Culture Czar To Be Appointed

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?

When the lights go down - Armand Van helden

15 Incredible Library Special Collections

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enter Here

Libraries can keep books with lead-containing ink

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Generations Online in 2009

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

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?

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.