LISNews: Librarian News

I had the pleasure of hearing David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States (and the first librarian to hold the position) speak this morning at the NFAIS conference in Philadelphia. I'll sleep better tonight knowing our national records are in good hands.

In addition to all the serious things he talked about (the twitter feed was #nfais11 and it was probably blogged somewhere) he told about a challenge put to the readers of the Prologue: Pieces of History blog: If our Founding Fathers had Twitter. Not quite The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation but still amusing.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education
February 28, 2011, 6:41 pm
By Tushar Rae

The steady growth of e-books has forced libraries to contend with how to curate and distribute materials in a way that makes them easy for increasingly technology-oriented patronage to access.

Some 150 public and academic libraries are trying to respond to that challenge through a new collaboration with the Internet Archive and Open Library. The arrangement will allow library patrons at participating institutions to access e-books owned and stored at libraries other than their home libraries. Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian at the Internet Archive, says the group has come up with a solution in which “the tech doesn’t suck” and “everyone will get paid.”......Read the rest here.

After over a year of wishing and several hours of searching (spread out over that year) I have finally found an app for my Android powered smartphone which will allow me to add annotations and highlights to Adobe Acrobat .PDF files. The program is called Repligo Reader from Cerience and is available on the Android Market either on your phone or on the web.

Full review at: http://www.ideationizing.com/2011/03/pdf-annotations-on-android.html

P.S. I have nothing to do with Cerience. I just found a good product that meets my demands for allowing me to maintain control over my documents and annotations, and I wanted to tell people about it.

For better or worse an operational calendar is being updated using IceOwl with Google Calendar hosting it on the back-end. To keep up with the production calendar, use this link in your calendaring package:

http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/erielookingproductions@gmail.com/public/basic.ics

A few weeks ago I pulled a number of books for a Commedia dell'arte performance course. The subject range of books I pulled for the session covered a large gamut of topics: art, dance, costume, literature, theatre, swordplay, wagons, etc. Following my presentation to the class, a student mentioned that seeing too many books gave her a headache. She further qualified that and said that not many things gave her a headache. In response I provided her the imagery of looking at the bookshelves as looking at a web page and going off in a number of different but related directions. She gave a somewhat quizzical look, but a few seconds later an approving nod. I felt like maybe, just maybe, I provided a connection that she could relate to.

Richard Curtis, veteran literary agent and president of Ereads.com, shared a few publishing predictions for 2011.

Here is a talk by Curtis in 1999 called Content Spoken Here

Reminds me that I want to visit BookMarc on Bleecker Street when the weather warms up....

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD and JULIE BOSMAN
Published in the New York Times: February 27, 2011

Kitson, a group of boutiques based in Los Angeles, is the kind of store that appears regularly in the tabloids for both its stylish clothes and its celebrity clientele like Sean Combs and Joe Jonas. But in a town that is all about flash, Kitson is finding a surprising source of revenue that is not from its fashionable shoes or accessories. It is from books..... Read the rest here

I wanted to write a railing piece about the new Harper Collins twenty-six checkout limit on ebooks, but Friday I had to finish a day of work and take my wife out for a date night before I could sit down to write.

This has given me the opportunity to read the reactions of librarian-bloggers. The reactions fell into two camps. The largest group was the" believers", those who saw ebooks as a means of library renaissance on the foundation of digital content. The other group was the "skeptics". These, I include myself in this group, were willing to incorporate ebooks into the library collection, but did not put all of their trust into the format for the salvation of libraries. -- Read More

From the Wall Street Journal

By AMIR EFRATI

Google Inc., long considered the gold standard of Internet search, is changing the secret formula it uses to rank Web pages as it struggles to combat websites that have been able to game its system.

The Internet giant, which handles nearly two-thirds of the world's Web searches, has been under fire recently over the quality of its results. Google said it changed its mathematical formula late Thursday in order to better weed out "low-quality" sites that offer users little value. Some such sites offer just enough content to appear in search results and lure users to pages loaded with advertisements.

Read more...

By Jennifer Howard in the Chronicle of Higher Education

Social media have become serious academic tools for many scholars, who use them for collaborative writing, conferencing, sharing images, and other research-related activities. So says a study just posted online called "Social Media and Research Workflow." Among its findings: Social scientists are now more likely to use social-media tools in their research than are their counterparts in the biological sciences. And researchers prefer popular applications like Twitter to those made for academic users.....More here.

Opinion piece in the Chronicle Review by David Rothman, who is a writer and founder of TeleRead, a Web site devoted to news and discussion of e-books and related topics. He is also a cofounder of LibraryCity.org, an informal, nonprofit group working toward a universal national digital-library system. He clearly has some skin in the game.

It's Time for a National Digital-Library System
But it can't serve only elites

By David H. Rothman

William F. Buckley Jr., my political opposite, once denounced the growing popularity of CD-ROM's in student research. Shouldn't young people learn from real books?

I disagreed. Why not instead digitize a huge number of books and encourage the spread of book-friendly tablet computers with color screens and multimedia capabilities? ....Read the rest here

I clearly have too much time on my hands. It's not even Friday and here's another video about the new product called BOOK, with english subtitles, so you can watch it with the sound off....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhcPX1wVp38

Abstract:
Intellectual property law has long been justified on the belief that external incentives are necessary to get people to produce artistic works and technological innovations that are easily copied. This Essay argues that this foundational premise of the economic theory of intellectual property is wrong. Using recent advances in behavioral economics, psychology, and business-management studies, it is now possible to show that there are natural and intrinsic motivations that will cause technology and the arts to flourish even in the absence of externally supplied rewards, such as copyrights and patents.

Download full PDF here

Social media is an important technological trend that has big implications for how researchers (and people in general) communicate and collaborate. Researchers have a huge amount to gain from engaging with social media in various aspects of their work.

This guide has been produced by the International Centre for Guidance Studies, and aims to provide the information needed to make an informed decision about using social media and select from the vast range of tools that are available.......More here.

By Viva Sarah Press
February 21, 2011

A Weizmann Institute scientist says clues to the history of pollution can be found in old books - but not in the written word, rather in the paper itself.
Prof. Dan Yakir of the Department of Environmental Sciences and Energy Research in the Faculty of Chemistry found the paper in library collections of old books and newspapers contains a record of atmospheric conditions at the time the trees that went into making the paper were growing. Yakir says he has traced the effects of atmospheric pollution from burning fossil fuel going back to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.....Read more here.

Funny cartoon from The Telegraph

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/matt/

Who knew? It's not Friday but these are fun to watch.

Organizing the bookcase -- love the soundtrack!

The Amazing Stop Motion Bookshelf

Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society has set up a planning wiki as a place to get input from the public about the Digital Public Library of America initiative. It's in the early stages but will be interesting to watch and participate.. Check it out here.

As the popularity of smartphones continues to grow, the challenge, on a global scale, may only get greater.

Full article

This study, conducted by the Library Resource Guide (LRG) — in conjunction with Unisphere Research, the market research division of Information Today, Inc (ITI) — in October and November 2010 among libraries listed in ITI’s American Library Directory, reveals current spending patterns for public, academic, government, and special libraries and projects budget and other spending trends for 2011.

From Information Today. You will need to register to download the report.

Download here