe population, 93 million people, have elected not to connect.

A comprehensive survey by the Federal Communications Commissionfound several barriers to entry, with broadband prices looming largest.The commission will release the findings on Tuesday and employ them asit submits a national broadband plan to Congress next month.

Ofthe 93 million persons without broadband identified by the study, about80 million are adults. Small numbers of them access the Internet bydial-up connections, or outside the home at places like offices orlibraries, but most never log on anywhere. In a world of digitalinformation, these people are “at a distinct disadvantage,” said JohnHorrigan, who oversaw the survey for the F.C.C.

Julius Genachowski,the chairman of the F.C.C., is promoting faster and more pervasivebroadband infrastructure as a tenet of economic growth and democracy.

Thestudy, conducted last fall, interviewed 5,005 residents by telephone.It indicates that the gap in access is no longer between slower dial-upand faster broadband; the overwhelming majority of people who haveInternet access have broadband.

“Overall Internet penetration hasbeen steady in the mid-70 to upper 70 percent range over the last fiveyears,” Mr. Horrigan said in an interview on Monday. “Now we’re at apoint where, if you want broadband adoption to go up by any significantmeasure, you really have to start to eat into the segment ofnon-Internet-users.”

Those nonusers are disproportionately olderand more likely to live in rural areas. Those with household incomes ofless than $50,000 are “much less likely” to have broadband access,according to the F.C.C. report.

Asked about the reasons for nothaving broadband at home, almost half of respondents cited aprohibitive cost, and almost as many said they were uncomfortable usinga computer. Forty-five percent answered “yes” to the statement, “I amworried about all the bad things that can happen if I use theInternet.” Others said they viewed the Internet as a waste of time.

Respondentswere able to give multiple answers, and most did. Consequently, “policysolutions that provide comprehensive aid to people are most likely tohave the most payoff,” Mr. Horrigan said.

Twelve percent of thosesurveyed who had not adopted broadband said that they could not connectto broadband where they lived. Because this figure is self-reported bythe residents, it may not be entirely accurate.

The F.C.C. wasmandated by Congress to produce a detailed plan with specificrecommendations to hasten the national adoption of broadband in theUnited States. The plan is expected to be unveiled by the F.C.C. onMarch 17. It will recommend, among other elements, an expansion ofbroadband adoption from the current 65 percent to more than 90 percent,Mr. Genachowski said in a blog post on an F.C.C. Web site last week.

Great Great Book.."This Book Is Overdue...."

2010-02-23T00:09:00.000-08:00

Librarians Gone Wild

In her new book,author Marilyn Johnson argues that, even in the Google age, humanbeings, namely librarians, are still the best resource for accurateanswers. In fact, Johnson says librarians are more important now thenever before. Plus, they're fascinating! They compete in dance competitions and blog about the quirky and downright disgusting behavior of patrons.

Download MP3 | Embed HTML

Librarians Gone Wild

2010-02-23T00:03:00.001-08:00

February 21, 2010 - 2:27pm
Posted by Bibliofuture

In her new book, author Marilyn Johnson argues that, even in the Google age, human beings, namely librarians, are still the best resource for accurate answers. In fact, Johnson says librarians are more important now then ever before. Plus, they're fascinating! They compete in dance competitions and blog about the quirky and downright disgusting behavior of patrons.

You can listen using the embedded player shown above or you can download a MP3 here.

Printing a Book, Old School

2010-02-23T00:00:00.001-08:00

Deer checks in, checks out of school library

2010-02-02T11:17:00.001-08:00

By Drew C. Wilson

Havelock News

Whetherit was to do research or check out the latest Dr. Seuss book, a deerbroke through a back-door window and into the library at Graham A.Barden Elementary School Tuesday morning.
Custodian Kelvin Becton discovered the broken window in the libraryaround 6:50 a.m. Assistant principal Christine Covert called Havelockpolice thinking that someone had broken into the school.
As Becton went to close the front door to the library, he happenedto see the back end of a small deer that was perhaps 3 1/2-feet tallrun into the library office.
“He said he didn’t see the deer’s head,” Covert said of Becton. “He saw the back of it, and he was a small.”
In a few minutes, the deer checked out of the library, running out the same way it had come in.
“The door opens into a little garden area the students maintain forvegetables,” Covert said. “We also have an acorn tree out there, and itis pretty obvious that he was interested in the acorns.”
The deer’s collision with the door sent glass flying about 30 feet into the library.
“I’ve looked real closely at the glass,” Principal Joan Bjork said.“We don’t see any blood or anything on the glass. Other than having abad headache, I think he’s going to be OK.”
The only damage was to the glass pane at the bottom of the doorway.There appeared to be no damage to anything in the library. Caution tapesealed off most of the library to students at the school.
“We were afraid he was going to tear up the books, but he didn’t,” Covert said.
Not surprisingly, administrators plan to use the incident to educate students.
“We’re going to use this as a way of teaching children about deerand the loss of habitat and the impact that humans have on wildlife,”Covert said.

Week to Watch USA PATRIOT Act

2010-01-28T18:38:00.000-08:00

From: http://bannedlibrarian.wordpress.com/

January 25, 2010 at 3:22 pm

There’s going to be a lot of movement around the PATRIOT Act in the next week or two. Maybe not the movement we’d like.

Here’s one update from the American Library Association’s recent Midwinter Meeting: “Bad News from Washington on Patriot Act.“

The Bill of Rights Defense Committee is also planning a Lobby Day in Washington for February 3rd. See, Lobby Day to Stop the PATRIOT Act.

If you can’t make it to D.C., you can also sign BORDC’s letter opposing the PATRIOT Act reauthorization, or call your senators and reps using the ALA’s Legislative Action Center.

The Fiscal Year 2008 Annual Report from The Library of Congress is Now Available Online

2009-11-06T15:26:00.000-08:00

The 2008 report has been released and is now available online. The report is for the 2008 fiscal year that ended on September 30, 2008 (84 color pages; PDF).
Here are some Fast Facts about the Library of Congress for FY 2008:
+ Welcomed more than 1.6 million onsite visitors
+ Provided reference services to 545,084 individuals in person, by telephone and through written and electronic correspondence
+ Recorded a total of 141,847,810 items in the collections:
+ 21,218,408 cataloged books in the Library of Congress classification system
11,599,606 books in large type and raised characters, incunabula(books printed before 1501), monographs and serials, music, boundnewspapers, pamphlets, technical reports and other printed material
++ 109,029,796 items in the nonclassified (special) collections, including:
++ 3,005,028 audio materials, such as discs, tapes, talking books and other recorded formats
++ 62,778,118 manuscripts
++ 5,357,385 maps
++ 16,086,572 microforms
++ 5,674,956 pieces of printed sheet music
+++ 14,388,175 visual materials, as follows:
+++ 1,207,776 moving images
+++ 12,536,764 photographs
+++ 98,288 posters
+++ 545,347 prints and drawings
+ Circulated more than 22 million disc, cassette and braille itemsto more than 500,000 blind and physically handicapped patrons
+ Registered 232,907 claims to copyright
+ Completed 871,287 research assignments for Congress through the Congressional Research Service
+ Prepared 1,529 legal research reports for Congress and oth er federal agencies through the Law Library
+ Recorded more than 85 million visits and 610 million page views onthe Library’s website. At year’s end, the Library’s on line historicalcollections contained 15.3 million digital files
+ Employed a permanent staff of 3,637 employees
+ Operated with a total fiscal 2008 appropriation of $613,496,414, including the authority to spend $50,447,565 in receipts
Access the FY 2008 Annual Report (84 color pages; PDF)
You can access annual reports for the years 2000-2008 on this page. All reports are in PDF.
Source: Library of Congress

Self-Appointed Censor at Tennessee Library

2009-10-30T12:31:00.001-07:00

Posted by birdie

According to the Daily Herald, someone has been crossing out dirty words in books, and employees at the Maury County (TN) Library aren’t happy about it.

“It bothers me because nobody is holding a gun to their head making them read these books,” said Elizabeth Potts, director of the county library. “If they don’t like them, they should just return them.”

Library Director Elizabeth Potts shows one of several books which have had “dirty” words marked through. Others have editorial comments added.

Librarians Won't Give Child 'Porn' Book

2009-10-27T14:47:00.000-07:00

[These ladies are being defiant to the rules of the library, they should be fired, imo]

Two Nicholasville librarians are fired for not allowing a kid check out a book. The women say the book contains pornographic material inappropriate for children.

The two women say they were fired last month when they wouldn't let a young girl check out a book from The League of Extraordinary Gentleman series. Now, both women say they're less concerned with their jobs and more concerned with keeping material like this out of children's hands.

"Residents in Jessamine County do not realize that these books that are so graphic are available in the library let alone to their children," former Jessamine County librarian, Beth Bovaire, said.

Beth Bovaire worked at Jessamine County Public Library up until a month ago. She and Sharon Cook worked as librarians- the two were fired last month when they say they didn't allow a child check out a book from the league of extraordinary gentleman series.

"My friend Sharon had brought it to me on Wednesday, and she said 'look at this book it's filthy and it's on hold for an 11 year old girl,' and I said well okay, lets take it off hold."

The Jessamine County Library director says it's against their policy to speak about employee terminations but he did give me a copy of their policy and it clearly states the responsibilities of the child's reading must lye with the parents and not with the library.

The women say the books contain lewd pictures of men and women in sexual situations that are inappropriate for children.

"If you give children pornography, a child, a 12 year old, can not understand and process the same way a 30 year old can," Sharon Cook said.

The women say parents these days are swamped and it's far too easy for a child to check out a book without them ever knowing. The women hope the library will reconsider their policies to make sure children aren't checking out inappropriate materials.

Three Tweets for the Web, by Tyler Cowen

2009-10-20T11:57:00.001-07:00

Welcome the new world with open arms—and browsers.

The printed word is not dead. We are not about to see the demise of the novel or the shuttering of all the bookstores, and we won’t all end up on Twitter. But we are clearly in the midst of a cultural transformation. For today’s younger people, Google is more likely to provide a formative cultural experience than The Catcher in the Rye or Catch-22 or even the Harry Potter novels. There is no question that books are becoming less central to our cultural life.

The relative decline of the book is part of a broader shift toward short and to the point. Small cultural bits—written words, music, video—have never been easier to record, store, organize, and search, and thus they are a growing part of our enjoyment and education. The classic 1960s rock album has given way to the iTunes single. On YouTube, the most popular videos are usually just a few minutes long, and even then viewers may not watch them through to the end. At the extreme, there are Web sites offering five-word movie and song reviews, six-word memoirs (“Not Quite What I Was Planning”), seven-word wine reviews, and 50-word minisagas.*

The new brevity has many virtues. One appeal of following blogs is the expectation of receiving a new reward (and finishing off that reward) every day. Blogs feature everything from expert commentary on politics or graphic design to reviews of new Cuban music CDs to casual ruminations on feeding one’s cat. Whatever the subject, the content is replenished on a periodic basis, much as 19th-century novels were often delivered in installments, but at a faster pace and with far more authors and topics to choose from. In the realm of culture, a lot of our enjoyment has always come from the opening and unwrapping of each gift. Thanks to today’s hypercurrent online environment, this is a pleasure we can experience nearly constantly.

It may seem as if we have entered a nightmarish attention-deficit culture, but the situation is not nearly as gloomy as you have been told. Our culture of the short bit is making human minds more rather than less powerful.

The arrival of virtually every new cultural medium has been greeted with the charge that it truncates attention spans and represents the beginning of cultural collapse—the novel (in the 18th century), the comic book, rock ‘n’ roll, television, and now the Web. In fact, there has never been a golden age of all-wise, all-attentive readers. But that’s not to say that nothing has changed. The mass migration of intellectual activity from print to the Web has brought one important development: We have begun paying more attention to information. Overall, that’s a big plus for the new world order.

It is easy to dismiss this cornucopia as information overload. We’ve all seen people scrolling with one hand through a BlackBerry while pecking out instant messages (IMs) on a laptop with the other and eyeing a television (I won’t say “watching”). But even though it is easy to see signs of overload in our busy lives, the reality is that most of us carefully regulate this massive inflow of information to create something uniquely suited to our particular interests and needs—a rich and highly personalized blend of cultural gleanings.

The word for this process is multitasking, but that makes it sound as if we’re all over the place. There is a deep coherence to how each of us pulls out a steady stream of information from disparate sources to feed our long-term interests. No matter how varied your topics of interest may appear to an outside observer, you’ll tailor an information stream related to the continuing “stories” you want in your life—say, Sichuan cooking, health care reform, Michael Jackson, and the stock market. With the help of the Web, you build broader intellectual narratives about the world. The apparent disorder of the information stream reflects not your incoherence but rather your depth and originality as an individual.

My own daily cultural harvest usually involves listening to music and reading—novels, nonfiction, and Web essays—with periodic glances at the New York Times Web site and an e-mail check every five minutes or so. Often I actively don’t want to pull apart these distinct activities and focus on them one at a time for extended periods. I like the blend I assemble for myself, and I like what I learn from it. To me (and probably no one else, but that is the point), the blend offers the ultimate in interest and suspense. Call me an addict, but if I am torn away from these stories for even a day, I am very keen to get back for the next “episode.”

Many critics charge that multitasking makes us less efficient. Researchers say that periodically checking your e-mail lowers your cognitive performance level to that of a drunk. If such claims were broadly correct, multitasking would pretty rapidly disappear simply because people would find that it didn’t make sense to do it. Multitasking is flourishing, and so are we. There are plenty of lab experiments that show that distracting people reduces the capacity of their working memory and thus impairs their decision making. It’s much harder to show that multitasking, when it results from the choices and control of an individual, does anyone cognitive harm. Multitasking is not a distraction from our main activity, it is our main activity.

Consider the fact that IQ scores have been rising for decades, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. I won’t argue that multitasking is driving this improvement, but the Flynn effect does belie the common impression that people are getting dumber or less attentive. A harried multitasking society seems perfectly compatible with lots of innovation, lots of high achievers, and lots of high IQ scores.

With the help of technology, we are honing our ability to do many more things at once and do them faster. We access and absorb information more quickly than before, and, as a result, we often seem more impatient. If you use Google to look something up in 10 seconds rather than spend five minutes searching through an encyclopedia, that doesn’t mean you are less patient. It means you are creating more time to focus on other matters. In fact, we’re devoting more effort than ever before to big-picture questions, from the nature of God to the best age for marrying and the future of the U.S. economy.

Our focus on cultural bits doesn’t mean we are neglecting the larger picture. Rather, those bits are building-blocks for seeing and understanding larger trends and narratives. The typical Web user doesn’t visit a gardening blog one day and a Manolo Blahnik shoes blog the next day, and never return to either. Most activity online, or at least the kind that persists, involves continuing investments in particular long-running narratives—about gardening, art, shoes, or whatever else engages us. There’s an alluring suspense to it. What’s next? That is why the Internet captures so much of our attention.

Indeed, far from shortening our attention spans, the Web lengthens them by allowing us to follow the same story over many years’ time. If I want to know what’s new with the NBA free-agent market, the debate surrounding global warming, or the publication plans of Thomas Pynchon, Google quickly gets me to the most current information. Formerly I needed personal contacts—people who were directly involved in the action—to follow a story for years, but now I can do it quite easily.

Sometimes it does appear I am impatient. I’ll discard a half-read book that 20 years ago I might have finished. But once I put down the book, I will likely turn my attention to one of the long-running stories I follow online. I’ve been listening to the music of Paul McCartney for more than 30 years, for example, and if there is some new piece of music or development in his career, I see it first on the Internet. If our Web surfing is sometimes frantic or pulled in many directions, that is because we care so much about so many long-running stories. It could be said, a bit paradoxically, that we are impatient to return to our chosen programs of patience.

Another way the Web has affected the human attention span is by allowing greater specialization of knowledge. It has never been easier to wrap yourself up in a long-term intellectual project without at the same time losing touch with the world around you. Some critics don’t see this possibility, charging that the Web is destroying a shared cultural experience by enabling us to follow only the specialized stories that pique our individual interests. But there are also those who argue that the Web is doing just the opposite—that we dabble in an endless variety of topics but never commit to a deeper pursuit of a specific interest. These two criticisms contradict each other. The reality is that the Internet both aids in knowledge specialization and helps specialists keep in touch with general trends.

The key to developing your personal blend of all the “stuff” that’s out there is to use the right tools. The quantity of information coming our way has exploded, but so has the quality of our filters, including Google, blogs, and Twitter. As Internet analyst Clay Shirky points out, there is no information overload, only filter failure. If you wish, you can keep all the information almost entirely at bay and use Google or text a friend only when you need to know something. That’s not usually how it works. Many of us are cramming ourselves with Web experiences—videos, online chats, magazines—and also fielding a steady stream of incoming e-mails, text messages, and IMs. The resulting sense of time pressure is not a pathology; it is a reflection of the appeal and intensity of what we are doing. The Web allows you to enhance the meaning and importance of the cultural bits at your disposal; thus you want to grab more of them, and organize more of them, and you are willing to work hard at that task, even if it means you sometimes feel harried.

It’s true that many people on the Web are not looking for a cerebral experience, and younger people especially may lack the intellectual framework needed to integrate all the incoming bits into a meaningful whole. A lot of people are on the Web just to have fun or to achieve some pretty straightforward personal goals—they may want to know what happened to their former high school classmates or the history of the dachshund. “It’s still better than watching TV” is certainly a sufficient defense of these practices, but there is a deeper point: The Internet is supplementing and intensifying real life. The Web’s heralded interactivity not only furthers that process but opens up new possibilities for more discussion and debate. Anyone can find space on the Internet to rate a product, criticize an idea, or review a new movie or book.

One way to understand the emotional and intellectual satisfactions of the new world is by way of contrast. Consider Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. The music and libretto express a gamut of human emotions, from terror to humor to love to the sublime. With its ability to combine so much in a single work of art, the opera represents a great achievement of the Western canon. But, for all Don Giovanni’s virtues, it takes well over three hours to hear it in its entirety, perhaps four with an intermission. Plus, the libretto is in Italian. And if you want to see the performance live, a good seat can cost hundreds of dollars.

Instead of experiencing the emotional range of Don Giovanni in one long, expensive sitting, on the Web we pick the moods we want from disparate sources and assemble them ourselves. We take a joke from YouTube, a terrifying scene from a Japanese slasher movie, a melody from iTunes, and some images—perhaps our own digital photos—capturing the sublime beauty of the Grand Canyon. Even if no single bit looks very impressive to an outsider, to the creator of this assemblage it is a rich and varied inner experience. The new wonders we create are simply harder for outsiders to see than, say, the fantastic cathedrals of Old Europe.

The measure of cultural literacy today is not whether you can “read” all the symbols in a Rubens painting but whether you can operate an iPhone and other Web-related technologies. One thing you can do with such devices is visit any number of Web sites where you can see Rubens’s pictures and learn plenty about them. It’s not so much about having information as it is about knowing how to get it. Viewed in this light, today’s young people are very culturally literate indeed—in fact, they are very often cultural leaders and creators.

To better understand contemporary culture, consider an analogy to romance. Although many long-distance relationships survive, they are difficult to sustain. When you have to travel far to meet your beloved, you want to make every trip a grand and glorious occasion. Usually you don’t fly from one coast to another just to hang out and share downtime and small talk. You go out to eat and to the theater, you make passionate love, and you have intense conversations. You have a lot of thrills, but it’s hard to make it work because in the long run it’s casually spending time together and the routines of daily life that bind two people to each other. And of course, in a long-distance relationship, a lot of the time you’re not together at all. If you really love the other person you’re not consistently happy, even though your peak experiences may be amazing.

A long-distance relationship is, in emotional terms, a bit like culture in the time of Cervantes or Mozart. The costs of travel and access were high, at least compared to modern times. When you did arrive, the performance was often very exciting and indeed monumental. Sadly, the rest of the time you didn’t have that much culture at all. Even books were expensive and hard to get. Compared to what is possible in modern life, you couldn’t be as happy overall but your peak experiences could be extremely memorable, just as in the long-distance relationship.

Now let’s consider how living together and marriage differ from a long-distance relationship. When you share a home, the costs of seeing each other are very low. Your partner is usually right there. Most days include no grand events, but you have lots of regular and predictable interactions, along with a kind of grittiness or even ugliness rarely seen in a long-distance relationship. There are dirty dishes in the sink, hedges to be trimmed, maybe diapers to be changed.

If you are happily married, or even somewhat happily married, your internal life will be very rich. You will take all those small events and, in your mind and in the mind of your spouse, weave them together in the form of a deeply satisfying narrative, dirty diapers and all. It won’t always look glorious on the outside, but the internal experience of such a marriage is better than what’s normally possible in a long-distance relationship.

The same logic applies to culture. The Internet and other technologies mean that our favorite creators, or at least their creations, are literally part of our daily lives. It is no longer a long-distance relationship. It is no longer hard to get books and other written material. Pictures, music, and video appear on command. Culture is there all the time, and you can receive more of it, pretty much whenever you want.

In short, our relationship to culture has become more like marriage in the sense that it now enters our lives in an established flow, creating a better and more regular daily state of mind. True, culture has in some ways become uglier, or at least it would appear so to the outside observer. But when it comes to how we actually live and feel, contemporary culture is more satisfying and contributes to the happiness of far more people. That is why the public devours new technologies that offer extreme and immediate access to information.

Many critics of contemporary life want our culture to remain like a long-distance relationship at a time when most of us are growing into something more mature. We assemble culture for ourselves, creating and committing ourselves to a fascinating brocade. Very often the paper-and-ink book is less central to this new endeavor; it’s just another cultural bit we consume along with many others. But we are better off for this change, a change that is filling our daily lives with beauty, suspense, and learning.

Or if you’d like the shorter version to post to your Twitter account (140 characters or less): “Smart people are doing wonderful things.”

*Not everything is shorter and more to the point. The same modern wealth that encourages a proliferation of choices also enables very long performances and spectacles. In the German town of Halberstadt, a specially built organ is playing the world’s longest concert ever, designed to clock in at 639 years. This is also the age of complete boxed sets, DVD collector’s editions, extended “director’s cut” versions of movies, and the eight- or sometimes even 10-year Ph.D. But while there is an increasing diversity of length, shorter is the trend. How many of us have an interest in hearing more than a brief excerpt from the world’s longest concert?

6 Ways We Gave Up Our Privacy

2009-10-20T11:56:00.000-07:00

by Bill Brenner, Senior Editor, CSO

October 12, 2009

Privacy has long been seen as a basic, sacred right. But in the Web 2.0 world, where the average user is addicted to Google apps, GPS devices, their BlackBerry or iPhone, and such social networking sites as Facebook and Twitter, that right is slowly and willingly being chipped away. In fact, some security experts believe it's gone already.

Here's the story of how privacy went the way of the dinosaur, how we willingly let it happen and how we might be able to get some of it back.

Adding to this sobering reality is that public and private entities have a growing array of tools to track our movements, habits and choices. RFID tags are on more of the items we take for granted. Those discount cards you use at the grocery store offer companies an excellent snapshot of the choices you make. And in the post 9-11 world, the government has greatly expanded its power to spy on you with such laws as The Patriot Act.

"Your credit card company and your loyalty card program memberships track your purchases, travels, expenditure levels, and blend that into offers that meet your lifestyle profile," said John Zurawski, vice president of Authentify Inc. "Firms sell GPS devices specifically to be hidden in vehicles permitting anyone to track your movements. The RFID Tollway passes states offer to speed you through their toll roads know where you've been and how fast you drove." Based on an informal survey of privacy and security experts, here are six examples of how we've willingly allowed our privacy to be taken away, and how we might be able to get some of it back.

1. Google
Google apps such as Gmail and Google calendar allow individuals and organizations to bring order to the hectic process of scheduling and communicating. But when you input company agenda items into the applications along with other proprietary information and potentially embarrassing things like an upcoming doctor's appointment, you're giving up privacy to Google, said Chicago-based business consultant Mark Cummuta, who specializes in compliance, security and CIO challenges.

"When Google first started, it said it would only use that information internally, to get a sense of the things you like and talk about," he said. "All that information used to be gathered in a way where you explicitly gave permission, through things like surveys. But Google can easily poke around without seeking permission, and they don't explain to you how they know what they know."

2. Social networking
It's getting increasingly harder NOT to find someone on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or all of the above. Then there's Myspace and a lot of lesser-known social networking sites. If you use these programs -- and you probably do -- chances are pretty good that you give up a lot of your privacy every day, willingly and even happily. Security experts have spent a lot of time ringing the alarm bell over this lately, because bad people can easily take the personal tidbits you post and use it against you, for everything from marketing to blackmail.

"Privacy is evaporating because Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and blogs are raising a generation of kids and adults who have no concept of privacy or the ability to truly understand that nothing digital is ever forgotten or destroyed," said Raj Goel, owner of security compliance consultancy Brainlink International Inc. "Ten years from now, kids will be Googling their mommy's spring break pictures and their daddy's Facebook profile, if they don't do so already."

3. RFID tags and loyalty cards
In this fast-paced world, people use special transponders to blow through highway toll stations without stopping and pay for gas without having to swipe a credit card. Then there are those cards you present at the grocery store for discounts. All have technology that can be used to track your movements and habits, right down to the time of day you typically go through a toll plaza each morning on the drive to work.

"Let's add RFID chips, the Real ID Act and the PASS Act to the list as well. How about chips in passports? We're lulled into a false sense of security and people aren't realizing that they are simply giving those rights to privacy away," said Julie Davis Friend, president of Gemstone Partners, a firm that advises organizations on issues surrounding identity theft and new legal requirements."

4. The Patriot Act
Given all the debate about the evils of The Patriot Act and how it gave the government a ridiculous amount of power to spy on people, we often forget that citizens were perfectly comfortable giving away privacy in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, when people were consumed with the desire to stop the next terrorist attack from happening. [See also: Eight Years After 9-11: Better Security or Just Luck?] Many a security expert will argue that the law did indeed improve our safety and prevent more attacks. In other words, enacting it was the right thing to do. But it's also universally accepted that civil liberties were eroded under the law.

Notes Zurawski: "The Patriot Act granted broad powers to law enforcement to enter your home with 'probable cause' and no warrant."

5. GPS
GPS navigation used to be a luxury item. Now most of us use the technology. It's relatively inexpensive to buy a GPS device that's bolted to the dashboard. Higher-end cars come with built-in GPS. And there are plenty of free navigation apps available for the BlackBerry and iPhone. The flip side to fewer people getting lost is that the providers of those systems can track your whereabouts without breaking a sweat.

6. The Kindle
Here's one you may not have seen coming. The increasingly popular Kindle allows us to tear through books on the go. But the device also "keeps track of what you read, how quickly you read it, what you may have read over several times, and can delete content you've paid for without your knowledge should it become 'necessary,'" Zurawski said.

Getting back some privacy
The good news in all of this is that there are steps people can take to protect more of their privacy. Educating younger folks on what they are giving away is a good place to start, those polled said. Businesses should steer clear of something like Gmail if they have sensitive data to send someone. And consumers can demand that government agencies crack down on the privacy-stealing practices of private-sector companies.

"The FTC could take on Facebook, Myspace and other sites that target kids the same way they expanded HIPAA's scope and brought online health care databases under their purview," Goel said. "When my goverment grows up, I want them to be the FTC -- the only national agency that's done anything meaningful about consumer privacy and security in the past decade."

Q: What can a reference librarian do that I can't do on Google?

2009-10-20T11:51:00.000-07:00

A: They know about more sophisticated strategies to find information and more efficient ways to find information than Google and teach you. They can teach you to evaluate those sources you find on Google and get better, more accurate results.

...

Full Article Here

Archive.org's BookServer: A Plan to Build an Open Web of Books

2009-10-20T11:49:00.000-07:00

Posted by Blake

RWW Points Out The Internet Archive has just unveiled their ambitious project called BookServer, which will allow users to find, buy, or borrow digital books from sources all across the web. The system, built on an open architecture and using open book formats, promises that the books housed there will work on any device whether that's a laptop, PC, smartphone, game console, or one of the myriad of e-Readers like Amazon's Kindle.

LINK:
www.archive.org/bookserver

Calif. Library Association Asks Congress to Do What Judiciary Did Not

2009-10-19T07:36:00.000-07:00

From: http://bannedlibrarian.wordpress.com

SACRAMENTO, CA — The California Library Association (CLA) has just announced a resolution calling on Congress to dramatically revise the up-for-renewal USA PATRIOT Act, passed hurriedly in the weeks following the 9/11 attacks. Librarians have been front-line opponents of certain provisions of the PATRIOT Act since its passage. The Act has made it possible, under Section 215, for the FBI to request and obtain library records for large numbers of individuals without reason to believe they are involved in illegal activity. This jeopardizes the basic ethics of the library profession, expressed in the Library Bill of Rights of the American Library Association.
Expanding on the American Library Association’s PATRIOT Act resolution last July, the CLA resolution goes further to address imminent First and Fourth Amendment concerns with Section 505. This provision grants the FBI broad authority to sidestep constitutional safeguards though use of National Security Letters to obtain information.
CLA Intellectual Freedom Committee chair, Mary Minow, a leading expert on library law, said, “It’s past time for the blatantly unconstitutional aspects of this legislation to be removed from the books, and now is the opportunity for Congress to act.”
Two sections of the PATRIOT Act are currently up for reauthorization, with sunsets at the end of December 2009, and librarians across the country see this as an opportunity to correct those provisions that attack basic civil liberties. CLA’s resolution calls for Congress to allow Section 215 to sunset, to amend Section 505 to “include a clear exemption for library records,” and in general to intensify Congressional oversight of the use of the Act.
* CLA Resolution on 2009 Reauthorization of the USA PATRIOT Act (PDF, 481k)
For more information, please contact:
Mary Minow, Chair,
CLA Intellectual Freedom Committee
408-366-0123
Amy Sonnie, Member,
CLA Intellectual Freedom Committee,
415-823-0497
or cla_ifc [a t] earthlink [dot] net

Chomsky Book BANNED @ Guantanamo

2009-10-11T20:46:00.000-07:00

By Carol Rosenberg | Miami Herald

Professor Noam Chomsky may be among America's most enduring anti-war activists. But the leftist intellectual's anthology of post 9/11 commentary is taboo at Guantanamo's prison camp library, which offers books and videos on Harry Potter, World Cup soccer and Islam.

U.S. military censors recently rejected a Pentagon lawyer's donation of an Arabic-language copy of the political activist and linguistic professor's 2007 anthology "Interventions" for the library, which has more than 16,000 items.

Chomsky, 80, who has been voicing disgust with U.S. foreign policy since the Vietnam War, reacted with irritation and derision. "This happens sometimes in totalitarian regimes,'' he saod by e-mail after learning of the decision.

"Of some incidental interest, perhaps, is the nature of the book they banned. It consists of op-eds written for The New York Times syndicate and distributed by them. The subversive rot must run very deep.''

Prison camp officials would not say specifically why the book was rejected but Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brook DeWalt, a Guantánamo spokesman, said staff reviews "every proposed or recommended library item to assess force protection issues associated with camp dynamics -- such as impact on good order and discipline.''

The banned book showed the bespectacled professor-emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in button-down shirt and sweater staring out of a black cover of a 2007 edition printed by a Beirut publishing house.

A rejection slip accompanying the Chomsky book did not explain the reason but listed categories of restricted literature to include those espousing "Anti-American, Anti-Semitic, Anti-Western'' ideology, literature on "military topics,'' and works that portray "excessive graphic violence'' and "sexual dysfunctions.''

The list of approved material includes poetry, fiction, art, math, history, religion, politics and current events.

A Pentagon defense lawyer sent the book to Ali Hamza al Bahlul, a confessed al Qaida member who had worked as Osama bin Laden's media secretary in Afghanistan at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

A military jury convicted Bahlul, 40, of soliciting murder and conspiracy and sentenced him to life in prison in November for creating al Qaida propaganda. The key evidence was a two-hour video he made by splicing fiery bin Laden speeches with Muslim bloodshed and stock news footage of the aftermath of the October 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole off Aden, Yemen.

Bahlul is currently the lone war crimes convict at Guantanamo, where the prison camps commander ordered him separated from the other 245 war-on-terror captives at the U.S. base in Cuba under an interpretation of the Geneva Conventions that forbids holding detainees with convicted prisoners. Two earlier convicts were sent back to their native countries, Australia and Yemen, and are now free after serving short sentences.

Prison camp staff would not say how many donated books have been refused.

But DeWalt said detainees are forbidden from receiving gifts of books as personal property. Instead, he said, books sent to the captives are evaluated for their suitability for the library -- a trailer where Defense Department staff have catalogued a collection that recently ballooned to more than 16,000 books, magazines and videos even as the Pentagon is downsizing the prison camp population.

President Barack Obama has ordered the prison camps closed by early next year, a deadline the White House now says it may miss.

Meantime, staff there say quality-of-life improvements will continue until the last detainee is gone.

The library is also a featured stop on weekly tours for reporters, members of Congress and other invited guests brought to the sprawling prison camp compound in a Pentagon bid to demonstrate that the much-maligned detention center is "safe, humane and transparent.''

Library staff have since 2005 described the Harry Potter series as a borrowing bestseller among the mostly devout Muslim population -- and shown off translated versions in the stacks that separate Arabic from Urdu, French from Farsi and cover more than a dozen languages.

Other reportedly popular items include old World Cup soccer playoff videos, a French cuisine cookbook published in Beirut and scholarship on the Koran, pre-screened to make sure they contain mainstream messages.

For a time, Richard Nixon's "Victory Without War" flew off the shelves, a librarian reported. So much so that alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed referred to it during a war court hearing earlier this year.

But not Chomsky, who in recent years got high-profile plugs from two of America's most ardent adversaries.

In September 2006, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez held up Chomsky's 2003 "Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance" in a speech at the United Nations that also likened President George W. Bush to Satan, and gave the book a bump in sales for several weeks.

A year later, bin Laden popped up in a keep-the-faith video address to his followers that proved he was alive and ridiculed the U.S. invasion of Iraq while praising the professor's "sober words of advice prior to the war.''

DeWalt said "force protection reasons'' barred him from explaining why any title or author was banned but said as of this week there were no Chomsky works of any type at the Guantanamo library in any language.

Librarians fight back against cuts with 'good library guidelines'

2009-10-07T22:45:00.000-07:00

New guidelines say that a good library should be accessible, with opening hours which suit local needs, and with regularly refreshed print, audio-visual and online resources

Good libraries should be accessible and well-stocked, according to new guidelines from CILIP, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals

With the prospect of closure threatening up to a third of the UK's libraries, a group of librarians have put together a set of guidelines to help the sector address its problems.

The guidelines were launched at today's public library authorities conference in Bristol by CILIP, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, whose chief executive Bob McKee estimated that there were problems of "varying degrees of severity" at as many as 50 of the 150 public library authorities in the UK.

The CILIP guidelines include the provisions that a good library should be accessible, with opening hours which suit local needs, and with regularly refreshed print, audio-visual and online resources. Staff should be knowledgeable and well-trained, and involved in the local community – especially encouraging those unable or unwilling to visit the library to join.

McKee said that it would be increasingly important that libraries and local authorities understand what is expected of them with the prospect of cuts in the government settlement for the next financial year.
"We know it's going to be a tough spending round and the danger is that if libraries' statutory provision is defined in weak terms, and education and social care are defined in strong terms, then libraries will be squeezed. I've been involved in four government reviews of public library service. Two during the Thatcher/Major years and two during the Blair/Brown years and none of them have managed to produce a clear and comprehensive statement of what is expected of public library provision," said McKee.

He pointed to the situation in the Wirral, where the council's plans to close 11 libraries were dropped last week following local campaigns and a public enquiry. "That's a welcome move, but the financial problems faced by Wirral and other local councils won't go away," he said. "Clear guidance is needed on what local councils are expected to provide in their role as public library authorities ... We hope that the CILIP guidelines will help to provide that clarity and leadership."

Scanning the Horizon of Books and Libraries, by Amy Goodman

2009-10-05T23:49:00.000-07:00

Posted on Sep 29, 2009

By Amy Goodman

A battle is raging over the future of books in the digital age and the role that libraries will play. One case now before a U.S. federal court may, some say, grant a practical monopoly on recorded human knowledge to global Internet search giant Google. The complex case has attracted opposition from hundreds of individuals and groups from around the planet.
Google announced in 2004 its plan to digitize millions of books and make them available online. Books in the public domain would be made freely available. Newer books, published since 1923 and for which copyright still exists, would still be online, but viewable only in what Google called “snippets.” Two groups, The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, sued, alleging copyright violations. In October 2008, the groups and Google announced a settlement to the lawsuits, dubbed the “Google Book Settlement” (GBS). Google would pay $125 million and create the Books Rights Registry, a new organization that would direct funds from the settlement, and future revenue from book sales, to the copyright holders. Google would be empowered to not only display works, but also to become a massive, online electronic bookstore.

The settlement grants Google, automatically, permission to scan, display and sell books that are still in copyright but are deemed “out of print,” and for which the copyright holder cannot be easily found. These are referred to as “orphan works.” The status of orphan works has been the subject of much debate, and legislation has been proposed to make orphan works more available to the public. The GBS gives Google, and only Google, the legal right to digitize and sell these works.

UC Berkeley Law professor Pamela Samuelson wrote recently, “The Google Book Search settlement will be, if approved, the most significant book industry development in the modern era ... [and] will transform the future of the book industry and of public access to the cultural heritage of mankind embodied in books.”

Brewster Kahle co-founded the Internet Archive, a digital library aspiring to provide “universal access to human knowledge.” It houses 150 billion Web pages, 200,000 movies, 400,000 audio recordings and more than 1.6 million texts. Kahle opposes the GBS. Google scans large library holdings and returns to each library digital versions viewable only on a limited number of computer terminals that Google provides.

I asked Kahle how he sees the future of libraries. “Libraries as a physical place to go, I think will continue,” he said. “But if this trend continues, if we let Google make a monopoly here, then what libraries are in terms of repositories of books, places that buy books, own them, be a guardian of them, will cease to exist. Libraries, going forward, may just be subscribers to a few monopoly corporations’ databases.” Kahle’s version of the digital library, which he and others are building collaboratively, is open and shareable, without strings attached as with Google’s deal. Kahle co-founded the Open Book Alliance, which filed an opposition to the GBS, equating the settlement with oil price-fixing schemes set up by railroad barons and John Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in the 1870s.

After Judge Denny Chin, who is presiding over the case, called for public comment, opposition began flooding in from around the globe, from sources ranging from the governments of France and Germany to scores of publishers and authors and artists including folk singer Arlo Guthrie and author Julia Wright, daughter of Richard Wright, who wrote the classics “Black Boy” and “Native Son.” Marybeth Peters, head of the U.S. Copyright Office, called it an “end run around legislative process and prerogatives.” Judge Chin proposed a “fairness hearing” for Oct. 7 to decide on the Google Book Settlement.

On Sept. 18, the U.S. Department of Justice filed an opposition brief. It read, in part, “the breadth of the Proposed Settlement—especially the forward-looking business arrangements it seeks to create—raises significant legal concerns. ... A global disposition of the rights to millions of copyrighted works is typically the kind of policy change implemented through legislation, not through a private judicial settlement.” Judge Chin announced a delay of the hearing. The Open Book Alliance, along with many others, applauded the delay and is calling for an open, transparent process going forward to deal with the future of book digitization and the issue of orphan works in a way that best benefits the public interest.

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 800 stations in North America. She is the author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” recently released in paperback.

Banned Books Week - September 26−October 3, 2009

2009-09-29T08:21:00.000-07:00

Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read

September 26−October 3, 2009

Banned Books Week (BBW) is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment. Held during the last week of September, Banned Books Week highlights the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted bannings of books across the United States.

Intellectual freedom—the freedom to access information and express ideas, even if the information and ideas might be considered unorthodox or unpopular—provides the foundation for Banned Books Week. BBW stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints for all who wish to read and access them.

The books featured during Banned Books Week have been targets of attempted bannings. Fortunately, while some books were banned or restricted, in a majority of cases the books were not banned, all thanks to the efforts of librarians, teachers, booksellers, and members of the community to retain the books in the library collections. Imagine how many more books might be challenged—and possibly banned or restricted—if librarians, teachers, and booksellers across the country did not use Banned Books Week each year to teach the importance of our First Amendment rights and the power of literature, and to draw attention to the danger that exists when restraints are imposed on the availability of information in a free society.

Banned Books Week is sponsored by the American Booksellers Association; American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression; the American Library Association; American Society of Journalists and Authors; Association of American Publishers; and the National Association of College Stores. It is endorsed by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress.

For more information on getting involved with Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read, please see Calendar of Events and Ideas and Resources. You can also contact the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom at 1-800-545-2433, ext. 4220, or bbw@ala.org.

OIF Blog » Banned Books Week

Banned Books Week Video: Puppet Book Banners

To kick off Banned Books Week 2009, our new Banned Books Week PSA featuring the puppets from “Crash Pad” is out! Watch as Chad, Rustle, and Mooch misinterpret the meaning of Banned Books Week and Herb comes to the rescue. Also check it out at AL Focus.

Banned Books Week Read-Out! in Chicago, IL, on September 26

The American Library Association, the McCormick Freedom Museum, and the Newberry Library invite you to join us along with ALA President Camila Alire and frequently challenged author Chris Crutcher, in a FREE event to celebrate your freedom to read! The Banned Books Week Read-Out! will take place Saturday, September 26, from noon to 2:00 PM [...]

New Book Censorship Map Reveals National Problem

Have you ever wondered where challenges to books in the United States actually occur? A new book censorship map featured on the BannedBooksWeek.org site illustrates that censorship efforts take place all across the country. The Google map displays more than 120 book challenges—from Maine to Florida and from Long Island, New York, to San Francisco, [...]

The menace of the public [library] option

2009-09-22T12:15:00.000-07:00

by M.C. Blakeman

Saturday, September 19, 2009

Of all the current assaults on our noble republic, perhaps none is more dangerous than the public option - specifically, the public library option.

For far too long, this menace has undermined the very foundations of our economy. While companies like Amazon and Barnes & Noble struggle valiantly each day to sell books, these communistic cabals known as libraries undercut the hard work of good corporate citizens by letting people read their books for free. How is the private sector supposed to compete with free? And just what does this public option give us? People can spend hours and hours in these dens of socialism without having to buy so much as a cappuccino. Furthermore, not only can anyone read books for free in the library, they can take them home, too. They get a simple card that can be used at any library in town. No checking on the previous condition of books they've read. No literacy test. Nothing. Yet, do these libertines of literature let you choose any book you want, anytime you want it? No. Have you ever tried to get the latest best-seller at a public library? They put you on a waiting list for that, my friend. And if you do ask these government apparatchiks a question about a book, they start talking your ear off, and pretty soon they're telling you what to read.

Of course, if you break one of their petty rules and return a book late, you have to pay fines that mount grotesquely each day. Even if you die, your overdue fees keep piling up. Is that not a death tax? How long must the elderly live in fear of burdening their children with these unfair sanctions on their estates?

Don't be fooled for a minute. Somebody has to pay for these "free" libraries, and I'll tell you who it is, pal. Those good ol' suckers, the American taxpayers, that's who.

Have you ever wondered who's really behind this public library option? And don't you think it's fishy that they mask their nefarious activities with benign-sounding names, like Friends of the Library? What's their real agenda - and why do they have so many "volunteer" meetings, anyway?

No, my fellow Americans. We cannot wait until we're all goose-stepped into a massive book checkout line. This assault on capitalism and our very way of life has got to end. Be subversive ... burn your library card! Go out and buy a book!

M.C. Blakeman is the co-author of "Safe Homes, Safe Neighborhoods" (Nolo Press).

Association for Rural & Small Libraries - Join NOW!

2009-09-15T14:58:00.000-07:00

[Did you know that the majority of libraries in the United States are Rural? - I didn't know either..and I work in one...But since I attended the 2009 ARSL Conference in Gatlinburg, TN - and JOINED as a member of this group - I know that fact and many more facts that will allow me to better assist my community]

Membership Opportunities

"The mission of the Association for Rural and Small Libraries is to provide a network of people and materials to support rural and small library staff, volunteers, and trustees to integrate the library thoroughly with the life and work of the community it serves."

Individual Membership

Benefits:

Demonstrates support for rural and small libraries
Helps provide a voice for rural and small libraries on the national library scene
Access to a wide variety of rural information sources in one location on ARSL's website — a "one stop shop for all things rural"
Regular sharing of success stories and problem solving on rural library issues on the ARSL listserv.
20% discount on annual ARSL conference designed exclusively for rural and small libraries
15% discount on The Rural Library Services Newsletter. Please contact the publisher for more information, letting them know you are a member of ARSL.
The Rural Library Services Newsletter
Susan Hill Pieper
Paulding County Carnegie Library
419-299-2032
susanhillpieper@gmail.com
Opportunity to vote for and run for the ARSL Board of Directors

Red-Hot and Filthy Library Smut

2009-09-15T10:59:00.001-07:00

From: http://thenonist.com

Red-Hot and Filthy Library Smut

Now, coming upon this post as you are, unawares, I feel I ought to clarify the title (which was alternately going to be sex libris) straight away by telling you what this post is not, in fact, about. By “library smut” I am in no way referring to the photo books on native peoples, or the illustrated health manuals, or any of the other volumes which, in your childhood, you lurked about the library aisle to find with the sole purpose of sneaking guilty glances at naked bodies. Nor am I referring to the “risqué” novels by Miller, Cleland, Réage, or Lawrence you leafed impatiently through as a teenager. No. What I’m talking about here is the full-frontal objectification of the library itself. Oh yeah.

Yesterday I came across a truly gorgeous book of photographs by Candida Höfer titled, Libraries, a title which pretty much says it all, because that is just exactly what it is, one rich, sumptuous, photo of a library interior after another. It’s like porn for book nerds. Seriously. They are gorgeous photos, nearly all without visitors and just begging to be entered. (ha. sorry.)

See below for 14 examples which I particularly liked, but keep in mind these 500px wide version can’t really compete with the big, glossy, real thing.

BNF PARIS

BIBLIOTECA DE LA REAL ACADEMIA DE LA LENGUA MADRID

KUPFERSITCH-KABINETT DRESDEN

BRITISH LIBRARY LONDON

REAL GABINETE PORTUGUES DE LEITURA RIO DE JANEIRO

CONWAY LIBRARY LONDON

STRAHOVSKA KNIHOVNA PRAHA

RIJKMUSEUM AMSTERDAM

WITT LIBRARY LONDON

STIFTSBIBLIOTHEK ST. GALLEN

HANDELINGENKAMER TWEEDE KAMER DER STATEN-GENERAAL DEN HAAG

KUPFERSTICH-KABINETT DRESDEN

STIFTSBIBLIOTHEK KLOSTERNEUBURG

TRINITY COLLEGE LIBRARY DUBLIN

Hope you enjoyed… but not too much… you filthy, beady-eyed perv.

You can pick up your own copy here.
(I’m sure they will ship in a plain brown paper-bag if you ask really nicely.)

Alternately, since I didn’t offer much by way of reading in this post I offer the following supplimentary material:

The obligatory Wiki round-up on the subject.

A history of private, royal, imperial, monastic and public libraries

Survivor: The History of the Library from History magazine.

Libraries & culture from University of Texas Press.

And hell, though it’s only tangentially related The Briar Press page:
Eleven Presses That Made History (Via.)

Reading Underground

2009-09-05T00:22:00.000-07:00

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

A CITY RITUAL Austin Ferrier, on his way to work, reads Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American” on the B train.

ByALEXIS MAINLAND

Published: September 3, 2009

THE middle-aged woman with the black cardigan around her shoulders had assumed a meticulously calibrated posture: feet shoulder-width apart, arms slightly bent, fists loosely clenched, muscles relaxed yet alert.

She was not preparing for a tae kwon do bout, but performing her personal version of the underground battle engaged in daily by millions of New Yorkers: reading, intently, on a sardine-can D train hurtling swiftly toward Brooklyn in the evening rush. Without holding on.

“I am a New Yorker,” the woman, Robin Kornhaber, 54, told me as if those five crisp words explained everything. “I can do anything on the subway.”

Reading on the subway is a New York ritual, for the masters of the intricately folded newspaper like Ms. Kornhaber, who lives in Park Slope and works on the Upper East Side, as well as for teenage girls thumbing through magazines, aspiring actors memorizing lines, office workers devouring self-help inspiration, immigrants newly minted — or not — taking comfort in paragraphs in a familiar tongue. These days, among the tattered covers may be the occasional Kindle, but since most trains are still devoid of Internet access and cellphone reception, the subway ride remains a rare low-tech interlude in a city of inveterate multitasking workaholics. And so, we read.

Even without a seat, even while pressed with strangers into human panini, even as someone plays a keyboard harmonica and rattles a cup of change, even when stumbling home after a party.

There are those whose commutes are carefully timed to the length of a Talk of the Town section of The New Yorker, those who methodically page their way through the classics, and those who always carry a second trash novel in case they unexpectedly make it to the end of the first on a glacial F train. There is a lawyer from Brooklyn who for the past two months has catalogued what she and other commuters are reading on a blog, “The Subway Book Club,” and a student at the New School who spent the summer passing out 600 donated books to subway riders to spread her passion for reading.

And then there are those reading the readers, imagining their story lines. That man in a suit studying “Rosetta Stone Level 3 Italian” on the No. 2 train must be preparing to meet his fiancée’s family in Tuscany. The woman reading a young-adult novel at 81st Street is probably a teacher preparing for class. We are usually left to wonder, but I recently spent 12 hours crisscrossing four boroughs underground, asking people what they were reading and why.

Bob Alderson, 46, the man learning Italian, is a patent lawyer, with no imminent overseas travel plans, but aspirations. “Someday I want to visit Italy, so I’m studying,” he said.

And the woman reading “City of Glass,” an urban fantasy involving a slavering demon and several warlocks? Kimberly Nessel, 26, a dog walker with a graduate degree in forensic psychology, said she became addicted to young-adult fiction with dark plot lines when she worked in a bookstore.

JUST BROWSING

C train at 135th Street, 9:30 a.m.

The blue bag balanced on her lap was packed full of health care administration textbooks and homework, but Deborah Hairston, who works in the cancer unit at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital was using her commute to peruse the catalogs that stuff her mailbox each week.

“Sometimes I find things I want to buy, but most of the time I am just browsing,” she said, paging past a display of bead-embellished Chadwicks cardigans. “I don’t want to read the news or get involved with anything too heavy. I have enough of that in my life.”

A PAGE A DAY

B train at 96th Street, 10 a.m.

To learn the Talmud, many of its students read one of its 2,711 pages each day. And it helps to have a chevruta, or study partner. Harry and David Zinstein, brothers from Washington Heights, generally conduct their Daf Yomi — page of the day, in Hebrew — study sessions en route to work on the Upper West Side.

Except on Wednesday, which turns out to be a kind of day of rest for Harry, the elder of the two Zinsteins at 28. A manager at Mike’s Bistro, a kosher restaurant on West 72nd Street, Harry Zinstein forgoes his subway Talmud study those days to read the Dining section of The New York Times.

“It’s the only thing I read on the train except for the Talmud,” he said, his thick, leather-bound Babylonian text tucked inside his messenger bag for later consumption. “And it’s the perfect length for the commute.”

David Zinstein, 19, who is studying in Israel but spent the summer working for his brother, sat to the right, reading his Aramaic tractates (with English translations). “I always read the Talmud on the subway,” he said. “Even on Wednesdays.”

MULTITASKING

A train at 23rd Street, 12:30 p.m.

Donalay Thomas is the kind of reader who creates a private space for herself among the multitudes, whether she is squashed by the door or has a whole row of seats to herself. With her iPod earbuds firmly in place (“On the Ocean,” from an R & B album by K’Jon) and a thick hardcover (“Resurrecting Midnight,” by Eric Jerome Dickey) open on her lap, Ms. Thomas, head down, can zone out and leave the world behind.

“I always listen to music while I read on the train because it sets the mood for me to get lost in the author’s plots,” said Ms. Thomas, 21, a model in between jobs who lives in Englewood, N.J., and was headed to West Fourth Street for an afternoon of skateboarding. “I can become one of the characters that I’m reading about.”

She does not, however, get so lost in her books that she loses touch with fellow passengers. “I’ll ask other readers if they’re enjoying a book I’m familiar with,” Ms. Thomas said.

Then she turned to a woman across the aisle. “Your stop is next,” she said, proving that she had been paying a little bit of attention to everything all along.

SUBWAY AS STAGE

B train at 42nd Street, 1:30 p.m.

If every restaurant in New York employs at least one actor, then every subway car seems to carry at least two — rehearsing for a part, or just daydreaming about one.

An actress named Rachel, who is 25 and wore dark sunglasses that may or may not have been helping her get into character, was in from Los Angeles, with several auditions lined up, including one for the part of Sosa in “The A-Team,” a movie remake of the 1980s television series. “Sosa is an aide to the secretary of defense,” she explained. “I am trying to channel her. She is sexy, but official.”

Across the aisle, James Wright, 31, was dressed casually, sitting beneath a dark suit and starched white shirt on a hanger. On his way to an audition for a soap opera, “As the World Turns,” he was reading Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” — he aspires to play Biff some day — to warm up.

A few minutes later, another actress, Angelica Ayala, was gesticulating forcefully and mouthing the words to her part, a woman with multiple names and personalities. Ms. Ayala, 45, made no apologies for her theatrical display.

“I just have to do what I have to do,” she said. “People might stare, but I need to rehearse.” Her play, “Peccatoribus,” was being staged at the Pregones Theater in the Bronx.

“It’s a play about war and fighting for yourself,” she said.

WRITING, TO READ LATER

N train at 59th Street, 4 p.m.

Having finished “The Nimrod Flipout,” a book of short stories by the Israeli writer Etgar Keret, on her morning commute, Alysia Vallas, on her way home to the Upper West Side, pulled out the journal in which she had been recording a summer’s worth of impressions of New York.

“I generally write little vignettes about daily occurrences I’d like to remember,” she said. “Strange places I’ve visited, people who have caught my eye on the subway, things of that nature.”

The journal, a patterned hardcover, also includes carefully drawn tables and notes on guitar chords she researched at the New York Public Library.

Ms. Vallas, 21 and a student at Grinnell College in Iowa, spent the summer as an intern at the Queens Library HealthLink. She said she typically used her train time to read or write.

“It’s the one the time of day that you have completely to yourself with no sort of immediate obligations, unplugged,” she said. “Although you’re surrounded by people, the anonymity is really forgiving.”

READERS IN TRAINING

2 train at 42nd Street, 5 p.m.

The day-campers from Tremont United Methodist Church in the Bronx, ages 5 to 8, were exhausted. They had been going full speed with activities since 7:30 a.m., including a field trip to the New York Hall of Science in Queens.

Waiting on the platform at Times Square, the children plotted how to score a coveted rush-hour seat, planning who would sit on whose lap if the options were scarce. Hands were held tight, and two of the youngest girls rested their heads against each other’s for a moment.

As the train pulled into 42nd Street, Jesus Figueroa, a Tremont counselor for six summers, readied the campers to board: “Get your books ready.” An explosion of titles — “Jig and Mag,” “A Rose, a Bridge, and a Wild Black Horse,” “The Kid Who Invented the Popsicle” — were pulled from backpacks.

According to a church rule, Tremont campers must read whenever they win a seat on the subway. Each day, campers select a book from the church library or bring one from home. They practice reading in short increments — 20 minutes here and there — and keep reading journals to document their progress.

“The books keep them occupied while they ride and help them stay on point with their reading skills,” said Mr. Figueroa, 20.

On the train, even campers who had to stand took to their books. An 8-year-old named Christopher used both hands to hold “Time Together,” supporting himself by twisting one of his black Nike Shox around the pole behind him. Next to him was Steven, also 8, who cracked open “50 Simple Things Kids Can Do to Save the Earth” with one hand and held on to a counselor with the other.

With an index finger following the words on Page 4 of “Mary Anne to the Rescue,” a book in the Baby-Sitters Club series, 8-year-old Laronda perched intently on her seat between two men scanning newspapers. For a moment, she looked up to offer an assessment of the task at hand. “This is a lot of work,” she said, “but it’s fun.” And then she turned back to the book.

JOINING THE CLUB

D train at Grand Street, 5:45 p.m.

Fellow passengers would probably never suspect that Carlton Clarke, standing in the middle of a crowded car, was consumed with the ramblings of a disaffected teenager.

With a logo bag from the accounting firm where he works slung over his shoulder and a stack of papers bound by a black clip balanced on his left palm, Mr. Clarke appeared to be taking his work home with him to Brooklyn.

But he was, in fact, three chapters into J. D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye,” a copy of which he had printed from a downloaded version circulating around his office book club, which meets weekly and turns 50-somethings like Mr. Clarke into armchair literary critics.

“I’m only part of the way into this book, but I already have questions about where it could be going and whether or not it can get there,” he said, bracing himself as the train lurched across the Manhattan Bridge.

In recent months, the book group has read the first and second installments in Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” series. “That was a different kind of reading experience because they are graphic novels,” Mr. Clarke said. “I had never been exposed to that genre before.”

As for “Catcher in the Rye,” Mr. Clarke could not remember whether he had read it before. “Maybe I did, in school, but either way, this is different,” he said. “I definitely never read it on the subway before.”

MEDITATION IN MOTION

7 train at Queensboro Plaza, 6:15 p.m.

On a crowded car hurtling toward Jackson Heights, Panee Ma was immersed in a solitary pursuit, radiating monklike calm.

For two years, Ms. Ma has used her round trips from Queens to the garment district, where she spends long days applying intricate beading to clothing by hand, to read “The Wisdom of the Lotus Sutra,” a six-volume Buddhist literary masterpiece. And here she was, on a warm Wednesday evening, most of the way through her last book.

Ms. Ma, 68, a native of Korea who came to New York in 1981 via Thailand, speaks in heavily accented English. Her reading goal is simple: “I am learning through these books to become a better human being and get better at English.

“I try to improve myself every day,” she added, thoughtful about the necessity of combining her spiritual life with the grime and noise of the subway. “I am trying to learn to live life as a Buddha. I don’t want to waste any time.”

An earlier version of this article misidentified the state in which Grinnell College is located and misstated part of the title of the Eric Jerome Dickey book being read by Donalay Thomas.

Tiny librarian is hell on wheels

2009-08-31T11:12:00.000-07:00

By Jim Kavanagh

(CNN) -- She's petite, she's middle-aged, she's bookish, and if she gets a chance, she'll knock you on your keister.

Librarian Beth Hollis gets ready to rumble in her Rubber City Rollergirls gear.

1 of 2

By day, she's Beth Hollis, a 53-year-old reference librarian in Akron, Ohio. By night, she's MegaBeth, an ageless dynamo on the roller derby rink.

"All my life, when I tell people I'm a librarian, they say, 'You don't look like a librarian,' " Hollis said. "And now that I'm a roller derby girl, they say, 'You don't look like a roller derby girl, either.' So I don't know where I fit in."

Hollis has been fitting in at the Akron-Summit County Library for 27 years.

"She's my hero," said Diane Barton, 48, who has worked with Hollis at the library for 18 years. "I just think it's so cool she's doing something so different and so active and so aggressive. You know how we are. We're librarians, so we tend to have that meek and mild stereotype." Watch her in action as Beth and MegaBeth »

Before discovering roller derby, Hollis had been casting about for a hobby.

"I tried knitting and literally got kicked out of the knitting class for just not being able to get the hang of it," she chortled. "I guess it was just too soon for me to try knitting. I needed something that maybe was a little bit more physical for a hobby."

Boy howdy.

She visited a Rubber City Rollergirls practice last winter after telling her husband, Warren, a retired high school math teacher, that she was going to an audition.

"At that point, I just said, 'I don't care that I have an AARP card in my wallet; I'm going to go for this,' " she said.

Roller derby is a real sport, having ditched the campy, WWE-like spectacle seen on TV in the early 1970s. The Rubber City squad practices six hours a week and competes against teams in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Kentucky.

Roller derby explained

Roller derby isn't as confusing as it first appears. Two teams of five players each line up on the oval track. Four are blockers, whose job is to knock down or otherwise impede the opposing players and to open the way for the fifth teammate, called the jammer, to make her way around the rink. The jammer scores a point for every opposing player she passes. If she laps everyone, she earns an extra point for her team. Each round, or jam, lasts two to three minutes or until the lead jammer calls it off. The teams play two 30-minute halves, and the team with the most points wins. Quirky uniforms and tough-chick nicknames add to the fun.

A roller derby match, called a bout, consists of two 30-minute halves. Each team has four blockers and one player called a jammer, whose job is to get past the other team's blockers on a 235-foot oval flat track and lap them to score points. Both teams are on offense and defense simultaneously, and the action is fast and rough.

"I think she's awesome," coach Brian "Coachise" Phillips said. "She is 53, so she is our oldest girl on the team, but she works every bit as hard as every other girl on the team, and she is in as good a shape if not better than every other girl on the team."

And she's an inspiration to the other players.

"It makes me actually excited to think that I could play ... for another 30 years, and that's awesome for me, because this is like my favorite thing to do," said Barb "Barbonic Plague" Brown, who at 21 is the youngest player on the team.

Hollis has earned the respect of her team captain, too.

"She's so tiny -- she's probably like 5 feet 4 and maybe 110 pounds or so -- but when she's out there, she's MegaBeth," said Tracy "Eighty-SixHer" Soulsby, 40. "I wouldn't say she's a very hard hitter, but she's a good blocker. Her strength is getting in people's way and then keeping them behind her, not letting them get around her."

The MegaBeth legend grew during a June bout with the Glass City Roller Girls, a team from Toledo, Ohio. Hollis found herself contending with a 6-foot-1, 220-pound foe who goes by the name Pamazon.

"Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her just take out this one girl, and I remember, the crowd just went wild. It was fantastic!" Brown recalled.

"I think that might be the highlight of her season," Phillips said.

For her part, Pamazon -- aka Pamela Keppler -- said she's never been knocked down in a bout.

"To be completely honest, I don't remember MegaBeth that well from the bout," she said. "I do remember talking with her at the after-party. We were all pretty surprised by her age, and I remember her saying that I knocked the snot out of her."

The team draws capacity crowds of 500 to 600 at its bouts, where admission costs $8.50 to $12.50 and concessions are sold.

"It really makes it exciting when you've got all those people cheering," Hollis said. "And as we progress through the season, it's obvious that we've gotten better ... and the fan support has just gotten louder."

But the glory comes at a cost. Two Rubber City Rollergirls have suffered broken legs -- in practice! -- and one is about to return after breaking her shoulder and nose in a bout.

"It's inevitable that you're going to get scrapes; you get rink rash and bruises," said Hollis, who wears number 796.21 -- the Dewey Decimal library index number for skating.

"I took a pretty tough fall to my hip that had me a little concerned. As I said to my teammates, at my age when you break a hip, it's the beginning of the end."

Asked whether she has hurt anyone else, the mother of two college graduates replied furtively: "I hope so."

Librarian Hollis isn't the only player smashing stereotypes. Among her teammates are teachers, a Starbucks manager, an accountant, a nurse practitioner, a barmaid and a couple of waitresses, most of whom are on the small side, Soulsby said.

"It's not just rough-and-tough, big, burly gals out on parole," Hollis said.

Perhaps just to keep it real, the team does include one former repo driver (Valcano) and a heavy-equipment operator (BulldozeHer Bo).

Barton, her fellow librarian, says there's something different about Hollis since she laced up her skates.

"It may just be my imagination, but she seems more confident in a way," Barton said. "It has to empower you somehow."

Hollis says it's good for people to test themselves with change.

"I encourage people to pursue things -- something like this -- that they think might be fun, and not to let stereotypes get in the way of whether or not they think they're going to fit in," she said. "Because you never know."

As Layoffs Loom, Broward Librarians Turn on One Another

2009-08-28T11:56:00.000-07:00

Posted by Bibliofuture

One Broward County Library worker told Juice of a recent conversation she had with a coworker claiming immunity from the scourge. "I'm not worried about getting laid off," the librarian allegedly boasted. "I have seniority." And in a disclosure she may have regretted, the librarian said that she had retired last year after some three decades of service, triggering her pension, only to be rehired so that she still collects a wage.

"This pissed me off," said her fellow worker, who asked to remain anonymous. "She's getting her retirement and still working while other people who have been here seven or ten years are worried for their job."

Full story here.

50 Exercises You can do at the Library (Without Looking Foolish)

2009-08-28T11:54:00.000-07:00

From: http://accreditedonlinedegrees.org

With library shifts easily running eight hours and over, does that time have to be wasted sitting or stacking books? The short answer is “no.” The long answer is: “check out these top 50 exercises you can do at the library, office, or just about anywhere.”

Best Desk Workouts You Can do at the Library

Get the most out of your desk time by trying out these highly recommended, expert exercises.

1. 15- Minute Desk Workout: Coach Nicole is a top expert at SparkPeople, a popular dieting and fitness site. In this short video, she shows you how to workout using items found around any office. A series of ten exercises work all your major muscle groups and end with seated stretches for the deskbound exerciser.

2. Best Exercises to do at Your Desk: “Forbes” magazine shows you how to work out at your desk. There are even tips on simple things you can do to have a healthier day. There is also a picture gallery of the best desk exercises.

3. Top to Bottom: Expert trainer Jillian Michaels has appeared on “The Biggest Loser.” In this three minute video, she shows you how to get a complete body workout with a few spare moments and free weights. Worth a look for its ability to workout multiple parts at the same time.

4. Dynamic Sculpt & Stretch: Natalie Yco shows you her professional 10 minute workout to work the entire body. It hits all five major muscle groups and follows up with stretching. Free weights are the only thing you need.

5. How to Work Out at Your Desk: MSNBC offers this simple guide to doing just that. Get instruction on the forearm stretch, finger pulls, neck stretch, tendon glides, and the chest stretch. There are also other related links.

6. Desk Workout: Gay Gasper shows you this mini desk workout. In just three minutes, learn a few exercises you can do at any work place. These simple kicks can even be done under a desk without anyone ever knowing.

Best Cardio Workouts You Can do at the Library

If you have a closed space or some free time, check out these workouts to get your heart going and those calories burning.

7. Jump Start Cardio Workout: Coach Nicole guides you through this ten minute workout. Simple cardio exercises are done without the need for equipment. It contains a warm up, workout, and cool down.

8. Cardio Sculpting: This ten minute cardio class will challenge you to work cardio intervals, alternating high intensity drills with short recovery breaks. You’ll sweat, jump, lunge, and even increase your flexibility in minutes. Watch for free or download for $1.99.

9. Bootcamp Calorie Burn: Why pay tons of money for a bootcamp workout when you can train as they do in 30 minutes for free? Kendall’s dynamic moves will get your body pumping in this calorie blasting workout. You just need a small space and a will to work.

Best Pilates Workouts You Can do at the Library

Because they require a small space and little to no equipment, Pilates can be done from any small space, such as an office.

10. Intro to Pilates: In this short video, Coach Nicole explains seven principles that will prevent you from making some common mistakes. Watch so that you can get the most out of your Pilates workouts. Posture, breath, and more are discussed.

11. 10-Minute Pilates Hips & Thighs Workout: This workout will help you strengthen your hips, glutes and thighs. Coach Nicole takes you through one short set of six Pilates exercises. Stretches are also included.

12. 20 Minute Power Pilates: Jessica’s routine will spark up every muscle in your abs, back, legs, hips and arms, while lengthening these muscles and joints. Her clear cues will ensure you get the most out of some classic Pilates moves. Ease back pain and achieve perfect posture to help you look pounds lighter. The preview is free.

13. Less is More Pilates: This video teaches you the fundamentals of controlled movement so you can get the benefits of your practice in the quickest way possible. Lizbeth shows you the routine, needing only a fitness mat. It is also optional if you have a carpeted floor.

14. Desk Pilates: Complete Workout: Pilates instructor Eleanor Gomez demonstrates a simple workout that will help prevent repetitive strain injury, strengthen your spine, and make working easier. Available at Bnet. There are also other related videos in the article.

15. Pilates Power: Take your Pilates up a notch with this twenty minute video. Jessica’s powerful routine will spark up every muscle in your abs, back, legs, hips and arms. She also shows you how to lengthen these muscles and joints to give you a long, sleek dancer’s body.

Best Stretches You Can do at the Library

Because injuring yourself is one of the best ways to look foolish, try out these stretches to minimize risk and get the blood flowing.

16. Seated Stretching Routine: This short articles shows you seven stretches that reduce stiffness and tension. They include the neck stretch, triceps, shoulders, and more. There is also a reference guide to stretching.

17. Football Flexibility: Rich Tuten works with the Denver Broncos and shows you how to stretch. Simple moves can be done anywhere with no equipment. Avoid injuries and adapt to any workout with this routine.

18. Running Flexibility: If you’re going for a run during your lunch break, check out this video to make sure you warm up properly. A few simple stretches are shown. Use for before and after a run.

19. Lower Body Stretching: This routine can be done completely standing up with no equipment. Six stretches target thighs, quads, hamstrings, and calves. Proper breathing is also shown.

20. Rhythmic Stretch: Get a groove going while you stretch in this video. Desiree shows you easy and fun ways to stretch. This simple routine will make you feel rejuvenated and radiant afterwards.

21. Upper Body Stretches: This short video begins with a shoulder roll. Another six stretches are shown in the three and a half minute video. Areas stretched include arms, chest, back, and neck.

Best Ab Workouts You Can do at the Library

Be the only one in the library wearing a cut off after taking on these challenging, yet rewarding, exercises.

22. Abs and Chest Combo Exercise: “Men’s Health” shows you this exercise in a short video. Simply choose MH Minute and Fitness to select. It involves an exercise ball and a few reps.

23. 12-Minute Pilates Abs Workout: This workout will help you strengthen your abdominals, obliques, and lower back. Coach Nicole takes you through one short set of eleven Pilates exercises for a complete core challenge. No equipment is needed.

24. Sculpt Abs on the Field: If you have a small grassy area outside of your library, give this workout a try. It is the same one professional baseball players use. A sprint and cardio drill help sculpt abs.

25. 10-Minute Crunchless Core Workout: No need for crunches or an exercise ball to do this workout. It strengthens abdominals, obliques, and lower back.

26. Rock Solid Abs: This plan hits your entire core–not just your abs but the muscles that support the spine. Moves can be done freestyle, with a weight, or exercise ball. You can even download the entire thing to your iPod.

27. Get A Flatter Belly: The experts at “Women’s Health” magazine show you four essential workouts for your core. Complete three circuits, resting for 45 seconds between each. Do the workout two or three nonconsecutive days a week.

Best Butt Workouts You Can do at the Library

Face bikini season head on or look great in those jeans with the help of these workouts

28. Butt Blasting Workout: If you’re tired of performing endless squats, then this short, focused workout is for you. These exercises target the gluteus maximus to retain strength and muscle tone. After six minutes of these targeted exercises, you will feel the burn and notice tighter and firmer muscles over time.

29. Butt Workout: Do these moves twice a week to complete this glute camp. There are videos of each move. You can also get a printable version of the workout.

30. 5-Minute Booty Workout with Ball: If you have an office, an exercise ball, and five minutes, this workout is for you. Use this short video to tone your butt and thighs without lunges or squats. The exercises target the gluteus maximus to retain strength and muscle tone.

31. Sculpt Your Butt: Stop by here to get a workout for both your butt and your legs. Five moves are done freestyle or with a stepper. Not only does it build muscle, but it burns calories as well.

32. Booty Burn: In just ten minutes, you’ll zap calories while lifting and tightening your glutes. Cindy increases your strength, power, and heart rate all in one. You’ll maximize your leg strength and boost your glutes and hamstrings.

Best Arm Workouts You Can do at the Library

Whether looking to lose the waddle or tone up, these short, free workouts will have your arms sculpted in no time.

33. 7-Minute Seated Band Resistance Workout: In this workout, Coach Nicole will lead you through a series of upper body exercises that you can do anywhere. Only a resistance band and a small space are needed.

34. Upper Body Towel Workout: Grab a towel and a few minutes to do these challenging arm workouts. Three moves are shown. They include two varying pushups and a towel crunch.

35. Arms Workout: These three moves can help you sculpt sexy arms. Three simple moves use only free weights. Complete two or three sets two days a week to get results.

36. Super Shoulders: In one and half minutes, Jillian Michaels’ shows you how to sculpt your shoulders. You only need free weights. Three advanced exercises are shown.

37. Armed and Dangerous: This Jillian Michaels mini workout is targeted for the arms, but works other areas, too. Free weights and jump rope mime are shown. She also gives recommendations on reps.

Best Leg Workouts You Can do at the Library

Don’t ignore your lower body. Try these workouts to get legs to match your arms.

38. Calf Raise With Hop: This exercise is a twist on an old classic. Do with or without a weight depending on your level. A hop is added for better results.

39. Single Leg Squat: For advanced exercisers, this can be the ultimate leg and lower body workout. Muscles, hips, and even posture are challenged. If you can do ten, try adding a pillow underneath your foot.

40. 10 Minute Buns & Thighs: Cindy shows you how to shape the lower body in just ten minutes using no equipment. Several simple exercises will have you feeling the burn in no time.

41. Lean Men Leg Workout: In a little over two minutes Jillian Michaels shows you how to get ripped legs. She shows you the plie, courtesy, and more.

42. Gold Medal Glutes and Legs: Wonder how Olympians work their lower body? Then try these creative and challenging body toning exercises. They will shape your glutes, hamstrings and the smaller muscles surrounding the glutes you need to get the smooth lines of an athlete.

Best Specialty Workouts You Can do at the Library

If you’re looking for something specific, or just a fun workout, try one or all of these mini workouts.

43. Kickbox Workout: Someone making fun of you for working out at the library? Then challenge them to this routine by trainer Amy Dixon. She’ll show you how to perfect your technique for maximum calorie burn.

44. Jump Rope Workout: Coach Nicole again shows you how to do a simple, ten minute workout using only a jump rope. This high intensity workout blasts calories. It can also be done without a jump rope.

45. Agility Workout: Afraid of looking foolish during these workout routines? Then try this 20 minute workout to make you both graceful and toned. Seven different moves use free weights, a basketball, and stepper.

46. Pylo Power: Jillian Michaels’ shows you how the power of jumping can workout your entire body. 180 jumping, the speed skater, and more are shown. She also tells you how many reps to do of each.

47. Kettlebell Workout: It’s basically a medicine ball with a handle attached, but it can tone your entire body. Missy Beaver, a Los Angeles trainer, created a twice-weekly routine that you can do at home. Four steps are shown in diagrams.

48. The Shim Sham Workout: If your library will let you take a ten minute hula hoop break, check this video out. Kelee shows you how to use one to get a fun workout. Hula hooping knowledge is required.

49. Fighting the Freshman 15: Not just for college students, librarians can get it too. Teri shows you body sculpting exercises that are meant to be performed in a small space. This fitness program was specifically designed for coeds by an instructor who has been there and done it herself.

50. Exercise Office Ball Chair: Lifehacker tells you how to use an exercise ball at your desk. It lists the pros and cons. If you are still on the fence, read the 50 comments left by various readers.

Libraries are often seen as dull, droll places with out of shape workers. It doesn’t have to be with the help of these 50 exercises you can do at or around the library. Make sure to consult a physician before beginning a workout plan.

Nominate Your Favorite Librarian of 2009!!!

2009-08-28T11:51:00.000-07:00

Librarians in our nation’s 123,000 libraries make a difference in the lives of millions of Americans every day. Now is your chance to tell us why we should shine the spotlight on a librarian at your public, school, college, community college or university library. Nominate your librarian for the Carnegie Corporation of New York/New York Times I Love My Librarian Award!

Up to ten librarians will be honored. Each will receive $5,000 and be recognized at an awards ceremony hosted by The New York Times at TheTimesCenter in December 2009.

Nominate a librarian in one of three categories: public librarians; school library media specialists; or college, community college, or university librarians.

Nominations close Oct. 9, 2009.

All winners will be announced in early November.

From: www.ilovelibraries.org

It's hip to be a librarian

2009-08-28T11:49:00.000-07:00

From: http://www.mb.com.ph - By RACHEL C. BARAWID

August 27, 2009, 8:56am

Librarians are old-fashioned boring nerds, unapproachable old maids or widowers -- not!

Today’s new breed of librarians have broken free from those dank and dusty school libraries, the century-old stereotypes, and have evolved into dynamic, progressive and most-sought after career people employed by large corporations, IT comp anies, hospitals and law firms.

Yes, a librarian can now be anyone -- from your cute neighbor or cool classmate, to that sophisticated babe or handsome hunk. Or better yet, he can be a multi-talented computer expert who is into flip spin, poi, fire breathing and photography such as Johann Frederick Cabbab, a professor of Library and Information Science (LISIS), at the University of the Philippines in Diliman.

A licensed librarian, the 36-year-old Cabbab admits he first settled for the LIS course after shifting from Accounting. A constant member of the library club in elementary and high school, Cabbab took interest in developing databases, one of the tasks of a librarian.

“When you talk of a librarian in this time and age, malawak na yung meaning. Many still land in the library but today, you can be a librarian in a virtual environment. You can be working in a publishing company and use your librarian skills such as journal indexing, abstracting and classifying.

I think that’s our advantage. We know how to classify. There’s a lot of difference from a librarian and non-librarian working in a database company,” explains Atty. Vyva Victoria Aguirre, dean of the UP School of Library and Information Studies and legal consultant of the Office of the Vice-Chancellor
for Research and Development.

Atty. Aguirre says in fact, librarians are among the most in demand professionals today. Many of them land in big corporations, schools, universities, big law firms, IT companies and hospitals.

“Everyday, I get a call or email from big corporations and schools asking for LISIS graduates that I can recommend. In the US, the trend now is clinical librarians accompany doctors in hospital rounds and sit with them in medical conferences to find out their needs. The same with law librarians who help lawyers gather evidence,” reveals Aguirre.

INFORMATION EXPERTS

When it comes to searching, managing and giving out information, librarians are also the most credible, says Aguirre.

Yes, in this age of information explosion, it may be easy to look for, download and cut and paste information using search engines. But the veracity of the information still has to be confirmed as the Web is not exactly an untainted source of information.

“Librarians have certain criteria for evaluating authoritativeness. We try to find out who is making this definition or where did it come from? Who is the author, the publisher? We are trained for this and we really go out of our way to decipher any information we get,” she points out.

Cabbab adds that librarians take the pains of searching, mostly thru scholarly journals, to look for specific subjects that cannot be answered by just Googling.

NO MORE GATHERING DUST

As LIS students continue to equip themselves with the necessary skills to become competent and competitive, they have also begun to adjust to a new paradigm shift that responds to the needs of the times.

“The information infrastructure has pushed Library Science to shift its paradigm from a librarian’s role of preserving, to that of servicing. You don’t care too much anymore if the books are lost as long as they are being used. You would rather lose them than keep them gathering dust on the shelves. From a warehouse mentality, a library has now become more like a supermarket for everyone to see, touch and get what they need. Hindi na tinatago ang mga books,” reveals Atty. Aguirre.

She says librarians are also gearing towards a hybrid library. Aside from the printed material, they also build on their electronic collection either through CDs, tapes or whatever storage accessible through the web. Libraries now subscribe to online journals. An Online Public Access (OPAC) system is now slowly replacing the old catalogs.

Librarians, adds Aguirre, have also started marketing the library as well as themselves.

“Before people will come to the library whether they want to or not because they need to. But now they can go elsewhere for their information needs even if the library has the most authoritative facts. But people don’t know that. So we have started marketing the library by improving its appearance,
and making it more attractive and conducive to learning,” she says.

Librarians are also taught to be more friendly and approachable. They should mingle with faculty members and students and let them know what they can offer.

“Sinasabi ko parati sa estudyante ko na if you get to work in company libraries, you have to exercise leadership and show your bosses that you are not just an additional expense. That you can actually
contribute to profit-making by giving them the info they need to improve their products. You have to be proactive and aggressive,” she stresses.

Libraries in UP, for example, have computers with internet connection and free WIFI for students with laptops. It also has discussion rooms that allow students to have group studies.

GROWING OPPORTUNITIES

When UP first offered LIS as a course in the 1940s, only 50 to 60 students enrolled. In the 70s, the degree became a requirement for those who wanted to work in libraries. At present, LIS averages around 400-500 students every year.

In LIS, students may choose electives which cater to their interest such as law librarianship for those who want to pursue Law, IT or medical and health courses. The next step for LIS graduates is to take the Professional Regulated Commission-organized board exam for librarians.

Graduating student Bianca Baylas shifted from Computer Science to LIS because she sees the career opportunities that it offers.

Senior student Kelvin Samson appreciates the course for its being service-oriented. “It elevates the image of the librarian from a mere keeper of books, to a guardian of information. As a student assistant, ang sarap ng pakiramdam pag nakikita mong nakakatulong ka sa mga kapwa estudyante mo. What more kung licensed librarian na ko, mas marami pa kong matutulungan,” he enthuses.

Graduating student John Eli Casino was attracted by the tracks that the LISIS course offers. He decided to combine law and IT electives to prepare for a new trend – law librarians who are also IT specialists. “It took years for my parents to understand my career move. Sa kanila, pag naging librarian ka walang room for growth. Tatanda ka nang ganun lang din, tiga-ayos ng libro. Biyudo. Tagapagpahiram. Eventually sila rin nakadiscover ng mga opportunities in this profession, and learned to accept my decision,” Casino shares.

LIS graduate Iya Agbon, on the other hand, didn’t expect she would end up having the same profession as the librarian that she was afraid of when she was in high school. “May bad experience ako sa libraries.

Yung librarian namin nakakatakot, naninigaw pag maingay ka. Kahit yung photocopying machine yung maingay akala niya kami pa rin. I also couldn’t imagine myself sitting in the library and immersing in such seemingly boring tasks like cataloging and indexing,” she says.

But later on when she shifted to LIS, Agbon realized that a librarian’s life is actually not confined in the four corners of a library.

“May buhay sa Lib Sci. Hindi totoo na librarian ka lang pag naggraduate ka. Hindi ka limited sa choices mo. You can be a researcher or enter in any other profession that is related to your field. You have an edge compared to other people with your eye for information. You can influence people with your credibility. But you should also be responsible and extra cautious in giving out information which is really sensitive,” she concludes.

Wikipedia's Parent Org Gets $2 Million Grant From eBay Founder

2009-08-26T12:07:00.000-07:00

Posted by Bibliofuture

The Omidyar Network, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's philanthropic and investment organization, announced today that it will give the Wikimedia Foundation, parent organization of Wikipedia, a $2 million grant over the next two years.

Full story here.

Library of Congress Staff Target of Threats

2009-08-21T19:38:00.000-07:00

August 16, 2009 - 1:00pm — Bibliofuture

Former Army reservist Lynndie England, a symbol of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, was set to discuss her biography Friday at the Library of Congress as part of a veterans forum on Capitol Hill, but her lecture was canceled after several staff workers received threats, according to the Associated Press.

More here.

She Wanted To be a Librarian, But She'll Have to Settle for Being a Star

2009-08-21T19:11:00.000-07:00

posted by birdie

Jennifer Garner tells Oprah Magazine, that when she was a young’n growing up in West Virginia she always wanted to be a librarian.

“I had a very rich imaginary world,” said Garner, who is 37. “And my dream was to grow up to be a librarian, because I had a librarian named Mrs. McCann who I thought was the most magical woman on the planet. She used to publish little versions of my stories, typing them on manila folders and illustrating them with pictures of me and my teddy bear.”

Libraries and reader privacy - critical juncture / take action

2009-08-03T17:45:00.000-07:00

From: http://blog.librarylaw.com

Libraries have always respected reader privacy as essential to one's freedom to read. If someone is looking over your shoulder, you might not pick up that book on gay stories, witchcraft, communism or whatever the taboo topic du jour happens to be. Libraries require either patron consent or actual legal process before disclosing patron records.

Fast forward to reading books online via Google Book Search. Fabulous new life for old books, but where in the complex proposed settlement agreement between Google and the publishers are reader privacy guarantees? I'll save you the pain of looking. Nowhere.

Every time you go online, you leave digital tracks, and with the settlement, you will generally need to authenticate yourself before viewing the out-of-print but in-copyright books at issue.

The final contours are not yet set. The settlement is not yet in effect. It's time now to take action to make sure we build some privacy safeguards in. The ACLU of Northern California, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Berkeley's Samuelson Clinic have joined in a letter to Google, requesting:

1- Protection against disclosure
2- Limited tracking
3- User control
4- User transparency

Our library users will be reading google books inside the library as well as at home/work. If a reader borrows a book from the library, we protect her privacy. If she reads the same book on our computer terminals, she needs the same protection.

Library Day in the Life...

2009-07-31T18:03:00.000-07:00

Emily 1 min ago

A Day in the Life of a Library...

Whether you are a librarian or library worker of any kind, help us share and learn about the joys and challenges of working in a library. Join us by sharing details of your day for a week on your blog. Not only is this a great way for us to see what our colleagues are doing and how they spend their days but it’s a great way for students who are interested in the library profession to see what we really do.

Round 1 July 2008
Round 2 January 2009
July 27th 2009 begins the Second Annual

Don't have a blog? Feel free to add a page to the wiki with your activites!

If you are interested in sharing your day/week in the life:

Create a PB Wiki account (it's free)!
Add your name, your job title (so we can see what you do at a glance) and a link to your blog.
Start blogging.
Tag your posts with librarydayinthelife.
After your first blog post come back and edit this page to change your blog link to a link to your tagged posts.
Add your Flickr photos or videos to the Group on Flickr

Thank you to Bobbi Newman for this wonderful idea! You can read the post that inspired librarydayinthelife on Bobbi's site Librarian by Day.

Theory and Practice in the Library Workplace

2009-07-31T18:02:00.000-07:00

July 26, 2009 - 10:50pm — vye

An Essay of the LISNews Summer Series

Every so often I hear someone remark that they didn't learn anything in library school; that their real professional learning happened on the job, or worse, that they think that the need for a library qualification is just gate keeping and protectionism. This always causes me some concern because it ignores the important role that library and information science theory plays in the workplace.

It is true that when you start working in a library there is a wealth of on-the-job learning to do. There are process and practical skills to master, and local policies and procedures to absorb. The daily improvement as we gain hands-on experience brings an immediate sense of achievement and an obvious increase in knowledge. The relevance of this behavioral learning is clear because it is needed to do the job. In contrast, knowledge of theory and principles is about understanding why we are doing the procedure. This understanding is important when making decisions to change local policy or practices, or in deciding how to adjust local practices in response to the impact of external factors.

Practical processes and procedures are there to help the library achieve its goals. The theory of libraries (or cataloging, reference, etc) is what is taught (and hopefully learned) in the process of gaining a professional library qualification. And in turn, that theory informs the daily procedures and practices. Furthermore, this library school learning gives library professionals a shared theoretical basis and often a shared value system, on which to make decisions in the workplace; decisions about what the policies will be, and what practices are most appropriate for helping a library achieve its purpose.

Of course, such knowledge is not set in stone. Over time, the theories and principles will change as the professional body of knowledge changes to incorporate new understandings of the library and information world.

In for-profit organizations practical measure usually exist to judge performance. Did more widgets get sold? Are widgets being produced more cheaply? Did the company make more money as a result? The bottom line is more complex however, in not-for-profit organizations like libraries. How do we know that the library is achieving its purpose? More people through the door? More books issued? More information literacy classes taught? Such quantitative measures are useful but they seldom express the real value libraries contribute to their communities. And because there is not a clearly agreed, black and white measure of the bottom line for libraries, many staff make assumptions based on their own value system. That is, they may assume that the purpose of their work is defined in terms of their value systems.

Changes in processes, policy or practice can be particularly difficult for those who are comfortable with their daily routines and who are working hard in the belief that their actions are contributing to the greater good of the library. Principles, theories and values can be difficult to articulate because they are often deep-seated, intuitively known and taken for granted. As a consequence, some people may be protective of a given activity because it is representative of their values and beliefs about libraries. A threat to an activity becomes a threat to their values. Resistance or obstruction to change can easily result if those affected belief that a proposed change is going to have a negative impact on their library's core purpose.

Library managers, or those leading change (even at the process level) may find it helps to take time to explore the commonly held beliefs and assumptions of their staff. Consider whether they are disagreeing with how things should be done, or if the conflict is at a more fundamental level. Do participants have differing theoretical perspectives on what sort of action adds value to the library's community?

This is important because changing beliefs and value systems is a far more challenging proposition than changing daily routines. Yet all too often in libraries the focus is on the more tangible behavioral learning rather than on the intangible theory that underlies practice. Of course, it makes sense on a day-to-day basis to focus staff training on how things should be done, but when a significant change is needed, time needs to be given to talking about why the change is being made and how it fits into the theory and principles of libraries and librarianship.

It seems that this kind of talk is not that common in libraries. Perhaps there is a tendency to assume that we are all working from the same set of core principles and theories, because most of us are as a result of our library school learning. But problems arise when time or external changes make some of our theories obsolete or irrelevant.

In recent years libraries have faced a constant stream of change. Changes are occurring not just at the operational level (think of the impact of the Internet, the web or Google on our local practices); there has also been a paradigm shift in how libraries are perceived. For example, these days libraries are often seen as social spaces with a focus on customer needs, rather than the quiet, scholarly environments of the 20th Century. However, there is no doubt in my mind that this shift in thinking is not universally accepted. The rate and extent of change means that we should not assume that there is a shared understanding of the principles on which our practices and polices are based.

Talking about theory and principles may seem abstract, 'wishy-washy' and unnecessarily time-consuming to practically-oriented library staff who just want to get on with the task at hand. But without such discussions conflict and resentment over change can endure longer than necessary. Taking time to dwell in the theoretical area could serve to bring staff together with a better understanding of the value of library activities and services. It may also be that some people will discover that what they know is as important as what they do and this link between theory and practice means that their professional education was not a waste of time.

###

Vye Perrone is Associate University Librarian, Collection Services at the University of Waikato Library in New Zealand. She was President of the Library and Information Association of New Zealand Aotearoa (LIANZA) in 2007/2008 and has just finished her year as Immediate Past President. Vye completed her MLIS from Victoria University of Wellington in 1998.

Behind the Scenes at the Library: The Journey of a Book July 24, 2009 - 8:04am — Blake

2009-07-31T18:01:00.000-07:00

By Phila Rogers, Special to the Planet

Thursday July 23, 2009

When you visit the Berkeley Public Library you’ll see staff at the circulation desk, at the reference desk, and others who are shelving books. What you are less likely to see are all those library employees, mostly in offices on the second floor of the Central Library, who move a book along from the time it’s either requested by a patron or a librarian. These are the employees who select, order, catalog, and process the 50,000 items added to the library’s collection every year.

First stop on a tour of this labyrinth of activity is the office of Marti Morec, the Collection Development librarian. A graduate of UC Berkeley’s Library School, Marti has been with the Berkeley Public Library since 1989, mostly in the Art and Music Department. “Though I loved working with the fabulous collection of recordings and books, I’ve also loved the last two years since I’ve stepped up to the exciting job of collection librarian. I still get a kick out of seeing a book arrive that I have steered through the whole process,” she adds.

A cart of new books sits next to Marti’s office and on her desk are a number of periodicals (Library Journal, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly) along with newspaper book review sections. “All the librarians are responsible for suggesting titles to buy and, of course, we listen to our patrons. Knowing our community helps us select books,” she says.

Marti coordinates patron requests, plus book selections made by a branch librarian and the Central Library book teams—each team focusing on a broad subject area. She also keeps a close eye on the book-buying budget and monitors the progress of the high-demand books. “Though it takes about four to six weeks from the time we order a book until it gets to the shelves, a hot item may be on the shelf in two weeks,” Marti adds.

(The library also has an impressive collection of audio books, CDs, and movies, but books still make up the lion’s share of the library’s collections.)

Marti electronically forwards the lists of suggested purchases to Technical Services, managed by librarian Megan McArdle. Tech Services includes four departments: Collection Development, Order, Cataloging, and Processing.

In the Order Department, lists are further collated and the best sources determined for buying at particular item. The orders are sent off to an appropriate vendor or jobber using a computerized book ordering system.

Delivery trucks deliver dozens of boxes of books daily, all of which are opened and the contents checked and rechecked to be sure that what is received is exactly what was ordered.

A cart, groaning under the weight of two packed shelves of books, with tags sticking out of each book, is parked in front of Yvette Pleasent’s office. She is one of the three people receiving new books. An order tag sticking out of the top of a book titled The Banana Slug: A Close Look at a Giant Forest Slug of Western North America contains 16 items of information which Yvette enters into the library database. A red slip indicates that a patron has already put a hold on the book. (Patrons can check the library’s catalog for titles “on order.”)

Once Yvette is satisfied that everything is in proper order she pays the bill electronically and Banana Slug, along with the other books, is rolled along into the Cataloging Department.

“This is where a book is given a call number so it can be shelved with similar books,” says librarian Greg McKean. “A book is also given a bar-code and lots of other information about the book, some of which you see when you look up a book on a computer,” he adds.

Finally, the book is off to its last stop on this complicated journey—to the Processing Department, a big cheery room with certain aspects of Santa’s workshop, well stocked with tools, labels, tapes, and packaging materials. Sam Zhang, the head of the Processing Department, says, “If a book is one that should remain in our collection but needs repair, we try and repair it here. ... With five employees, someone usually has the requisite skills.”

At a work table, one employee affixes a mylar strip down the spine of a paperback book. A hardcover book is fitted with a protective cover, stamped “Berkeley Public Library” on the ends of the closed pages, and is given an electronic tag for circulation tracking and security.

At another table, a technician tries to repair a spiral-bound Russian book, while another employee cleans a dirty CD. “If we can’t repair a book that is both valuable and irreplaceable, we send it to an outside bindery for repair,” says Sam.

Processed books are finally loaded into crates for twice-daily transport to the branches or on to book carts for the trip to Central’s various departments.

Now it’s up to the patron, checking out a book, to complete the journey.

Note: If Banana Slug: A Close Look at a Giant Forest Slug of Western North America has captured your fancy, copies are available in the Children’s Library at both the Central Library and at the Claremont Branch. The call number is 594.3 H213b.

Clash guitarist Mick Jones has become a 'guerrilla librarian'

2009-07-31T16:55:00.000-07:00

Posted by Blake

The Clash's lead guitarist Mick Jones has swapped the noisy world of punk rock for a quiet life as a librarian.

The lead guitarist, who was a prominent figure in the punk rock movement of the seventies and eighties, opened his Rock-n-Roll Public Library in London yesterday.

Based in an office near Portobello Road, west London, close to where Jones formed The Clash with Joe Stummer in 1976, the "guerrilla library" will include 10,000 items from the guitarist's private collection.

Library fan nears 25,000th book

2009-07-29T12:34:00.000-07:00

Mrs Brown is fast approaching her 25,000th library loan

An avid reader in south west Scotland is on the brink of borrowing her 25,000th book from her local libraries.

Louise Brown, 91, from Stranraer, took her first book on loan from Castle Douglas library in 1946.

Since then she has borrowed at least six books every week throughout each year and has recently increased that to about 12 volumes every seven days.

Library staff said they were amazed by the achievement, particularly since Mrs Brown has never had an overdue fine.

The Dumfries and Galloway pensioner first became a member at Castle Douglas library and has particularly fond memories of the staff there.

'Remarkable lady'

She began using Stranraer Library in October 2002 when she moved there to live with her daughter.

Staff at the library described Mrs Brown as a "remarkable lady" and said they looked forward to her weekly visits.

They also believe that her book borrowing figures could constitute a Scottish record.

They have asked any library with a more prolific reader to contact them.

Janice Goldie, the cultural services manager for the region, said they had not heard of anyone who could match her.

She said: "We are fascinated to know if Mrs Brown's record can be beaten.

"There may be other people out there who can beat them and we would love them to get in touch.

"We very much want Dumfries and Galloway to be celebrated as a reading region."

Story from BBC NEWS

The Librarian Song

2009-07-06T21:13:00.000-07:00

Song from the Joe Uveges-When Freedom Calls concert on November 2, 2007 in Colorado Springs

Librarian Nancy Pearl Picks Summer's Best Books

2009-06-26T12:28:00.000-07:00

by Nancy Pearl

Listen Now [7 min 19 sec] add to playlist | download

iStockphoto.com

Vote: The Best Beach Books Ever
Nominate your favorite beach reads of all time.

Morning Edition, June 19, 2009 · Summer is a great time to cozy up with some good books, and, boy, do I have some fantastic suggestions for you!

The following are a few of my favorite recent reads. Despite their differences of plot, settings and genre, what I love about each one of these books is the same: the voice of the narrator. These narrators are so compelling, so engaging, so real that I resented each moment I wasn't reading them. I hope you enjoy their company as much as I did.

'The Disreputable History Of Frankie Landau-Banks'

Excerpt: 'The Disreputable History Of Frankie Landau-Banks'

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, by E. Lockhart, hardcover, 352 pages, Hyperion Books CH, list price: $16.99

Twelve- to 15-year-old girls looking for a relationship novel that's neither sappy, angsty nor a fantasy need search no further: E. Lockhart's The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks is not only one of the most enjoyable teen novels that I've read in a long time, it's also one of smartest. Intelligently written with a cast of well-drawn characters and a witty narrative voice, Lockhart's novel features an original, thought-provoking plot that carries a serious message along with its good humor.

Frankie starts her sophomore year at Alabaster Prep a changed young woman from the geeky freshman she was just a few months ago. When she starts going out with handsome Matthew — the senior boy who's the catch of the campus — she's pretty sure she's left all remnants of the old nerdy Frankie behind. But when she learns that Matthew is the president of an all-male secret society of juniors and seniors at the school called "The Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds," her immense annoyance at being excluded simply because she's female leads her to come up with a brilliantly inventive (if perhaps slightly illegal) scheme to get back at the club members.

Entertaining as it is, the caper-filled plot is Lockhart's method to get us interested in knowing Frankie, who is simply a delight. A fan of P.G. Wodehouse, Frankie loves words, and she's not afraid to either ask questions or challenge accepted norms. I wish I had been exactly like her when I was 15. This would be a terrific choice for mother-daughter book groups.

'The Photographer'

Check Out A Graphic Novel Excerpt From The Photographer

The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders, by Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefevre, paperback, 288 pages, First Second, list price: $29.95

In 1986, on his first assignment as a photojournalist, Didier LeFevre accompanied a team of Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) members who were traveling to Afghanistan during the long bloody conflict between the invading Soviet Union troops and the Taliban. It was a dangerous journey that began in Peshawar, Pakistan, and ended three months later in Afghanistan. Straying off the path was not encouraged, as land mines were prevalent, and there was always the fear of snipers or of being attacked by roving soldiers of either side. Their destination was a small village in northern Afghanistan, where they set up a clinic to treat the men, women and children who were the collateral damage in a brutal war. When the team was returning back to their home base in Pakistan, LeFevre made an unwise choice to travel back to Pakistan by himself — a decision that nearly got him killed.

Now, in The Photographer, an unusual and powerful graphic novel that mixes photographs, illustrations and text, LeFevre, artist Emmanuel Guibert and graphic designer Frederic Lemercier revisit that journey. The book includes LeFevre's original contact sheets, which, it's interesting to note, are not unlike strips of comics. Supplementing the photos are drawings by Guibert and text that was reconstructed from discussions Guibert and LeFevre had about the journey. (LeFevre's journals — mentioned in the book — were lost years ago.)

The Photographer is a good example of how the graphic novel format can work elegantly for nonfiction; it's also a good example of how inadequate the term "graphic novel" is for a work that makes equal use of text and illustrations. And the decision to do this as a graphic novel — however inadequate the phrase is — was exactly right, because we need both the visuals and the text to fully grasp the experiences LeFevre and the MSF team underwent. Reading The Photographer is a stunning, unforgettable experience: You somehow emerge from your time spent in Pakistan and Afghanistan a better, more humane individual.

'The Color Of Lightning'

Excerpt: 'The Color Of Lightning'

The Color of Lightning, by Paulette Jiles, hardcover, 368 pages, William Morrow, list price: $25.99

The Color of Lightning, Paulette Jiles' powerful and moving third novel, begins with a real person and — taking the little that is known from the historical record — creates a life for him that illuminates a morally complex time and place in American history. Britt Johnson was a black man, a freed slave, who, along with his wife and three children, accompanied his former owner and several other white families to homestead on the north Texas Plains during the last years of the Civil War.

At the time, Texas had opened up its land for settlement, but the Kiowa and Comanche Indians, who were afraid of losing their traditional hunting grounds, retaliated by kidnapping and/or murdering the settlers. Meanwhile, the U.S. government was trying to corral (almost literally) the Indians on reservations.

One day, while Johnson and most of the other men are away, their settlement is raided. Many — including Johnson's oldest son — are killed. The others, mainly women and children, are taken north with the Indians. Heartbroken and in an angry despair, Johnson rides to the Indian camps to rescue his family. Along the way, we meet the (wholly fictitious) character of Samuel Hammond, a member of the Society of Friends who is appointed as an agent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to try to use peaceful means to disarm the Indians and get them to agree to become farmers. Other characters for whom we grow to care deeply are Tissoyo, who was banished by his tribal leaders; Mary, Britt's wife, almost fatally damaged both physically and psychologically by her treatment in captivity; and Elizabeth Fitzgerald, a terrifically stubborn white woman taken in the same raid as Mary.

I was especially moved by the dilemma of the white children who were kidnapped at a young age and had little memory of their early years, as they grew up knowing nothing except their life on the Plains. Here's how Jiles describes one little girl's feelings about being brought back to the white family she scarcely remembered: "She was not afraid of going hungry, or starvation. She was afraid of the slow death of confinement. Of being trapped inside immovable houses and stiff clothing."

With fully developed characters and vivid, brilliantly crafted writing, Jiles skillfully re-creates a complicated period of history. (Incidentally, Johnson's adventures as an Indian hostage hunter became the inspiration for Alan Le May's 1954 novel, The Searchers, which was turned into the 1956 John Ford film of the same name. In the movie, the character based — very loosely — on Johnson, through the vagaries of the creative process and Hollywood casting, is played by John Wayne.)

'The Gone-Away World'

Excerpt: 'The Gone-Away World'

The Gone-Away World, by Nick Harkaway, paperback, 592 pages, Vintage Contemporaries, list price: $15.95

Some books are relatively easy to talk about: I tell a bit of the plot, describe a character or two, maybe compare it to another book, and — voila! — there you have it. And then there is Nick Harkaway's The Gone-Away World. I refuse to reveal much about Harkaway's outstanding first novel because I want readers — and I hope there will be many, many of them — to discover its joys without prejudice.

Nevertheless, I will say this: You'll probably find the book in the science fiction section of the library, since it's a post-apocalyptic novel. The narrative voice is likely to capture you from the very first paragraph. And the characters are mostly sympathetic and always three-dimensional.

And without giving anything away, I'm pretty sure that I can tell you that there's a spectacular plot twist that totally changes the way you read the book. (As a result of that, I suspect that you'll want to go back to the beginning and reread it, just as I did, looking for the clues that Harkaway helpfully planted for us along the way.)

If you're a reader, you'll find echoes of other books and authors in The Gone-Away World, including the narratively complex fiction of Harkaway's father, John Le Carre (although Harkaway's novel is of another genre, entirely); Neal Stephenson; one particular short story of Clifford Simak's; a lot of military science fiction, including Joe Haldeman's The Forever War; Sylvia Nasar's A Beautiful Mind (or perhaps the movie made from it); Robert Heinlein; Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass; and Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles.

I've never met Nick Harkaway, so I don't know if he's ever read (or enjoyed) any of the books or authors I've mentioned, but as I was reading The Gone-Away World, these came to mind. What I can say is that if you're looking for an inventive, intelligent, rousing and simply all-around terrific novel, then Nick Harkaway's The Gone-Away World is for you. Let's hope it's the beginning of a long career.

'Narrow Dog To Indian River'

Excerpt: 'Narrow Dog To Indian River'

Narrow Dog to Indian River, by Terry Darlington, paperback, 352 pages, Delta, list price: $15

I laughed pretty much the entire time I was reading Terry Darlington's Narrow Dog to Indian River, a delightful recap of Darlington's journey with his wife on the 1,150-mile Intracoastal Waterway from Virginia to the Gulf of Mexico. Despite their ages and the fact that it had never been done before, the septuagenarian Darlingtons leave their home in Stone, England, and set out in their narrowboat accompanied by their dog, Jim.

A narrowboat, as I learned, is also known as a canal boat; it's 6 foot, 10 inches wide and 60 feet long, with a top speed of 6.2 miles per hour. (Jim, a whippet, is about 6 inches wide.) The boat is perfect for cruising the canals of Europe, but perhaps not so great for the open water that the Darlingtons encounter on their journey. Nonetheless, the trio sets out, encountering along the way ice storms, high seas, piranhas, chiggers and various Southern phenomena, including sweet tea, grits and good ol' boys and their families. There's also lots of that hospitality the region is known for — despite Jim's behavior at Christmas, which I'm still chuckling about. While I'm not brave enough to ever reproduce the trip the Darlingtons made, reading this made me think about a) getting a whippet, and b) taking a narrowboat trip through the canals in England.

'What Happened To Anna K'

Excerpt: 'What Happened To Anna K.'

What Happened to Anna K, by Irina Reyn, paperback, 256 pages, Touchstone, list price: $14

Discovering a first novel that I love and want to share with others reaffirms my faith that it's still possible to find books that offer me insight, knowledge and pleasure in a voice I've never heard before. Irina Reyn's What Happened to Anna K, a retelling of Anna Karenina, was such a book for me. Reyn ingeniously reinvents Leo Tolstoy's tragically selfish eponymous heroine, moving her more than a century and many time zones away from her native Russia, while maintaining the outlines of Tolstoy's plot.

Even in the 21st century, women's roles are tightly constricted in Anna K's close-knit Russian-Jewish community in Rego Park, Queens. The goal is to marry well (arranged marriages are common), follow the biblical commandments and dictates of the group's rabbi, and raise children to carry on the tradition. When Anna K leaves her financially successful older husband and young son because she's fallen hopelessly and helplessly in love with a younger man (a wannabe writer who happens to be her naive and innocent cousin Katia's boyfriend), the shock waves reverberate throughout the insular community.

The pleasures of Reyn's novel are to be found both in her clear-eyed depiction of the tensions between self and society, as well as in the descriptions of the Bukharian-Jewish emigre community where Anna lives, and whose conventions she both flouts and flaunts. I had never heard of Bukharian Jews before I read What Happened to Anna K, but I spent a lot of time when I finished it looking up information on their fascinating history. I also went out and bought the highly regarded new translation of Anna Karenina by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky to read.

'A Far Cry From Kensington'

Excerpt: 'A Far Cry From Kensington'

A Far Cry from Kensington, by Muriel Spark, paperback, 192 pages, New Directions, list price: $12.95

One of my favorite characters in all of fiction is Mrs. Hawkins, the greatly overweight, greatly capable and greatly opinionated narrator of Muriel Spark's lighthearted novel, A Far Cry from Kensington. As Mrs. Hawkins says of herself: "I enjoy a puritanical and moralistic nature; it is my happy element to judge between right and wrong, regardless of what I might actually do. At the same time, the wreaking of vengeance and imposing of justice on others and myself are not at all in my line. It is enough for me to discriminate mentally and leave the rest to God."

The heart of the novel, recounted in a long flashback, takes place in 1954, in the world of literary London. Mrs. Hawkins lives in a rooming house in Kensington, then a down-at-heels part of the city, where she works as an editor for a small publishing company. One of her great dislikes (among many) is bad and pretentious writing. One day, Mrs. Hawkins happens upon Hector Bartlett, a writer whom she believes is one of the worst offenders, in the park on her way to work. She accuses him of being a "pisseur de copie," someone who "vomits literary matter." Not unnaturally, he takes great umbrage at being referred to thus, and becomes Mrs. Hawkins' great enemy, not only getting her fired from two publishing jobs, but also, quite possibly, doing even more serious harm to one of Mrs. Hawkins' fellow boarders. Or did he? With Spark, it's hard to know.

Spark is a spare and meticulous writer; she brings her creations to life in a simple sentence or two. One female character in A Far Cry from Kensington is described as being so forgettable that "she seemed to live in parentheses." But it's the character of Mrs. Hawkins who demonstrates Spark's talents at their finest. I first read this novel more than 20 years ago and loved it then. Rereading it for Pearl's Picks, spiffied up in a new cover from New Directions, I found it as buoyant and satisfying as I did back then.

'The Silver Linings Playbook'

Excerpt: 'The Silver Linings Playbook'

The Silver Linings Playbook, by Matthew Quick, hardcover, 304 pages, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, list price: $24

Aawww shucks! I know that's hardly a usual way to begin a book review, but it was my immediate response to finishing Matthew Quick's heartwarming, humorous and soul-satisfying first novel, The Silver Linings Playbook. The book opens as 30-year-old Pat Peoples, a former high school history teacher, is being sprung from a Baltimore mental institution and taken home by his mother. Convinced that he was in the hospital for only a few months, Pat has no idea why he was sent there in the first place. What he does know is that Nikki, his wife, wants some "apart time," as Pat calls it. But Pat is bound and determined to win her back, because he believes in happy endings and silver linings. This belief is despite the fact that his father won't even talk to him, there are huge gaps in his memory, and he's become addicted to working out.

As Pat slowly begins to remember and come to terms with the painful realities of his past, he begins to understand that "it's better to be kind than to be right." Along the way he's aided by an eccentric (but effective) psychiatrist named Patel (who shares Pat's love for the Philadelphia Eagles football team) and Tiffany, the widowed sister-in-law of his old best friend, Ronnie.

I could go on and on listing the reasons why this book makes me smile, but I'll limit myself to two: First, I loved reading Pat's critiques of classic fiction like The Great Gatsby, The Scarlet Letter, The Bell Jar and — especially — A Farewell to Arms, which he reads because he's trying to become the person he thinks Nikki (an English teacher) wanted him to be. Second, I never realized that the Philadelphia Eagles inspired such intense, crazed-with-love, live-and-die-with-their-team fanatics. The scenes set around the football games are hilarious — indeed, the only way Pat and his father can seem to communicate is when the Eagles are on television.

What's known as "light fiction" tends to be undervalued among critics. Along with The Silver Linings Playbook, James Collins' Beginner's Greek, Steve Kluger's Last Days of Summer, Stephen McCauley's The Easy Way Out and Elinor Lipman's My Latest Grievance all offer us hours of reading pleasure. This, in my opinion, is not something to be taken lightly.

Filtering in Washington State

2009-06-23T11:09:00.000-07:00

posted by birdie

From The Seattle Weekly:

Tomorrow, the State Supreme Court will hear Bradburn v. North Central Library Region (NCLR). The North Central Library Region is a system spanning Chelan, Douglas, Ferry, Grant, and Okanogan (WA) counties. Like other library systems that receive federal funds for Internet access, the NCLR is required to have the ability to block minors from seeing materials deemed "harmful" to them. Typically, libraries disable those filters at the request of adults.

Nevertheless, the NCLR has instead decided that it will judge the merits of each adult's request to disable the filter. This, says the ACLU, "hampers adults in researching academic assignments, locating businesses and organizations, and engaging in personal reading on lawful subjects." ACLU spokesperson Doug Honig says that the majority of requests to lift the filter has been denied.

The organization sent out a partial list of sites that have been blocked by the filter:

* The website of an organization encouraging individuals to commit random acts of kindness
* The Seattle Women's Jazz Orchestra website
* The website of an organization encouraging women to carry to term by creating "a supportive environment for women in crisis situations to be introduced to the love of Christ"

Ray Bradbury Fights For Libraries

2009-06-22T19:09:00.000-07:00

Posted by Great Western Dragon

Ray Bradbury loves libraries and Bo Derek. And since Bo Derek isn't in any financial trouble right now and the Ventura County Public Libraries are, he's stepping up to help.

A life long advocate of libraries, and a regular speaker within them, Mr. Bradbury will be the guest of honour on Saturday, June 20th at an event to benefit the library. There will be a screening of The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, a movie based off Bradbury's short story of the same name. Afterward there will be a discussion with the author. Tickets are US$25 and all proceeds go the library.

City Of Detroit Spending Money Meant For Libraries

2009-06-22T19:08:00.000-07:00

Posted by Great Western Dragon

It's bad enough that libraries are in the financial situation they are today, but it only makes it worse when they wind up fighting their city government for money that's supposed to be theirs.

Such is the case in Detroit where the library learned that the City of Detroit is spending money out of the library's fund. The Detroit Public Library is a separate municipal tax corporation and the use of it by the City not only raises ethical questions, but several legal ones as well. Even worse, the library found out about this practice the same time Detroit Public Schools learned that the City has been dipping into their equally separate tax fund.

Since July 1 of last year, the City spent around $6.2 million in money that didn't belong to it. Library Commissioner Jonathan Kinloch said:

"It's horrible, and it's illegal. There's a piggy bank that our money is supposed to be in, and the city is basically going into our piggy bank to pay their bills."

The City's misuse of money garnered the attention of the State Legislature and an investigation may be launched.

Facebook group for a Library Themed Ben & Jerry’s Flavor

2009-06-18T10:42:00.000-07:00

Posted by AndyW

Advocacy through social media has just gotten a bit cooler.

There is a newly formed Facebook group for a Library Themed Ben & Jerry’s Flavor. But what do libraries and Ben & Jerry’s have to do with each other?

In these economic conditions, the role of the library is becoming more important in the lives of its patrons. Diminished incomes have stopped people from buying books, newspapers, magazines, music and movies as well as dropping services like home internet. They are turning to the library for the media and materials that they would have normally bought for themselves in the past. With employers moving their hiring applications to their websites and most job searches move online, the ability for people to be able to access the internet increases in importance. In reaction to this, libraries have added job hunting, resume writing, and interview materials, classes, and programs. On top of this, we are helping people everyday navigate this new age of information. But we are still struggling to maintain services in the face of stagnant or slashed state, county, and municipal budgets.

Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream has a long history for corporate advocacy for different causes. From their mission statement, they seek to conduct business in a socially responsible and environmentally sensible way. Over the years, they’ve created flavors to raise awareness for poverty, global warming, water preservation, family farmers, disadvantaged children, and world peace. Their activism extends to their employees who volunteer their time for community projects. Plus, they make some pretty tasty ice cream.

Sounds like a perfect match!

Join the group, spread the word, and let’s make the library an even cooler place to be!

Cross Posted to my personal blog, Agnostic, Maybe

Kid Running "Banned Books" Library Out of School Locker

2009-06-11T10:20:00.000-07:00

posted by shelfcheck

On a question posted to Yahoo! Answers, a high school student asks, Is it OK to run an illegal library from my locker at school?, then continues:

"Let me explain.

I go to a private school that is rather strict. Recently, the principal and school teacher council released a (very long) list of books we're not allowed to read. I was absolutely appalled, because a large number of the books were classics and others that are my favorites. One of my personal favorites, The Catcher in the Rye, was on the list, so I decided to bring it to school to see if I would really get in trouble. Well... I did but not too much. Then (surprise!) a boy in my English class asked if he could borrow the book, because he heard it was very good AND it was banned! This happened a lot and my locker got to overflowing with the banned books, so I decided to put the unoccupied locker next to me to a good use. I now have 62 books in that locker, about half of what was on the list. I took care only to bring the books with literary quality. Some of these books are:

>The Perks of Being a Wallflower
>His Dark Materials trilogy
>Sabriel
>The Canterbury Tales
>Candide
>The Divine Comedy
>Paradise Lost
>The Godfather
>Mort
>Interview with the Vampire
>The Hunger Games
>The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
>A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
>Animal Farm
>The Witches
>Shade's Children
>The Evolution of Man
> the Holy Qu'ran
... and lots more.

Anyway, I now operate a little mini-library that no one has access to but myself. Practically a real library, because I keep an inventory log and give people due dates and everything..."

My hero. [read rest of Yahoo! Answers post]

President Obama Freezes School Library Funding in 2010

2009-05-19T10:15:00.000-07:00

By Debra Lau Whelan -- School Library Journal, 5/12/2009

President Obama may talk about the importance of libraries, but now that his budget is out, librarians are wondering, where’s the love?

The president is proposing a slight funding hike for public libraries through the Library Service and Technology Act (LSTA)—but he’s keeping monies for the Improving Literacy Through School libraries program at $19.1 million, the same level since 2008.

“We’re disappointed by the budget because it lacks the adequate resources that libraries require to meet the needs of the American people,” says Melanie Anderson, the American Library Association’s (ALA) associate director of the Office of Government Relations. “We’ve more than demonstrated that libraries provide important resources for their communities during this recession.”

ALA had high hopes that Obama would be more generous to libraries next year, considering the president’s comment in February that his administration had begun to go “line by line through the federal budget” to eliminate wasteful and ineffective programs and reward those that succeed.

That same month, the Department of Education(DOE) released a report saying that schools participating in the Improving Literacy Through School Libraries program perform higher on state reading tests.
...

http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6657608.html?desc=topstory

Ode To The Book, by Pablo Neruda

2009-05-10T22:28:00.000-07:00

When I close a book
I open life.
I hear
faltering cries
among harbours.
Copper ignots
slide down sand-pits
to Tocopilla.
Night time.
Among the islands
our ocean
throbs with fish,
touches the feet, the thighs,
the chalk ribs
of my country.
The whole of night
clings to its shores, by dawn
it wakes up singing
as if it had excited a guitar.

The ocean's surge is calling.
The wind
calls me
and Rodriguez calls,
and Jose Antonio--
I got a telegram
from the "Mine" Union
and the one I love
(whose name I won't let out)
expects me in Bucalemu.

No book has been able
to wrap me in paper,
to fill me up
with typography,
with heavenly imprints
or was ever able
to bind my eyes,
I come out of books to people orchards
with the hoarse family of my song,
to work the burning metals
or to eat smoked beef
by mountain firesides.
I love adventurous
books,
books of forest or snow,
depth or sky
but hate
the spider book
in which thought
has laid poisonous wires
to trap the juvenile
and circling fly.
Book, let me go.
I won't go clothed
in volumes,
I don't come out
of collected works,
my poems
have not eaten poems--
they devour
exciting happenings,
feed on rough weather,
and dig their food
out of earth and men.
I'm on my way
with dust in my shoes
free of mythology:
send books back to their shelves,
I'm going down into the streets.
I learned about life
from life itself,
love I learned in a single kiss
and could teach no one anything
except that I have lived
with something in common among men,
when fighting with them,
when saying all their say in my song.

GOVERNOR'S ADMINISTRATION WARNS: THE STATE MAY BORROW $2 BILLION FROM LOCAL GOVERNMENTS IF MAY 19TH BALLOT MEASURES FAIL

2009-05-07T11:10:00.001-07:00

Take Action!

May 7, 2009

Yesterday the State Department of Finance informed several local government organizations that, with the possibility that the May 19th ballot initiatives may not be successful, one of the options to address the potential Budget shortfall would be to borrow approximately $2 billion in property taxes from local governments.

The background paper provided during the briefing by the Department of Finance states:

"The constitution allows that up to 8% of local governments' property tax revenues can be borrowed by the state and repaid within three budget years with interest. The amount that can be borrowed is determined by the amount of property taxes received by cities, counties, and special districts in the preceding year. Borrowing from local government in the 2009-10 fiscal year would provide $2.006 billion in solutions.

Local governments could borrow against the state's constitutional obligation to repay, thereby mitigating the impact of this reduction. However, in the current economic landscape, local governments are not easily finding available short term financing and could face difficulties borrowing these funds from the market. If they borrow, local government will incur substantial borrowing costs."

The Department of Finance also acknowledges that there would be varying affects on local governments as it "will, in part, depend on the ability of local government to obtain borrowing from the market. This reduction could result in cuts to locally funded services such as police and fire, waste collection, road maintenance, libraries and other services."

As you will recall, Proposition 1A in 2004, provided certain protections for cities, counties, and special districts against future raids of their property taxes, for the purpose of balancing the state Budget. However, contained in Proposition 1A was a caveat, which allows the state, beginning in 2008-09, to "suspend" the prohibition on taking local property taxes if the Governor proclaims a "significant State fiscal hardship" and gets the Legislature to agree by a 2/3rds vote. If you are interested, the legislation spelling out the terms of Proposition 1A is contained in SCA 4 (2004) and SB 1096 - a Budget trailer bill from 2004.

Last year, during the very difficult and protracted Budget deliberations, there was an ongoing threat that the Budget deal would include borrowing property taxes from cities, counties, and special districts. Thanks to opposition from affected groups, the proposal was not included in the final Budget agreement. As you may be reading, and it is particularly indicative in early polling data, there is a strong likelihood that several, if not all of the ballot measures will fail on May 19th, resulting in a $6 billion loss in revenue, primarily from the loss of $5 billion in lottery securitization funds (Proposition 1C). Coupled with the $8 billion shortfall already projected by the Legislative Analyst's Office, there will be an immediate $14 billion hole in the state Budget. Some Republican members of the legislature have stressed that "taxes will not be an option this time around" and thus, the legislature will be looking to solutions such as cuts, borrowing, and increased fees.

Submitted by Michael Dillon and Christina DiCaro, CLA Lobbyists

Google Introduces Public Data Search Feature

2009-05-06T19:05:00.000-07:00

Find public statistical data through Google

Public statistical data, such as unemployment rates or population numbers, doesn't need to be hard to find or, more importantly, hard to understand. Google is making it easier to find and use important public statistical data from governments and other sources. This data is included in Google.com search results and displayed as interactive graphs that you can customize and share with others.

Find public statistical data through Google

Public statistical data, such as unemployment rates or population numbers, doesn't need to be hard to find or, more importantly, hard to understand. Google is making it easier to find and use important public statistical data from governments and other sources. This data is included in Google.com search results and displayed as interactive graphs that you can customize and share with others.

Watch a short video on using Google to find public data

See public data results

If you've ever done research involving large datasets, you know that it can take hours to comb through databases in order to find and analyze trends. Anyone who searches for U.S. unemployment rates or population numbers on Google.com will see relevant statistics and graphs included in their search results. You can even search by state or county (but not by city).

Want to give it a try? Try these example searches: [ Florida unemployment rate ], [ Santa Clara county population ]. Not using Google.com? Go to http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en&gl=us to try these searches.

Customize and share public data graphs

Clicking a public data result will take you to a larger interactive graph where you can compare the available data. (Having problems viewing the graph? Make sure you're using the latest version of Flash.)

Even people who normally shy away from statistics should find these dynamic graphs easy to use and understand. Here are a few suggestions for working with these graphs:

Use the checkboxes on the left to add more information to the graph. As you include additional selections, the axes and lines on the graphs may adjust and shift.
Hover over a point on a line to see the point's numerical value.
It's always good practice to verify a given statistic. To see the source of the data for a given graph, click the link below the graph.
Once you've customized a graph, share it with others. Click Link in the upper-right corner of the page to create a URL which you can then paste into an email or IM.

Have other questions about using these public data graphs? Visit the Google Web Search Forum.

Data sources

The unemployment rate and population data you see in Google come from the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics. Keep in mind that even the most recent public statistic is a bit old by the time it's published, since it takes time to collect and process data. Information on accessing the original datasets

Want to make your public data more visible?

We are constantly looking to expand the scope of public data that people can find through Google. To learn more about making your organization's data available through the public data feature of Google search, see our information for data publishers.

Libraries Need to Think More Like Trent Reznor

2009-04-27T11:20:00.000-07:00

From: http://ericschnell.blogspot.com

I seem to be reading a lot about Trent Reznor as of late. I have been forwarded the "Nine Inch Nails iPhone App Extends Reznor's Innovative Run" article in Wired and a Twitter update from a librarian colleague/former student referenced Digg Dizlog: Trent Reznor.

For those saying "Trent Who?," Reznor is a musician/noisemaker for the group Nine Inch Nails (NIN). He has been gaining accolades for his efforts to make music affordable for the consumer while helping artists earn a living. He has done this by rejecting the major-label system and instead distributing music directly to the public via the Web. Many feel that Trent Renzor represents the future of the music industry.

The Reznor piece that caught my attention was a (15 min) YouTube video of a presentation given by Michael Masnick, the founder of Techdirt. Masnick has distilled Reznor's business model down into a simple equation: CwF + RtB = $$$$.

The "CwF" in the equation stands for Connect with Fans. Using various approaches, like dropping USB keys containing new music in the bathrooms at NIN concerts, Reznor has been able to engage, energize, and get fans excited. He continuously experiments and does new stuff to connect with his fans. Masnick commented that he had to change his presentation as he was building it since Reznor kept coming up with new stuff.

The "RtB" in the equation stands for Reason to Buy. This is where Reznor uses his connection with fans to give them reasons to purchase concert tickets, t-shirts, etc. For example, he also creates special 'box' packages of his products which are considered by NIN's fans to be special and unique. Reznor is giving his followers an opportunity to have something that they feel has a significant value added.

The "$$$$" is self explanatory.

Amid all the discussions about the future of academic libraries, I began musing what academic librarians could possibly learn from Reznor. What I came up with was the following (and half-baked) modified Masnick equation:

CwC + RtU = a dynamic library

The "CwC" in the equation refers to Connect with Community. Academic libraries should constantly thinking and prototyping new ways to connect with our communities. This is not to say that libraries are failing to connect. The challenge is that libraries tend to make a connection and hang onto it well beyond its useful life. We shouldn't be satisfied with how we are connecting today.

What are the next connections out there that will allow academic libraries to integrate the services and resources we offer into the lives of our communities? How many prototypes and pilots can we create and get out there as fast as possible?

Academic libraries must implement ideas that are half-baked and equally willing to let them go when they are not working out. We need to continuously experiments and do new stuff to connect with our communities. We need to be so dynamic that others need to change presentations about libraries since we keep coming up with new stuff. We need to learn how to plan less, prototype more!

I doubt Reznor performed a formal needs assessment, a literature search to see what other were doing, and charged a planning committee for each of his ideas.

While academic libraries are playing around with ways to connect with our communities, the important question that each needs to ask and answer for itself is what are the Reasons to Use (RtU)? An interesting analogy was drawn between libraries and the post office in the report No Brief Candle.

Unless libraries take action, participants cautioned, they risk being left with responsibility for low-margin services that no one else (including the commercial world) wants to provide. An analogy is the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). Its innovative, high-margin services, such as international and overnight delivery, have been taken over by private firms, leaving the USPS largely with its lowest-margin-of-return function: domestic mail delivery

Libraries and the post office do share many similar qualities. The physical access to information was our first class mail service for a very long time. We still have (largely) organizational structures, services, and resources allocated around the organization and delivery of physical information. As technology has improved, our communities have begun to use other pathways to deliver and receive their information (first class mail), be it in physical or digital formats.

As with the postal service, at some point libraries could be left offering services that no other service provider finds of value. We could be 'stuck' offering our equivalent of second and third class mail services. Sure, these services are reasons to use the library, but should we be satisfied in offering lowest-margin-of-return services?

The challenge is that some librarians may actually feel that it is the role of academic libraries to provide lowest-margin-of-return services since those are the ones our communities say they need. Instead, I feel that librarians need to begin identifying our added value services. What are the premium packages and the limited addition services which we can provide to support our communities? How can we create a new organizational models to support these services and the Reasons to Use?

CwC + RtU = a dynamic library

So, do academic libraries need to stop thinking less like a post office and start thinking more like Trent Reznor? I think so.

Should academic libraries be scattering USB drives containing attention grabbing content on the floors of our student Unions during orientation week? Absolutely!

However, we shouldn't do it again next year, let alone the year after that.

Judge Rejects Internet Archive Motion to Intervene in Google Settlement

2009-04-27T11:17:00.000-07:00

Posted by: birdie

Publishers Weekly reports: A federal judge overseeing the approval process for the Google Book Search settlement has rejected an attempt by the Internet Archive (IA) to intervene in the action. In a short ruling released today, Judge Dennis Chin wrote that he construed the IA’s letter to the court, filed last week, as “a motion to intervene,” and denied it. “The proposed interveners are, however, free to file objections to the proposed settlement.” Objections and comments must be filed by May 5.

The IA had asked the court to alter the proposed settlement to give other companies that have scanned printed books the same protections regarding orphan works that would be granted to Google under the terms of the settlement. The IA had said it does not want to file an amicus brief, also known as a friend of the court brief, as other parties said they intend to do, and it believes “there are no existing parties in the case that could adequately represent the Archive’s interests, or the interest of other Internet content providers.”

San Jose rejects porn filters in libraries

2009-04-23T17:22:00.000-07:00

Posted by Blake

A year and a half of debate over filtering pornography out of San Jose public library computers came to a head late Tuesday when the City Council rejected spending money on the technology.

"The fear is not based on fact," said Tina Morrill. "We can use this money to keep our library hours longer."

Culture Czar To Be Appointed

2009-03-18T13:58:00.000-07:00

Posted by StephenK

The "Arts, Briefly" blog at the New York Times reports that President Obama is staffing a position in the White House Office of Public Liaison and Intergovernmental Affairs for overseeing cultural and artistic affairs. The post would coordinate the work of the National Endowment for the Arts and also the Institute for Museum and Library Services.

What happens when the library closes?

2009-03-10T21:32:00.000-07:00

When the lights go down - Armand Van helden

15 Incredible Library Special Collections

2009-03-08T00:13:00.000-08:00

Posted by admin in College Libraries on 03 5th, 2009 | 2 responses

Large libraries, be they university or city, aren’t just good for research and circulation. They also often have amazing special collections centered around singular, often esoteric, topics. These collections are often donated via will by individuals who collected the items over a lifetime of obsession. Many library patrons may not realize it, but often these special collections are surprisingly accessible. The items usually don’t circulate, but libraries often put on exhibits or provide special reading rooms for people who want to take in the collection. There are many, many special collections around the world worthy of discussion, but here are 15 that we found particularly interesting.

15. The George Kelley Paperback and Pulp Fiction Collection (University of Buffalo)

The George Kelley Paperback and Pulp Fiction Collection houses over 25,000 pulp fiction books and magazines. The bulk of the collection comes from Dr. George Kelley, and was further added to by Dr. Thomas Shaw and Margarete Shaw. The collection is open for in house perusing with appointment, and the website for the collection features an in depth look at 185 books in the collection, as you can see here with Isaac Asimov’s A Whiff Of Death.

More: The George Kelley Paperback and Pulp Fiction Collection

14. Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection (University of Texas)

The Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection is a massive collection of over 250,000 maps housed at the University of Texas. That’s an impressive statistic, but what really makes this collection stand out is the accessibility. The collection is considered “open stack” which means any University of Texas students, faculty, staff and the general public can check out the maps in the collection. You can also view over 11,000 of the maps online here.

13. The Treasure Island Collection (University of Minnesota)

The University of Minnesota has over 450 illustrated editions of Treasure Island, from the original appearance in magazine form to the interpretations by artists such as N.C. Wyeth. A man named Lionel Johnson accumulated the collection over many years of travel to cities like New York, London, and Paris, giving each subsequent purchase a number for his catalog of books. The University of Minnesota includes other unique collections, such as this accumulation of Oz works and this collection of Paul Bunyan paraphernalia.

12. Nurse Romance Novels (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)

Talk about esoteric, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has a large collection of dime store novels with nurses as central characters. They were donated to UWM by former UWM Art Professor Leslie Bellavance who collected them as part of her research on pop culture depictions of nurses. For awhile UWM was putting a nurse cover on the collection’s website every week, but it looks to have stopped last year. Still worth spending a few minutes browsing the archives however.

More: UWM page on the Nurse Romance Novel collection

11. The Frank W. Tober Collection on Literary Forgery (University of Delaware)

The Tober collection on literary forgery deals, naturally enough, with authors who published (or attempted to publish) works that were not their own. Perhaps the most famous of these was Clifford Irving, who attempted to publish a forged autobiography of Howard Hughes. There are many other interesting pieces in this collection however, including Shakespeare forgers, as well as a great deal of reference material on the subject of literary forgery.

More: Forging a Collection: The Frank W. Tober Collection on Literary Forgery

10. John G. White Chess and Checkers Collection (Cleveland Public Library)

The John G. White chess and checkers collection claims to the largest chess library in the world. It includes instruction books, chess problems, Asian and European chess manuscripts, treatises on the game of chess, tournament records, and chess periodicals. It also includes dozens of chess sets that document the historical and artistic development of chess pieces throughout history. The collection altogether has over 30,000 manuscripts, documents, images, etc., many of which are extremely rare.

More: John G. White Chess and Checkers Collection

9. UCLA Film And Television Archive

It’s fitting of course that a college in LA would have a special collection centered around film. UCLA’s collection is the largest of any university in the world, and includes over 220,000 titles and an incredible 27 million feet of newsreel footage. UCLA provides onsite access to its holdings after making a viewing appointment, and the university provides over 200 special public screenings a year.

More: UCLA Film And Television Archive

8. The George Arents Collection on Tobacco (New York Public Library)

The George Arents tobacco collection encompasses over one hundred years of collecting by George Arents. The collection includes almost any kind of work dealing with tobacco, even works with only incidental mentions. There are many hundreds of interesting prints, as well as literature and historical works.

More: The George Arents Collection on Tobacco

7. Fore-edge paintings (Boston Public Library)

These are a true lost art. Fore-edge paintings are paintings on the external pages of a book, that can only be seen when the edges of the pages are displayed. Much easier to grok by simply looking at the pictures, which are amazing:

More: Fore-Edge Painting Collection

6. The Grateful Dead Archive (UC Santa Cruz)

The Grateful Dead got their start in California, and UC Santa Cruz has put together an exhaustive catalog of the group’s thirty years of existence. Included in the archive are original documents, media clippings, show files, programs, newsletters, posters, cover art, photographs, tickets, t-shirts, and stickers. The collection also includes stage props and touring materials. Fitting to the group, a special emphasis is placed on fan media, with fan correspondence and fan art also given a place in the archive.

More: The Grateful Dead Archive

5. Occult Sciences, Demonology and Witchcraft Collection (University of Sydney)

University libraries already have a bit of a reputation as musty places filled with stacks of dusty, vaguely odd, books, and the University of Sydney takes this imagining to it’s logical conclusion, by housing a large collection of occult material. The collection includes works on demonology, witchcraft, exorcism, the Inquisition, as well as grimoires and spellbooks. They even hold a copy of the Necronomicon, the 1973 edition of which only 348 were printed. This is definitely the place to go if you are looking for 17th century original works dealing with witches and exorcism.

More: Occult Sciences, Demonology and Witchcraft Collection

4. The Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature (University of Florida)

The University of Florida’s children’s lit collection is massive, with more than 100,000 volumes published in Great Britain and the United States from 1700 to the present. The library includes over 300 copies of Robinson Crusoe, 100 editions of Pilgrim’s Progress, and virtually every children’s literature work imaginable for the past 200 years.

More: The Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature

3. The Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation, and Fantasy (Toronto Public Library)

The Merril Collection of science fiction is a non-circulating collection held at the Toronto Public Library that includes more than 68,000 items of science fiction and fantasy, as well as fringe subjects like UFO’s and Atlantean legends. The library also includes a great many early pulp magazines, where science fiction really made it’s way into the collective consciousness. The Merril collection even includes a deep back catalog of role playing games and graphic novels, meaning there’s something here for just about every geek.

More: The Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy

2. Comic Art Collection (Michigan State)

Michigan State has one of the biggest comic art collections in the world, with more than 150,000 comic books published in the US since 1935 indexed. They don’t stop with comic books however, they also have an exhaustive comic strip collection, including every known book collection of comic strips, as well as over 500,000 hand clipped daily strips filed away in hand made scrapbooks.

More: Comic Art Collection

1. Various Collections (Smithsonian Institution Libraries)

Our top spot is taken not just by one collection, but by the most impressive group of special collections in the US, held at the various Smithsonian Institution Libraries. Included are:

The Dibner Science and Technology library, including rare works from Galileo, Kepler, Euclid, Descartes, and Aristotle, among many, many more.
The Cullman Natural History Library, including hundreds of rare early volumes in botany, accounts of voyages from early Renaissance travels, and a Zoology collection that deals with the earliest classification of animals, including work from Aristotle.
The National Design Museum Library, including over 1,000 volumes dealing with the World’s Fair, a pop-up book collection with hundreds of instructional pop-up books for children and adults both, and papers, images, and records from many important and notable American design firms.
The National Air and Space Museum Library which includes 29,000 books, 11,000 bound serials, and a microform collection dealing with the history of aeronautics and astronautics.
The National Museum of American History Library including over 285,600 catalogs detailing the history of manufacturing in America. These catalogs include product catalogs, technical manuals, advertising brochures, price lists and company histories.

Exploring a ‘Deep Web’ That Google Can’t Grasp

2009-02-23T21:55:00.000-08:00

From: http://www.nytimes.com

Jeffrey D. Allred for The New York Times

At the University of Utah, Prof. Juliana Freire is working on DeepPeep, an ambitious effort to index every public database online.

One day last summer, Google’s search engine trundled quietly past a milestone. It added the one trillionth address to the list of Web pages it knows about. But as impossibly big as that number may seem, it represents only a fraction of the entire Web.

Beyond those trillion pages lies an even vaster Web of hidden data: financial information, shopping catalogs, flight schedules, medical research and all kinds of other material stored in databases that remain largely invisible to search engines.

The challenges that the major search engines face in penetrating this so-called Deep Web go a long way toward explaining why they still can’t provide satisfying answers to questions like “What’s the best fare from New York to London next Thursday?” The answers are readily available — if only the search engines knew how to find them.

Now a new breed of technologies is taking shape that will extend the reach of search engines into the Web’s hidden corners. When that happens, it will do more than just improve the quality of search results — it may ultimately reshape the way many companies do business online.

Search engines rely on programs known as crawlers (or spiders) that gather information by following the trails of hyperlinks that tie the Web together. While that approach works well for the pages that make up the surface Web, these programs have a harder time penetrating databases that are set up to respond to typed queries.

“The crawlable Web is the tip of the iceberg,” says Anand Rajaraman, co-founder of Kosmix (www.kosmix.com), a Deep Web search start-up whose investors include Jeffrey P. Bezos, chief executive of Amazon.com. Kosmix has developed software that matches searches with the databases most likely to yield relevant information, then returns an overview of the topic drawn from multiple sources.

“Most search engines try to help you find a needle in a haystack,” Mr. Rajaraman said, “but what we’re trying to do is help you explore the haystack.”

That haystack is infinitely large. With millions of databases connected to the Web, and endless possible permutations of search terms, there is simply no way for any search engine — no matter how powerful — to sift through every possible combination of data on the fly.

To extract meaningful data from the Deep Web, search engines have to analyze users’ search terms and figure out how to broker those queries to particular databases. For example, if a user types in “Rembrandt,” the search engine needs to know which databases are most likely to contain information about art ( say, museum catalogs or auction houses), and what kinds of queries those databases will accept.

That approach may sound straightforward in theory, but in practice the vast variety of database structures and possible search terms poses a thorny computational challenge.

“This is the most interesting data integration problem imaginable,” says Alon Halevy, a former computer science professor at the University of Washington who is now leading a team at Google that is trying to solve the Deep Web conundrum.

Google’s Deep Web search strategy involves sending out a program to analyze the contents of every database it encounters. For example, if the search engine finds a page with a form related to fine art, it starts guessing likely search terms — “Rembrandt,” “Picasso,” “Vermeer” and so on — until one of those terms returns a match. The search engine then analyzes the results and develops a predictive model of what the database contains.

In a similar vein, Prof. Juliana Freire at the University of Utah is working on an ambitious project called DeepPeep (www.deeppeep.org) that eventually aims to crawl and index every database on the public Web. Extracting the contents of so many far-flung data sets requires a sophisticated kind of computational guessing game.

“The naïve way would be to query all the words in the dictionary,” Ms. Freire said. Instead, DeepPeep starts by posing a small number of sample queries, “so we can then use that to build up our understanding of the databases and choose which words to search.”

Based on that analysis, the program then fires off automated search terms in an effort to dislodge as much data as possible. Ms. Freire claims that her approach retrieves better than 90 percent of the content stored in any given database. Ms. Freire’s work has recently attracted overtures from one of the major search engine companies.

As the major search engines start to experiment with incorporating Deep Web content into their search results, they must figure out how to present different kinds of data without overcomplicating their pages. This poses a particular quandary for Google, which has long resisted the temptation to make significant changes to its tried-and-true search results format.

“Google faces a real challenge,” said Chris Sherman, executive editor of the Web site Search Engine Land. “They want to make the experience better, but they have to be supercautious with making changes for fear of alienating their users.”

Beyond the realm of consumer searches, Deep Web technologies may eventually let businesses use data in new ways. For example, a health site could cross-reference data from pharmaceutical companies with the latest findings from medical researchers, or a local news site could extend its coverage by letting users tap into public records stored in government databases.

This level of data integration could eventually point the way toward something like the Semantic Web, the much-promoted — but so far unrealized — vision of a Web of interconnected data. Deep Web technologies hold the promise of achieving similar benefits at a much lower cost, by automating the process of analyzing database structures and cross-referencing the results.

“The huge thing is the ability to connect disparate data sources,” said Mike Bergman, a computer scientist and consultant who is credited with coining the term Deep Web. Mr. Bergman said the long-term impact of Deep Web search had more to do with transforming business than with satisfying the whims of Web surfers.

Library Value Calculator

2009-02-23T21:43:00.000-08:00

Posted by Bibliofuture

The Denver Public library has a Library Value Calculator on their website. It was mentioned in this story about a person who decided not to buy any books for one year. (Article indicates they are a librarian)

Excerpt: There are several reasons I stopped buying books in 2008. With a young child at home, a car payment and student loans, saving money was becoming more important to me than owning "Zazie in the Metro" or "Tamerlane: Sword of Islam." As a librarian I also saw a limit on book buying as an opportunity to enrich my professional life by experiencing the library more fully as a patron. Finally, part of me just wanted to see if I could do it.

In the comments to the article there is this comment: Thank you Denver Post, for printing an article that damages further an already damaged industry, the local book shop. While libraries have their places, we desperately need the few surviving bookshops. How about an article boosting the buying of books?

The Bookcave

2009-02-23T21:34:00.000-08:00

Koran and Bible Moved To the Top Shelves in U.K.

2009-02-20T13:33:00.000-08:00

Posted by birdie

In this instance, Dewey's system is not part of the equation. It seems that officials at UK libraries have recommended keeping all holy books, including the Bible and the Koran on the top shelves in the interests of equality.

Leicester's librarians consulted the Federation of Muslim Organisations and were advised that all religious texts should be kept on the top shelf to ensure equality.

But there are critics of the new requirements; Robert Whelan of the Civitas think-tank told The Daily Mail: "Libraries and museums are not places of worship. They should not be run in accordance with particular religious beliefs.

Christian.org UK argues that Christians do not apply such beliefs to the Bible, which they say should be easily accessible for everyone.

More from Telegraph UK and opinion (unorthodox to say the least) from Damian Thompson of the Telegraph.

Syriac bible found in Cyprus

2009-02-13T14:43:00.000-08:00

Authorities in northern Cyprus believe they have found an ancient version of the Bible written in Syriac, a dialect of the native language of Jesus.

The manuscript was found in a police raid on suspected antiquity smugglers. Turkish Cypriot police testified in a court hearing they believe the manuscript could be about 2,000 years old.

The manuscript carries excerpts of the Bible written in gold lettering on vellum and loosely strung together, photos provided to Reuters showed. One page carries a drawing of a tree, and another eight lines of Syriac script.

Experts were however divided over the provenance of the manuscript, and whether it was an original, which would render it priceless, or a fake.

Experts said the use of gold lettering on the manuscript was likely to date it later than 2,000 years.

"I'd suspect that it is most likely to be less than 1,000 years old," leading expert Peter Williams, Warden of Tyndale House, University of Cambridge told Reuters.

Turkish Cypriot authorities seized the relic last week and nine individuals are in custody pending further investigations. More individuals are being sought in connection with the find, they said.

Further investigations turned up a prayer statue and a stone carving of Jesus believed to be from a church in the Turkish held north, as well as dynamite.

The police have charged the detainees with smuggling antiquities, illegal excavations and the possession of explosives.

Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic - the native language of Jesus - once spoken across much of the Middle East and Central Asia. It is used wherever there are Syrian Christians and still survives in the Syrian Orthodox Church in India.

Aramaic is still used in religious rituals of Maronite Christians in Cyprus.

"One very likely source (of the manuscript) could be the Tur-Abdin area of Turkey, where there is still a Syriac speaking community," Charlotte Roueche, Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King's College London told Reuters.

Stories regarding the antiquity of manuscripts is commonplace. One case would be the Yonan Codex, carbon dated to the 12th century which people tried to pass off as earlier.

After further scrutiny of photographs of the book, manuscripts specialist at the University of Cambridge library and Fellow of Wolfson College JF Coakley suggested that the book could have been written a good deal later.

"The Syriac writing seems to be in the East Syriac script with vowel points, and you do not find such manuscripts before about the 15th century.

"On the basis of the one photo...if I'm not mistaken some words at least seem to be in modern Syriac, a language that was not written down until the mid-19th century," he told Reuters.

Win a trip to the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago

2009-02-13T14:39:00.000-08:00

Enter Here

Libraries can keep books with lead-containing ink

2009-02-09T15:44:00.000-08:00

By Liz Szabo, USA TODAY

Librarians won't have to throw away their children's books after all on Tuesday, when a sweeping new product safety law takes effect.

The law, passed in August, dramatically cuts the amount of lead and other chemicals allowed in kids' products. That had librarians worried, because some books made before the 1980s had ink that contained lead.

ANTI-LEAD LAW: Safety rules on lead in kids' products perplex and polarize
STUDY: Children's lead levels, SAT scores linked
IN-DEPTH: For many kids, lead threat is right in their own homes

Today, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the federal agency in charge of enforcing the law, announced that it won't prosecute anyone for distributing "ordinary" children's books printed after 1985. These books have never been found to violate the new lead standards, which will mandate that kids' items contain no more than 600 parts per million beginning Tuesday. The standards get twice as tough in August when the limit will be 300 parts per million.

Given the way that kids tear and chew through library books, congressional staff involved in the legislation says it's unlikely that libraries have many children's books that are more than 24 years old.

Book burning on Feb. 10th 2009 due to CPSIA

2009-02-05T15:53:00.000-08:00

The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA H.R. 4040) has a good goal: protect kids from dangerous imports tainted with lead. Bravo! Unfortunately it goes about doing so in such a way that it’ll drive up costs across the board, drive many manufacturers and retailers out of business, and not really make kids any safer.

So what does CPSIA do? It mandates lead testing for ALL items intended for children under 13 or PERCEIVED as being for those under age 13. So items commonly regarded as “kids stuff” even if it is intended for adults, such as many comics, collectible books, high end popups, etc, still falls under the statute even though they’re aimed at adult collectors.

It requires UNIT testing. The final product must be tested from each batch. It doesn’t matter if all the components going into it are certified and have been tested as having no lead, it still must be tested for lead.

Here’s an example. You publish textbooks for 4^th graders. You publish a science textbook. You publish a spelling book. They are printed with all the same materials, on the same day, on the same press, with the same crew manning it. You must test the science book and the spelling book separately because they may contain lead!

This basically seems to imply that somehow alchemy works. Non-lead containing item + non-lead containing item= LEAD!

The manufacturer needs to provide a testing certificate to the retailer, which must be available for inspection, should a Consumer Product Safety Administration inspector come in. No certificate, the retailer can’t sell it.

The truly bizarre part is that the new regulations apply retroactively. Even if it was printed 50 years ago and the publisher no longer exists, you need to have a certificate proving it’s not filled with lead. Even if it is the only remaining copy of a rare children’s book worth thousands of dollars and only will ever be handled by collectors, you cannot sell it because you can’t prove it is not filled with lead.

Anything manufactured after November 10th 2008 should have come with a certificate certifying it has been tested for lead. If your distributor didn’t provide one, you need to call and get one. As of Febuary 10^th, its in fact illegal for your distributor to sell you a kids’ book without a certificate of lead testing, no matter when it was printed.

Objects without a certification still have to be tested. So those copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows that were printed in 2007 that are still available new at Amazon may have to be destroyed as of February 10th 2009 because they haven’t been tested for lead. (Amazon is taking this seriously and sent a mail to all affiliates asking them to provide the lead testing certificates for all items)

How bad can the punishment be? For selling books? Up to $100,000 PER ITEM and up to five years in jail. It’s also a felony. Get busted, you may lose your right to vote in some states. Even if you can fight it in court, you’ll likely go broke doing so and your local newspaper will carry the headline “Local business selling lead tainted goods”… even though you know they aren’t. Good luck getting them to print the retraction months or years later after that PR disaster.

This includes not just selling, but distribution. So you can’t donate the untested goods to your local library, Good Will, or literacy program. You also can’t sell them to overseas collectors either, as they’re illegal to export. (preventing dumping of truly toxic goods on third world markets is one of the few good portions of this law. Good job on that, bad job on the rest)

This leaves you, the bookseller, with two legal options: store the books indefinitely, hoping regulations change, OR destroy them.

What to do? Write your Congressman. You can look up the mailing info for your Congressman and Senators through House.gov and Senate.gov Call them on the phone too! Some of them may have a staffer dedicated to handling inquiries or willing to tell you which of the many addresses will get the mail in your representatives hands fastest.

You can find more info on CPSIA on:

CPSA page on CPSIA
Government FAQ on CPSIA
FAQ entry specifically about whether books are effects (YES, yes they are)
CPSIA Central
Washington Post Article on the impact on toy makers
Blog post with the phone numbers of who to call at the Consumer Product Safety Administration
Track the latest updates on CPSIA via Twitter
Vote for amending CPSIA on Change.org between January 5th and 15th
A blog post on how is affects taxpayers
Look up the full text of the bill via THOMAS at the Library of Congress (search for bill number H.R.40.40.ENR to get exact bill passed by the House and Senate and signed by the President. If you forget the ENR you may get only part of the bill, or the wrong version)

Foreign dealers, this does effect ALL imports, even individual items shipped through the mail. Try writing to your country’s consulate in the US. They cannot directly effect legislation, but can certainly express their concern to government officials in the US.

EDIT: as of 1/8/09 CPSC has issued an exemption for second hand dealers. New books are STILL not exempted, but step in right directionm. (and no guarantee they won’t change their mind again)

Press release on exemption here

She So Loved the Library She Left It Her Inheritance

2009-02-02T10:22:00.001-08:00

Posted by birdie

The Baltimore Sun reports that Enoch Pratt Free Library officials happily discovered the esteem one of their retirees held for the place.

At her death, Sara (Bunny) Siebert directed that more than $650,000 of her assets go to the library, a figure that exceeds the total of all the paychecks she took home in her 34 years as Pratt's director of young adult reading. She died at age 88 last year.

Siebert, an energetic and popular librarian who sought no attention as a donor during her life, left an estate of more than $2 million.

Having no survivors, she divided her assets among the Baltimore institutions she admired including the Pratt Library and her alma mater, Goucher College.

Google's Got All the Marbles, posted by birdie

2009-02-02T10:21:00.001-08:00

February 2, 2009 - 9:52am —

Robert Darnton, head of the Harvard library system, writes in a lengthy article in the February 12th issue of the New York Review of Books:

"Google will enjoy what can only be called a monopoly--a monopoly of a new kind, not of railroads or steel but of access to information. Google has no serious competitors. Google alone has the wealth to digitize on a massive scale. And having settled with the authors and publishers, it can exploit its financial power from within a protective legal barrier; for the class action suit covers the entire class of authors and publishers."

He also discusses the economics of professional journals and how the system has changed over the past hundred years. A portion of his commentary:

"The result stands out on the acquisitions budget of every research library: the Journal of Comparative Neurology now costs $25,910 for a year's subscription; Tetrahedron costs $17,969 (or $39,739, if bundled with related publications as a Tetrahedron package); the average price of a chemistry journal is $3,490; and the ripple effects have damaged intellectual life throughout the world of learning. Owing to the skyrocketing cost of serials, libraries that used to spend 50 percent of their acquisitions budget on monographs now spend 25 percent or less. University presses, which depend on sales to libraries, cannot cover their costs by publishing monographs. And young scholars who depend on publishing to advance their careers are now in danger of perishing."

Tons of Twittery Tips

2009-02-02T10:19:00.000-08:00

From http://lisnews.org

Posted by birdie

From John Kremer, Book Market, here are just some of his twitter suggestions:

Google Twitter Gadget: Allows you to read and update Twitters right on your desktop.

Loud Twitter: This batch-tweeting service allows users to set up automatic posting of their tweets to their blog (a listing of tweets once per day).

Mr. Tweet: Helps you build meaningful relationships on Twitter, showing you the followers and influencers you should follow. Also recommends you to enthusiastic users relevant to you.

A free service that allows you to customize your Twitter page. Again, a customized page is a boon for helping you to brand yourself on Twitter. I (www.bookmarket.com) used this service to produce my current Twitter background in five minutes.

Ping Vine: A free service that takes an Atom or RSS feed from your blog, lifestream or favorite website and posts it to Twitter, Ping.fm or Identi.ca. Hence, you can automatically post your blog posts to Twitter via RSS feed.

Lead Law Could Cause Big Headaches for Libraries

2009-01-30T11:29:00.001-08:00

posted by birdie

Toys with dangerous levels of lead, toxic chemicals in clothing, hazardous baby cribs — the soon-to-be-enforced Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act aims to protect children from all of them.

But library books? Unless the Consumer Product Safety Commission exempts them from the sweeping legislation, libraries nationwide could be forced to pull children’s books from their shelves or, alternately, ban children. The law is scheduled to take effect on February 10.

“You’re talking about separating children from books, which has got to be the most ridiculous thing this commission has ever attempted,” said Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the American Library Association’s Washington office. “Books are safe. They are not a dangerous product.”

Paper cuts maybe...but lead? Kansas City Star reports.

10 Ways Social Media Will Change in 2009

2009-01-29T11:04:00.000-08:00

Written by Ravit Lichtenberg / January 27, 2009 10:00 AM

"Social media" was the term du jour in 2008. Consumers, companies, and marketers were all talking about it. We have social media gurus, social media startups, social media books, and social media firms. It is now common practice among corporations to hire social media strategists, assign community managers, and launch social media campaigns, all designed to tap into the power of social media.

But social media today is a pure mess: it has become a collection of countless features, tools, and applications fighting for a piece of the pie.

Facebook, a once groundbreaking online community, has become the ant colony of third-party applications. Twitter users now have a dozen or so additional applications they can use to overcome Twitter's ever-present shortcomings. People spread themselves across a number of tools and maintain different networks on each (large portions of which they don't even know), making it nearly impossible to decide what to share and with whom.

Users, marketers, and companies face an incredible amount of noise, too. For every new application that relies on a network, another crops up that helps users manage it. While "eyeballs" used to be the coveted metric, both ad publishers and investors now realize that having smaller well-targeted niches can lead to much better returns than marketing to one large undifferentiated mass of users.

Meaning and connection -- two key anchors of all things social media -- are corroding by the day as people's ability to organize their experiences and find the relevance of their networks declines. Social media, in essence, is bumping up against its own ceiling, no longer able to serve the needs of those living within its walls; and for these reasons, social media as we know it is changing course.

Social Media is Evolving

Social media is morphing into a holistic experience that speaks to people's social needs in new ways. If you are a CEO of a startup who is focusing on the next generation of social media, here are 10 areas you'll need to take into consideration in the coming year:

1. It's About People

We're moving away from "users," "customers," and "shoppers": social media is bringing back the human element to all digital interaction. People now deliberately seek meaningful connection, self-expression, and a relevant and receptive community. Forrester's Social Technographic research and Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff's Groundswell represent a huge step towards a new kind of behavior-driven segmentation, but companies that want to succeed will need to take it further and tap into people's evolving needs, using the social media context as the new baseline.

2. Creating Meaning and Value

Social media will no longer be about features and applications. These have become a dime a dozen. People will be looking to get tangible and relevant value out of their social experience; they'll be looking for meaning and for order. "Social media online is no different from social media offline," said Brent Csutoras at a recent Social Media Club event. People will be looking for ways to keep their networks going regardless of device or platform. They will connect around meaningful topics and have live and simultaneous conversations within parameters they themselves define, which will bring relevance back to their interaction with others.

3. Enabling Convergence

FriendFeed -- now both a destination and an API -- is growing rapidly, despite a miserable wiki-like interface and interactive experience. That's because people are at a loss when it comes to pulling their conversations together from various sources and assigning meaning to them. Companies that deliver beautifully designed, easy-to-use, searchable, flexible, aggregating platforms will become more important than any social media tool by itself. Deb Schultz, a San Francisco-based web strategist, compares social media to an art exhibit and says people will "curate their live presence through the web ecosystem as needed." Noovo and Zannel are examples of early attempts to enable this.

4. Building a Truly Cross-Platform Experience

The iPhone experience has changed the playing field for users, companies, and developers. In Q1 of 2009 alone, Apple sold 4.4 million iPhones, and Google's Android and the new Palm continue to build on the cross-platform, application- and service-driven model. In the new landscape of social media, people are seeking solutions that seamlessly cut across mobile, web, and live interaction, hopping on and off them like double-decker buses, all with the same pass.

5. Creating Relevant Social Networks

People will create, join, and seek social networks that enable them to have meaningful and relevant experiences with each other. They will measure their return on investment (time spent, level of disclosure, etc.) in replies, comments, their ability to influence, and the value of their learning. Rachel Masters, VP of Strategic Relationships at Ning -- a social network that grew a massive 388% in 2008 -- says, "the Internet is confusing because it can be used to replicate almost any previous medium. Ning addresses this by delivering social networks that allow people to connect around the things they love."

6. Innovating in the Advertising Space

Ad publishers and the attached ecosystem will continue to lose revenue until they realign their understanding of what appeals to people who are conversing, connecting, and expressing. The next phase of social media is a gold mine of targeted niche demographics. Nuconomy, an Israeli startup, experiments in creating and delivering highly targeted, dynamic display advertising. Shahar Nechmad, Nuconomy's co-founder and CEO, says that, on average, Nucomony customers see six to nine times higher click-through rates on targeted ads than on non-targeted ones. "People do click on ads and buy things in the same session," says Nechmad. Ad agencies and publishers that are able to quickly realign their thinking and create an innovative and relevant product discovery experience will gain significant competitive advantage.

7. Helping People Organize Their "Old" Social Media Ecosystem

As aggregating platforms enter the field, people will seek to bring order to the endless bits of information available to them. Video tagging, conversation archiving, taking cloud computing to the next stage, and making search more relevant are some of the new baseline requirements. These represent a significant opportunity for companies willing to undertake this massive endeavor.

8. Connecting with the Rest of the US and the World

With some exceptions, today's active social media users are early adopters. In the next one to two years, the benefits of social media will cross the chasm and reach the mainstream, not only in the US but around the world -- especially in community-driven regions like Southeast Asia and countries like Brazil, Russia, and Germany. Companies will need to understand the explicit and implicit differences between adoption patterns in different countries and adjust their products to meet these different needs.

9. Preparing for New Social Media Jobs

It has been a harsh year for marketing firms. Companies are looking to divert marketing dollars to more targeted social media destinations. And this is just the beginning. David Spark, founder of Spark Media Solutions, says that businesses will need to go beyond paying people to Tweet or put up a Facebook page. Social media's new job descriptions will call on subject-matter experts who can plan for relevant interaction within networks and aggregating platforms and bring together products, services, and people.

10. Making Money

The next phase of social media will bring plenty of lucrative opportunities. With the rise of aggregating platforms, social networks, and new mobile and location-based features, we're bound to see an increase in targeted and personalized ads, "freemium" packaging, revenue sharing between strategic partners, and a flow from the offline world to online social engagement (such as when real goods complement virtual ones).

Social media has forever changed the way people use technology to interact with others, but it can no longer satisfy people's needs in its current form and must change course.

The new form of social media will be about creating "whole products" and complete experiences, all in real time, across the web, mobile, and live. Each user will be able to create his or her own experience using tools, features, and apps that magically coalesce. People will be able to move seamlessly through information that is available to them anywhere, anytime, sharing rich content with a rich set of groups and networks that they themselves define. Innovative companies that are able to listen to these needs and deliver products based on them will not only survive but thrive in the coming months and years as people eagerly advance on the inviting waters of the new social alchemy.

Radical Reference Now Taking Reference Questions

2009-01-29T10:29:00.000-08:00

From: http://www.radicalreference.info/

Submitted by jenna on Thu, 04/17/2008 - 11:39am

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Generations Online in 2009

2009-01-29T10:08:00.000-08:00

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has published a new report titled Generations Online in 2009 which breaks down online activities by generation. After defining the scope of the generations, the study goes on to summarize that Teens and Generation Y are the most likely to utilize the Web for entertainment purposes while older generations use the Internet primarily for conducting information searches, email, and online shopping. However there are some universal activities that span the generation gaps such as downloading videos, online banking, travel reservations, and job searching. The report has an excellent chart which breaks down each activity type by generation.

Mad Magazine Becomes Quarterly

2009-01-26T10:28:00.000-08:00

From: http://speakquietly.blogspot.com

Weekend Funnies

Today's Weekend Funnies is more of a Weekend :-( as several news agencies are reporting that Mad Magazine will no longer be a monthly. The news came after years of the magazine experimenting with different page layouts in hopes of getting more readers (you just weren't the same when you went from black to color...there's no humor in color...everyone knows that).

The magazine will now be published four times a year as a quarterly. When asked to comment, the magazine said, "What, me worry?" The now cliche Mad phrase wasn't even funny this time around...it was just sad.

Mad monthly, you shall be missed.

Can Libraries Act With Freedom Online?

2009-01-26T10:27:00.000-08:00

January 25, 2009 - 5:32pm — by StephenK

Highlighted on NZ-LIBS today was a piece in the left-leaning British publication The Guardian. The essay by Wendy Grossman is entitled Why you can't find a library book in your search engine. Of note is the discussion of e-commerce and OCLC's most recent annual revenue being calculated at USD$246m.

Google & the Future of Books

2009-01-26T10:26:00.000-08:00

By Robert Darnton

How can we navigate through the information landscape that is only beginning to come into view? The question is more urgent than ever following the recent settlement between Google and the authors and publishers who were suing it for alleged breach of copyright. For the last four years, Google has been digitizing millions of books, including many covered by copyright, from the collections of major research libraries, and making the texts searchable online. The authors and publishers objected that digitizing constituted a violation of their copyrights. After lengthy negotiations, the plaintiffs and Google agreed on a settlement, which will have a profound effect on the way books reach readers for the foreseeable future. What will that future be?

No one knows, because the settlement is so complex that it is difficult to perceive the legal and economic contours in the new lay of the land. But those of us who are responsible for research libraries have a clear view of a common goal: we want to open up our collections and make them available to readers everywhere. How to get there? The only workable tactic may be vigilance: see as far ahead as you can; and while you keep your eye on the road, remember to look in the rearview mirror.

When I look backward, I fix my gaze on the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment, its faith in the power of knowledge, and the world of ideas in which it operated—what the enlightened referred to as the Republic of Letters.

The eighteenth century imagined the Republic of Letters as a realm with no police, no boundaries, and no inequalities other than those determined by talent. Anyone could join it by exercising the two main attributes of citizenship, writing and reading. Writers formulated ideas, and readers judged them. Thanks to the power of the printed word, the judgments spread in widening circles, and the strongest arguments won.

The word also spread by written letters, for the eighteenth century was a great era of epistolary exchange. Read through the correspondence of Voltaire, Rousseau, Franklin, and Jefferson—each filling about fifty volumes—and you can watch the Republic of Letters in operation. All four writers debated all the issues of their day in a steady stream of letters, which crisscrossed Europe and America in a transatlantic information network.

I especially enjoy the exchange of letters between Jefferson and Madison. They discussed everything, notably the American Constitution, which Madison was helping to write in Philadelphia while Jefferson was representing the new republic in Paris. They often wrote about books, for Jefferson loved to haunt the bookshops in the capital of the Republic of Letters, and he frequently bought books for his friend. The purchases included Diderot's Encyclopédie, which Jefferson thought that he had got at a bargain price, although he had mistaken a reprint for a first edition.

Two future presidents discussing books through the information network of the Enlightenment—it's a stirring sight. But before this picture of the past fogs over with sentiment, I should add that the Republic of Letters was democratic only in principle. In practice, it was dominated by the wellborn and the rich. Far from being able to live from their pens, most writers had to court patrons, solicit sinecures, lobby for appointments to state-controlled journals, dodge censors, and wangle their way into salons and academies, where reputations were made. While suffering indignities at the hands of their social superiors, they turned on one another. The quarrel between Voltaire and Rousseau illustrates their temper. After reading Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality in 1755, Voltaire wrote to him, "I have received, Monsieur, your new book against the human race.... It makes one desire to go down on all fours." Five years later, Rousseau wrote to Voltaire. "Monsieur,...I hate you."

The personal conflicts were compounded by social distinctions. Far from functioning like an egalitarian agora, the Republic of Letters suffered from the same disease that ate through all societies in the eighteenth century: privilege. Privileges were not limited to aristocrats. In France, they applied to everything in the world of letters, including printing and the book trade, which were dominated by exclusive guilds, and the books themselves, which could not appear legally without a royal privilege and a censor's approbation, printed in full in their text.

One way to understand this system is to draw on the sociology of knowledge, notably Pierre Bourdieu's notion of literature as a power field composed of contending positions within the rules of a game that itself is subordinate to the dominating forces of society at large. But one needn't subscribe to Bourdieu's school of sociology in order to acknowledge the connections between literature and power. Seen from the perspective of the players, the realities of literary life contradicted the lofty ideals of the Enlightenment. Despite its principles, the Republic of Letters, as it actually operated, was a closed world, inaccessible to the underprivileged. Yet I want to invoke the Enlightenment in an argument for openness in general and for open access in particular.

If we turn from the eighteenth century to the present, do we see a similar contradiction between principle and practice—right here in the world of research libraries? One of my colleagues is a quiet, diminutive lady, who might call up the notion of Marion the Librarian. When she meets people at parties and identifies herself, they sometimes say condescendingly, "A librarian, how nice. Tell me, what is it like to be a librarian?" She replies, "Essentially, it is all about money and power."

We are back with Pierre Bourdieu. Yet most of us would subscribe to the principles inscribed in prominent places in our public libraries. "Free To All," it says above the main entrance to the Boston Public Library; and in the words of Thomas Jefferson, carved in gold letters on the wall of the Trustees' Room of the New York Public Library: "I look to the diffusion of light and education as the resource most to be relied on for ameliorating the condition promoting the virtue and advancing the happiness of man." We are back with the Enlightenment.

Our republic was founded on faith in the central principle of the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters: the diffusion of light. For Jefferson, enlightenment took place by means of writers and readers, books and libraries—especially libraries, at Monticello, the University of Virginia, and the Library of Congress. This faith is embodied in the United States Constitution. Article 1, Section 8, establishes copyright and patents "for limited times" only and subject to the higher purpose of promoting "the progress of science and useful arts." The Founding Fathers acknowledged authors' rights to a fair return on their intellectual labor, but they put public welfare before private profit.

How to calculate the relative importance of those two values? As the authors of the Constitution knew, copyright was created in Great Britain by the Statute of Anne in 1710 for the purpose of curbing the monopolistic practices of the London Stationers' Company and also, as its title proclaimed, "for the encouragement of learning." At that time, Parliament set the length of copyright at fourteen years, renewable only once. The Stationers attempted to defend their monopoly of publishing and the book trade by arguing for perpetual copyright in a long series of court cases. But they lost in the definitive ruling of Donaldson v. Becket in 1774.

When the Americans gathered to draft a constitution thirteen years later, they generally favored the view that had predominated in Britain. Twenty-eight years seemed long enough to protect the interests of authors and publishers. Beyond that limit, the interest of the public should prevail. In 1790, the first copyright act—also dedicated to "the encouragement of learning"—followed British practice by adopting a limit of fourteen years renewable for another fourteen.

How long does copyright extend today? According to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 (also known as "the Mickey Mouse Protection Act," because Mickey was about to fall into the public domain), it lasts as long as the life of the author plus seventy years. In practice, that normally would mean more than a century. Most books published in the twentieth century have not yet entered the public domain. When it comes to digitization, access to our cultural heritage generally ends on January 1, 1923, the date from which great numbers of books are subject to copyright laws. It will remain there—unless private interests take over the digitizing, package it for consumers, tie the packages up by means of legal deals, and sell them for the profit of the shareholders. As things stand now, for example, Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt, published in 1922, is in the public domain, whereas Lewis's Elmer Gantry, published in 1927, will not enter the public domain until 2022.^[1]

To descend from the high principles of the Founding Fathers to the practices of the cultural industries today is to leave the realm of Enlightenment for the hurly-burly of corporate capitalism. If we turned the sociology of knowledge onto the present—as Bourdieu himself did—we would see that we live in a world designed by Mickey Mouse, red in tooth and claw.

Does this kind of reality check make the principles of Enlightenment look like a historical fantasy? Let's reconsider the history. As the Enlightenment faded in the early nineteenth century, professionalization set in. You can follow the process by comparing the Encyclopédie of Diderot, which organized knowledge into an organic whole dominated by the faculty of reason, with its successor from the end of the eighteenth century, the Encyclopédie méthodique, which divided knowledge into fields that we can recognize today: chemistry, physics, history, mathematics, and the rest. In the nineteenth century, those fields turned into professions, certified by Ph.D.s and guarded by professional associations. They metamorphosed into departments of universities, and by the twentieth century they had left their mark on campuses—chemistry housed in this building, physics in that one, history here, mathematics there, and at the center of it all, a library, usually designed to look like a temple of learning.

Along the way, professional journals sprouted throughout the fields, subfields, and sub-subfields. The learned societies produced them, and the libraries bought them. This system worked well for about a hundred years. Then commercial publishers discovered that they could make a fortune by selling subscriptions to the journals. Once a university library subscribed, the students and professors came to expect an uninterrupted flow of issues. The price could be ratcheted up without causing cancellations, because the libraries paid for the subscriptions and the professors did not. Best of all, the professors provided free or nearly free labor. They wrote the articles, refereed submissions, and served on editorial boards, partly to spread knowledge in the Enlightenment fashion, but mainly to advance their own careers.

The result stands out on the acquisitions budget of every research library: the Journal of Comparative Neurology now costs $25,910 for a year's subscription; Tetrahedron costs $17,969 (or $39,739, if bundled with related publications as a Tetrahedron package); the average price of a chemistry journal is $3,490; and the ripple effects have damaged intellectual life throughout the world of learning. Owing to the skyrocketing cost of serials, libraries that used to spend 50 percent of their acquisitions budget on monographs now spend 25 percent or less. University presses, which depend on sales to libraries, cannot cover their costs by publishing monographs. And young scholars who depend on publishing to advance their careers are now in danger of perishing.

Fortunately, this picture of the hard facts of life in the world of learning is already going out of date. Biologists, chemists, and physicists no longer live in separate worlds; nor do historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars. The old map of the campus no longer corresponds to the activities of the professors and students. It is being redrawn everywhere, and in many places the interdisciplinary designs are turning into structures. The library remains at the heart of things, but it pumps nutrition throughout the university, and often to the farthest reaches of cyberspace, by means of electronic networks.

The eighteenth-century Republic of Letters had been transformed into a professional Republic of Learning, and it is now open to amateurs—amateurs in the best sense of the word, lovers of learning among the general citizenry. Openness is operating everywhere, thanks to "open access" repositories of digitized articles available free of charge, the Open Content Alliance, the Open Knowledge Commons, OpenCourseWare, the Internet Archive, and openly amateur enterprises like Wikipedia. The democratization of knowledge now seems to be at our fingertips. We can make the Enlightenment ideal come to life in reality.

At this point, you may suspect that I have swung from one American genre, the jeremiad, to another, utopian enthusiasm. It might be possible, I suppose, for the two to work together as a dialectic, were it not for the danger of commercialization. When businesses like Google look at libraries, they do not merely see temples of learning. They see potential assets or what they call "content," ready to be mined. Built up over centuries at an enormous expenditure of money and labor, library collections can be digitized en masse at relatively little cost—millions of dollars, certainly, but little compared to the investment that went into them.

Libraries exist to promote a public good: "the encouragement of learning," learning "Free To All." Businesses exist in order to make money for their shareholders—and a good thing, too, for the public good depends on a profitable economy. Yet if we permit the commercialization of the content of our libraries, there is no getting around a fundamental contradiction. To digitize collections and sell the product in ways that fail to guarantee wide access would be to repeat the mistake that was made when publishers exploited the market for scholarly journals, but on a much greater scale, for it would turn the Internet into an instrument for privatizing knowledge that belongs in the public sphere. No invisible hand would intervene to correct the imbalance between the private and the public welfare. Only the public can do that, but who speaks for the public? Not the legislators of the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.

You cannot legislate Enlightenment, but you can set rules of the game to protect the public interest. Libraries represent the public good. They are not businesses, but they must cover their costs. They need a business plan. Think of the old motto of Con Edison when it had to tear up New York's streets in order to get at the infrastructure beneath them: "Dig we must." Libraries say, "Digitize we must." But not on any terms. We must do it in the interest of the public, and that means holding the digitizers responsible to the citizenry.

It would be naive to identify the Internet with the Enlightenment. It has the potential to diffuse knowledge beyond anything imagined by Jefferson; but while it was being constructed, link by hyperlink, commercial interests did not sit idly on the sidelines. They want to control the game, to take it over, to own it. They compete among themselves, of course, but so ferociously that they kill each other off. Their struggle for survival is leading toward an oligopoly; and whoever may win, the victory could mean a defeat for the public good.

Don't get me wrong. I know that businesses must be responsible to shareholders. I believe that authors are entitled to payment for their creative labor and that publishers deserve to make money from the value they add to the texts supplied by authors. I admire the wizardry of hardware, software, search engines, digitization, and algorithmic relevance ranking. I acknowledge the importance of copyright, although I think that Congress got it better in 1790 than in 1998.

But we, too, cannot sit on the sidelines, as if the market forces can be trusted to operate for the public good. We need to get engaged, to mix it up, and to win back the public's rightful domain. When I say "we," I mean we the people, we who created the Constitution and who should make the Enlightenment principles behind it inform the everyday realities of the information society. Yes, we must digitize. But more important, we must democratize. We must open access to our cultural heritage. How? By rewriting the rules of the game, by subordinating private interests to the public good, and by taking inspiration from the early republic in order to create a Digital Republic of Learning.

What provoked these jeremianic- utopian reflections? Google. Four years ago, Google began digitizing books from research libraries, providing full-text searching and making books in the public domain available on the Internet at no cost to the viewer. For example, it is now possible for anyone, anywhere to view and download a digital copy of the 1871 first edition of Middlemarch that is in the collection of the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Everyone profited, including Google, which collected revenue from some discreet advertising attached to the service, Google Book Search. Google also digitized an ever-increasing number of library books that were protected by copyright in order to provide search services that displayed small snippets of the text. In September and October 2005, a group of authors and publishers brought a class action suit against Google, alleging violation of copyright. Last October 28, after lengthy negotiations, the opposing parties announced agreement on a settlement, which is subject to approval by the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.^[2]

The settlement creates an enterprise known as the Book Rights Registry to represent the interests of the copyright holders. Google will sell access to a gigantic data bank composed primarily of copyrighted, out-of-print books digitized from the research libraries. Colleges, universities, and other organizations will be able to subscribe by paying for an "institutional license" providing access to the data bank. A "public access license" will make this material available to public libraries, where Google will provide free viewing of the digitized books on one computer terminal. And individuals also will be able to access and print out digitized versions of the books by purchasing a "consumer license" from Google, which will cooperate with the registry for the distribution of all the revenue to copyright holders. Google will retain 37 percent, and the registry will distribute 63 percent among the rightsholders.

Meanwhile, Google will continue to make books in the public domain available for users to read, download, and print, free of charge. Of the seven million books that Google reportedly had digitized by November 2008, one million are works in the public domain; one million are in copyright and in print; and five million are in copyright but out of print. It is this last category that will furnish the bulk of the books to be made available through the institutional license.

Many of the in-copyright and in-print books will not be available in the data bank unless the copyright owners opt to include them. They will continue to be sold in the normal fashion as printed books and also could be marketed to individual customers as digitized copies, accessible through the consumer license for downloading and reading, perhaps eventually on e-book readers such as Amazon's Kindle.

After reading the settlement and letting its terms sink in—no easy task, as it runs to 134 pages and 15 appendices of legalese—one is likely to be dumbfounded: here is a proposal that could result in the world's largest library. It would, to be sure, be a digital library, but it could dwarf the Library of Congress and all the national libraries of Europe. Moreover, in pursuing the terms of the settlement with the authors and publishers, Google could also become the world's largest book business—not a chain of stores but an electronic supply service that could out-Amazon Amazon.

An enterprise on such a scale is bound to elicit reactions of the two kinds that I have been discussing: on the one hand, utopian enthusiasm; on the other, jeremiads about the danger of concentrating power to control access to information.

Who could not be moved by the prospect of bringing virtually all the books from America's greatest research libraries within the reach of all Americans, and perhaps eventually to everyone in the world with access to the Internet? Not only will Google's technological wizardry bring books to readers, it will also open up extraordinary opportunities for research, a whole gamut of possibilities from straightforward word searches to complex text mining. Under certain conditions, the participating libraries will be able to use the digitized copies of their books to create replacements for books that have been damaged or lost. Google will engineer the texts in ways to help readers with disabilities.

Unfortunately, Google's commitment to provide free access to its database on one terminal in every public library is hedged with restrictions: readers will not be able to print out any copyrighted text without paying a fee to the copyright holders (though Google has offered to pay them at the outset); and a single terminal will hardly satisfy the demand in large libraries. But Google's generosity will be a boon to the small-town, Carnegie-library readers, who will have access to more books than are currently available in the New York Public Library. Google can make the Enlightenment dream come true.

But will it? The eighteenth-century philosophers saw monopoly as a main obstacle to the diffusion of knowledge —not merely monopolies in general, which stifled trade according to Adam Smith and the Physiocrats, but specific monopolies such as the Stationers' Company in London and the booksellers' guild in Paris, which choked off free trade in books.

Google is not a guild, and it did not set out to create a monopoly. On the contrary, it has pursued a laudable goal: promoting access to information. But the class action character of the settlement makes Google invulnerable to competition. Most book authors and publishers who own US copyrights are automatically covered by the settlement. They can opt out of it; but whatever they do, no new digitizing enterprise can get off the ground without winning their assent one by one, a practical impossibility, or without becoming mired down in another class action suit. If approved by the court—a process that could take as much as two years—the settlement will give Google control over the digitizing of virtually all books covered by copyright in the United States.

This outcome was not anticipated at the outset. Looking back over the course of digitization from the 1990s, we now can see that we missed a great opportunity. Action by Congress and the Library of Congress or a grand alliance of research libraries supported by a coalition of foundations could have done the job at a feasible cost and designed it in a manner that would have put the public interest first. By spreading the cost in various ways—a rental based on the amount of use of a database or a budget line in the National Endowment for the Humanities or the Library of Congress—we could have provided authors and publishers with a legitimate income, while maintaining an open access repository or one in which access was based on reasonable fees. We could have created a National Digital Library—the twenty-first-century equivalent of the Library of Alexandria. It is too late now. Not only have we failed to realize that possibility, but, even worse, we are allowing a question of public policy—the control of access to information—to be determined by private lawsuit.

While the public authorities slept, Google took the initiative. It did not seek to settle its affairs in court. It went about its business, scanning books in libraries; and it scanned them so effectively as to arouse the appetite of others for a share in the potential profits. No one should dispute the claim of authors and publishers to income from rights that properly belong to them; nor should anyone presume to pass quick judgment on the contending parties of the lawsuit. The district court judge will pronounce on the validity of the settlement, but that is primarily a matter of dividing profits, not of promoting the public interest.

As an unintended consequence, Google will enjoy what can only be called a monopoly—a monopoly of a new kind, not of railroads or steel but of access to information. Google has no serious competitors. Microsoft dropped its major program to digitize books several months ago, and other enterprises like the Open Knowledge Commons (formerly the Open Content Alliance) and the Internet Archive are minute and ineffective in comparison with Google. Google alone has the wealth to digitize on a massive scale. And having settled with the authors and publishers, it can exploit its financial power from within a protective legal barrier; for the class action suit covers the entire class of authors and publishers. No new entrepreneurs will be able to digitize books within that fenced-off territory, even if they could afford it, because they would have to fight the copyright battles all over again. If the settlement is upheld by the court, only Google will be protected from copyright liability.

Google's record suggests that it will not abuse its double-barreled fiscal-legal power. But what will happen if its current leaders sell the company or retire? The public will discover the answer from the prices that the future Google charges, especially the price of the institutional subscription licenses. The settlement leaves Google free to negotiate deals with each of its clients, although it announces two guiding principles: "(1) the realization of revenue at market rates for each Book and license on behalf of the Rightsholders and (2) the realization of broad access to the Books by the public, including institutions of higher education."

What will happen if Google favors profitability over access? Nothing, if I read the terms of the settlement correctly. Only the registry, acting for the copyright holders, has the power to force a change in the subscription prices charged by Google, and there is no reason to expect the registry to object if the prices are too high. Google may choose to be generous in it pricing, and I have reason to hope it may do so; but it could also employ a strategy comparable to the one that proved to be so effective in pushing up the price of scholarly journals: first, entice subscribers with low initial rates, and then, once they are hooked, ratchet up the rates as high as the traffic will bear.

Free-market advocates may argue that the market will correct itself. If Google charges too much, customers will cancel their subscriptions, and the price will drop. But there is no direct connection between supply and demand in the mechanism for the institutional licenses envisioned by the settlement. Students, faculty, and patrons of public libraries will not pay for the subscriptions. The payment will come from the libraries; and if the libraries fail to find enough money for the subscription renewals, they may arouse ferocious protests from readers who have become accustomed to Google's service. In the face of the protests, the libraries probably will cut back on other services, including the acquisition of books, just as they did when publishers ratcheted up the price of periodicals.

No one can predict what will happen. We can only read the terms of the settlement and guess about the future. If Google makes available, at a reasonable price, the combined holdings of all the major US libraries, who would not applaud? Would we not prefer a world in which this immense corpus of digitized books is accessible, even at a high price, to one in which it did not exist?

Perhaps, but the settlement creates a fundamental change in the digital world by consolidating power in the hands of one company. Apart from Wikipedia, Google already controls the means of access to information online for most Americans, whether they want to find out about people, goods, places, or almost anything. In addition to the original "Big Google," we have Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Images, Google Labs, Google Finance, Google Arts, Google Food, Google Sports, Google Health, Google Checkout, Google Alerts, and many more Google enterprises on the way. Now Google Book Search promises to create the largest library and the largest book business that have ever existed.

Whether or not I have understood the settlement correctly, its terms are locked together so tightly that they cannot be pried apart. At this point, neither Google, nor the authors, nor the publishers, nor the district court is likely to modify the settlement substantially. Yet this is also a tipping point in the development of what we call the information society. If we get the balance wrong at this moment, private interests may outweigh the public good for the foreseeable future, and the Enlightenment dream may be as elusive as ever.

Notes

^[1]The Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 retroactively lengthened copyright by twenty years for books copyrighted after January 1, 1923. Unfortunately, the copyright status of books published in the twentieth century is complicated by legislation that has extended copyright eleven times during the last fifty years. Until a congressional act of 1992, rightsholders had to renew their copyrights. The 1992 act removed that requirement for books published between 1964 and 1977, when, according to the Copyright Act of 1976, their copyrights would last for the author's life plus fifty years. The act of 1998 extended that protection to the author's life plus seventy years. Therefore, all books published after 1963 remain in copyright, and an unknown number—unknown owing to inadequate information about the deaths of authors and the owners of copyright—published between 1923 and 1964 are also protected by copyright. See Paul A. David and Jared Rubin, "Restricting Access to Books on the Internet: Some Unanticipated Effects of U.S. Copyright Legislation," Review of Economic Research on Copyright Issues, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2008).

^[2]The full text of the settlement can be found at www.googlebooksettlement.com/agreement.html. For Google's legal notice concerning the settlement, see page 35 of this issue of The New York Review.

Wordsmith Word of the Day - Ex Libris

2009-01-26T10:25:00.000-08:00

ex libris

PRONUNCIATION:

(eks LEE-bris, LI-)

MEANING:

1. From the library of (a phrase inscribed in a book followed by the name of the book owner).
2. A bookplate.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Latin ex libris (from the books), from ex- (from) + liber (book).

NOTES:

Novelist and Nobelist Anatole France once said, "Never lend books -- nobody ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are those which people have lent me." An ex libris inscription identifies the owner of a book, and supposedly prevents others from building their own libraries by borrowing. I've also seen bookplates that say "Stolen from the library of ..."
Typically an ex libris is placed on the inside cover or the front end paper. Earlier bookplates featured coats of arms. Like everything else, there are bookplate enthusiasts and collectors with their own societies, conferences, journals, blogs, and more.

USAGE:

"I found a copy of Mein Kampf with Hitler's ex libris bookplate."
Timothy W Ryback; Hitler's Secret Library; The Sunday Times (London, UK); Jan 11, 2009.

Got a Question? Ask K.G.B. Agents for the Answer

2009-01-26T10:22:00.001-08:00

By Jenna Wortham

Let’s say you were lost in downtown Washington, D.C., and needed directions to the closest train station. Or you wanted to settle a bar bet on the average lifespan of a dolphin or whether it’s Alexander Hamilton or Thomas Jefferson on the two-dollar bill. Would a specific, accurate and rapid response from a human researcher be worth 50 cents?

Bruce Stewart, the chief executive of mobile and digital for kgb, hopes so. The New York company, which has been providing directory assistance services in the United States and around Europe since 1992, this month unveiled a human-powered mobile search service called kgbkgb. If you send a question via text message to kgbkgb (or 542542), a human “kgb special agent” will find the answer and text it back. (The company’s name is an obvious play on the name of the former Soviet Union’s intelligence agency, known by its Russian initials, KGB.)

“The mobile browsing experience is getting better, and text is on a significant upswing and adoption curve in the U.S.,” said Mr. Stewart, who estimated kgb and its subsidiary companies answered a billion voice and text queries last year. “It was very natural for us to move from a strong position answering voice information calls into mobile apps and the Web.”

Response times varies depending on the difficulty of the texted question, but a typical turnaround ranges from two to four minutes. A test question — “How many Oscar nominations did “The Wrestler” receive for the 2009 Academy Awards?” — was answered accurately in three minutes.

Kgb will have to compete with free mobile-based search services that don’t charge fees beyond standard messaging rates. For example, sending a search query for local addresses, weather reports, directions or work definitions via Google’s SMS service, returns results in a text message. Yahoo’s Mobile Search also offers cellphone users the option of texting inquiries for information like restaurant addresses, celebrity news, sports scores and movie reviews.

In addition, there’s ChaCha, another two-way mobile texting service that funnels queries to a team of human experts and allows users up to 20 freebie queries per month.

Mr. Stewart, who helped roll out Yahoo’s Mobile Search before leaving in 2008 to join kgb, is hoping to carve a niche out for kgb’s mobile service by placing a heavy emphasis on precision and accuracy for cellphone users who may not be equipped with a smartphone or are in too much of a hurry to browse for answers on their mobile Web browser.

“If you need a precise answer in minutes, you don’t want to hunt and navigate to find it,” said Mr. Stewart.

The company relies of a team of experts who work primarily from home. Kgb agents, which Mr. Stewart says number in the thousands, are first vetted with a series of trivia questions and then interviewed to pinpoint particular areas of expertise, such as language proficiency, geography, film awards or pop culture. Incoming questions to the service are analyzed and categorized by topic and routed to the appropriate person.

The idea is that someone who already has a working knowledge of food chemistry might be more adept at quickly researching suitable substitutes for eggs in a crème brûlée. For popular topics that have already been fielded –- such as inquiries about Sarah Palin or Barack Obama –- incoming text questions can be matched to previously answered queries for an even quicker turnaround.

In addition to the mobile texting service, kgb is currently working on versions for the Apple iPhone and the Web.

Kevin Trudeu - The Fraud THEY Didn't Want You To Know About

2009-01-26T10:22:00.000-08:00

Posted by Great Western Dragon

Despite being utterly, and embarrassingly, full of crap, Kevin Trudeau's books are still popular. I've got patrons asking for them every week and I have to put them on hold because they're usually checked out. Never mind that the man's a fraud and a con-artist spreading false information about everything from cures to cancer to ways out of debt, people want to read his stuff.

So while I applaud the recent actions of a federal judge who ordered Trudeau to pay US$37 million for violating a 2004 order regarding false claims in his weight loss "cures" book, I doubt it'll have an effect on those wanting to read it. However, we can at least take solace in the fact that he's also been barred from publishing anything or creating infomercials for the next three years.

More from, where else?, the Federal Trade Commission.

Iowa woman arrested for keeping library book

2009-01-26T10:20:00.000-08:00

Posted by Blake

An Independence woman was arrested on theft charges Thursday for failing to return a library book.

Shelly J. Koontz, 39, was arrested just after 8 p.m. at her residence after a warrant had been issued. She was originally charged with fifth-degree theft for keeping "The Freedom Writers Diary," which she checked out from the Jesup Public Library in April 2008.

Jesup Police Chief Rick Deitrick said the book was valued at $13.95.

"Theft is theft, no matter what it is," Deitrick said.

Scanner Turns Books into Audio Files

2009-01-19T18:35:00.000-08:00

By Andi Wang, 3:20 PM on Fri Jan 9 2009, 8,790 views

Plustek's updated Book Reader V100 can instantly turn your reading material into MP3s. Simply place the book on the scanner, and with the push of a button, it does the rest for you.

Like their previous book scanner, the V100 uses character recognition technology to scan every word on a page, even words curved into the spine of your book. More than just cloning your books into PDF and other visual files, the Book Reader can automatically convert your literature into MP3s, which will use a "natural voice synthesis" as your storyteller.

Having your books in MP3 format would mean that you will be able to easily carry your books around on an existing MP3 player without having to purchase an electronic reader. However, as they are currently priced at $700, forking up the cash for a Kindle does seem cheaper in comparison. [Wired]