LISNews: Librarian News

How Google's 'Penguin' Update Will Change Publishing, for the Better

Over the past decade, the publishing industry been swinging on a pendulum created by the effects of search engine optimization (SEO). In the old, primarily print days, the most successful publishers were those that could produce great content for a specific audience and keep that audience engaged via subscriptions or at the newsstands. More recently, the kings of publishing were those that could best engage web crawlers and monetize their sites through a windfall of free search traffic. The focus has been less on creating great content and engaging readers than on producing lots of words on lots of pages to engage web crawlers.

But there is a silver lining to all of this. With last year's Panda release, and the more recent Penguin release, Google is going to flip SEO on its head. If Old SEO enabled some to fool a crawler into indexing borderline junk content to get high rankings, New SEO looks likely to take any notion of fooling anyone out of the equation.

http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/google-s-penguin-update-change-publishing/236580/

Interesting link at Library Journal
http://www.infodocket.com/2012/08/10/metadata-the-isbn-users-manual-6th-ed-2012/

With so many more distractions available to disrupt their attention, perhaps there is more academic librarians could do to help students achieve academic success.

http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2012/08/opinion/steven-bell/attention-is-the-new-currency-from-...

Essayist and humorist David Rakoff has died, novel to be published in 2013
http://books.usatoday.com/bookbuzz/post/2012-08-10/essayist-and-humorist-david-rakoff-has-di...

A new book by Kenneth Feinberg traces his years of work in assessing and paying victims’ claims after disasters, whether the 9/11 attacks, the Virginia Tech massacre or the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Article in the NYT

Laser etched Kindle 2
http://www.flickr.com/photos/adafruit/3350369712/

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap?

Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading. -- Read More

FRONTLINE and ProPublica investigate the hidden cost that comes with the demand for better and faster cell phone service.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/cell-tower-deaths/

Watch Cell Tower Deaths on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

Thomas Pynchon, author of “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “The Crying of Lot 49,” characteristically declined to speak about his decision.

http://libwire.blogspot.com/2012/06/after-long-resistance-pynchon-allows.html

Houston librarians keep a wary eye for counterfeit bills
http://libwire.blogspot.com/2012/06/houston-librarians-keep-wary-eye-for.html

Waukegan needs Ray Bradbury museum, biographer says
http://libwire.blogspot.com/2012/06/waukegan-needs-ray-bradbury-museum.html

A librarian friend of mine who makes thoughtful book recomendations said that - Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Battle for the Internetwas an excellent and timely read.

Book

The Story of Ain't: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published

Humanities editor Skinner, who is on the usage panel for the American Heritage Dictionary, offers a highly entertaining and intelligent re-creation of events surrounding the 1961 publication of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary by G. & C. Merriam. The dictionary, assembled at a cost of $3.5 million, included a press release from Merriam’s president Gordon J. Gallan, which said the work contained “an avalanche of bewildering new verbal concepts.”

Starred review at Publisher's Weekly

Hachette returning e-book access to some libraries in pilot program
http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/hachette-returning-e-book-access-to-some-libraries-in-pilot-p...

Libraries change with the digital times
http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/libraries-change-with-the-digital-times/

Reddit debunks Wikipedia-fooling college class hoax in 26 minutes
http://www.teleread.com/chris-meadows/reddit-debunks-wikipedia-fooling-college-class-hoax-in...