LISNews: Librarian News

Article in the NYT about sequestration and the Library of Congress

Greetings from Ashtabula. My name is Mike Kellat and I am the owner of Erie Looking Productions. I am recording this on Saturday, May 4, 2013. This is for immediate release.

Stephen has received dispatch orders from the Director of the Ashtabula County Board of Elections herself this very morning. As you may or may not be aware, Stephen is thoroughly involved in local democracy by serving as a substitute precinct election official. We have a local election coming up on Tuesday and Stephen has been ordered to a new precinct to take up duty to serve the public by helping conduct the vote. Stephen first served as a poll judge during the November 2012 Presidential General Election.

Our producer continues to be away on medical leave and that is beginning its fourth week. Between that and the requirements placed upon Stephen between now and Tuesday to avoid taking positions on ballot questions which include library issues, I am suspending production of LISTen and the Burning Circle at this time. I am also factoring in the Ubuntu Developer Summit as part of this production suspension so that time is spent appropriately on that.

There shall be no episodes released on Monday, May 6th, or Monday, May 13th. Normal production releases shall resume on Monday, May 20th, which is the Victoria Day holiday in Canada.

Thank you for your patience and understanding. We'll see you on the other side of this production suspension.

Gadgets you can borrow at the Stanford Law Library. Interesting collection of items. Five Fuji bicycles are on the list.

What gadgets does your library lend? Successes? Problems?

Schmidt and Cohen authored a book - The New Digital Age

Now things have changed. First, and most obviously, mobile devices are everywhere. Second, there are now legions of interesting Web services to automate. The final ingredient is the most important: With the rise of Big Data, there is now enough information available for a software agent to actually use to perform anticipatory actions. In that context, the challenges of applying software agents and artificial intelligence to business solutions is nothing compared to the potential payoff to users.
The combination of automated agents, contextual search and a sea of data from our devices, services and the Internet of Things, search is poised to become vastly more useful and efficient than it already is. The pieces are getting there with agents like Siri and contextual search like Google Now. If it all works as promised, information we need will be delivered to us just when we need it, without our having to invest time and effort looking for it."

"It’s not so easy to peruse the stacks because the tables with the computers are right there," Skaller said. "There's not a lot space away from those screens... For the 3-year-old, there's an immense opportunity to discover new things to read, and anything that's pulling her away from that gets in the way of the purpose of the trip to the library."

We can thank digital for much of the gain, of course, with overall digital sales up a whopping 66%, split between e-book sales (up 134%) and digital fiction sales (up 149%). And yes, physical book sales were down, though with a mere 1% dip, only slightly. But what I’m not sure anyone was expecting was this: Total sales of physical books in the fiction genre actually grew by 3%. Take a bow, Fifty Shades of Grey.

Read more: http://techland.time.com/2013/05/01/physical-books-are-dead-long-live-physical-books/

Documents That Changed the World [ITunes Link]
A look at documents that have made a difference in the world. Joe Janes, of the University of Washington Information School, tells the stories of these important information objects, how and why they were created, and the impacts they've had. These documents also tell the story of human society. and its never ending evolution.
[Thanks Zamms!]

LISNews received the following letter from the Carnegie Corporation of New York; please read and take part (if you wish...):

I am writing from Carnegie Corporation of New York, where we've created a web photo project together with dozens of education nonprofits to support national Teacher Appreciation Week, which starts Monday. I'm hoping you'll help spread the word to people at schools (which could, if public, have the opportunity to win $3500), and anyone interested in inspired learning and education, and/or photography…

“Picture This!” aims to do just that. Using Carnegie’s "umbrella"
position—supporting multiple organizations, ranging from universities, to the NEA, the National Council on Teacher Quality, Public Impact, Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, and more—we’ve created a far-reaching collaboration to call on students, parents, teachers, administrators, and anyone who’s witnessed great teaching, to upload pictures to our photo-sharing site Great Teaching that “visually” answer one of these questions:

When I picture great teaching I see ________.

When my teaching is inspired I ________.

My teacher inspires me when ________.

Plus, the person who submits the most inspiring photo (pic and description) can win $3500 for a K-12 public school of his or her choice! The site is live, so please take a look (and upload a photo!). Thanks for your help spreading the word. Finally, the project also integrates with Instagram through the hashtag #GreatTeaching.

Thanks,

Deanna Lee
Chief Communications and Digital Strategies Officer Carnegie Corporation of New York

From The New York Times Arts Beat:

What is the sound of two heads reading?

On Tuesday, in a hushed sixth-floor reading room in New York University’s Bobst Library packed with students cramming for final exams, the answer might have seemed to be: nothing much.

But for three pairs of readers scattered among the laptop-laden tables, wearing special headphones hooked up to iPod Nanos and shuffling through a pile of suspiciously literary books, the act of reading was transformed into a strange — and sometimes very loud — drama of turning pages, pointing fingers and eerily drifting thoughts.

“The first thing you notice is that for a place dedicated to silence, there’s not really that much silence at all,” a British-accented voice whispered into the readers’ ears. “After a while you start to think that it might be better considered as a place dedicated to the collection of sounds.”

The readers, who had signed up in advance, were both the audience and the stars of “The Quiet Volume,” a 55-minute stealth performance piece by the British artists Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells being staged through Sunday by Performance Space 122 as part of the PEN World Voices Festival. (The piece, which also comes in a Spanish-language version, is also running at the Schomburg Center in Harlem.)

“The whole thing made you think about the nature of your sensory experience while reading, the relationship between the voice in your head and the words on the page,” said Jessica Harris, a graduate student who had just finished performing the piece with a friend.

The New Yorker reviews Josh Hanagarne’s new memoir about growing up with Tourette's Syndrome and becoming a librarian at the Salt Lake City Public Library. Worth a read, especially if you didn't catch our earlier review.

Help the Northlake Public Library get a 9-foot-tall Incredible Hulk statue, graphic novels and a creation station featuring:
•iMac with a drawing pad
•Editing software
•Cintiq interactive pen display
•3D printer
•Artograph Light Tracer Elite

Libraries are constantly changing and evolving beyond just a place to do school work and use the internet. Today’s libraries are celebrating creativity, entertainment and life long learning, and they are doing it with technology and popular materials including graphic novels. The problem is that many people still think of libraries in the old way. We want to smash that stuffy reputation with a 9 foot tall Incredible Hulk Statue.

Op-ed in the NYT: E-Books and Democracy by Anthony W. Marx (president of the New York Public Library)

WRESTLING with my newspaper on the subway recently, I noticed the woman next to me reading a book on her smartphone. “That has to hurt your eyes,” I commented. Not missing a beat, she replied, in true New York style, “My font is bigger than yours.” She was right.

Full piece

Among Amazon skeptics, patience for the online retailer’s lack of profits has become a source of bemused agony. No other marquee tech company could get away with, at best, earnings in the low millions (to say nothing of ending last year in the red). Despite such low numbers, Amazon’s shares have enjoyed unprecedented success over the last few months.

But the past few days have seen the onset of what could turn into what the short sellers would see as a major correction. If so, it’s not only shareholders who could suffer. A major stock downturn led by investors no longer willing to wait for Jeff Bezos to work miracles could eventually mean higher prices for Amazon customers.

To understand why, first consider the fortunes of one of Amazon’s main rivals.

Full article

More books & comics shown here, collection by Charlie Savage.

...and from Moby Lives:

Is this the first ever web page? If not, CERN would like to know
Boffinry nerve-centre CERN has attempted to recreate the very first website to mark 20 years since the official launch of the World Wide Web.

It is feared the first ever web page is lost to the sands of time as it was changed daily and any backups are few and far between. However the team has pulled up a snapshot of the very first website dating from November 1992, which the eggheads say "may be the earliest copy we can find". The CERN bods are still hunting around for earlier versions.

Why online education is mostly a fantasy

"I’m not arguing that online courses have no value. They have tremendous value for those who are self-motivated and prone to seeking out knowledge on their own. But in this regard, online courses play the role of a public library. And just as libraries are utilized by a fairly small percentage of the population and have not solved our educational needs, so too will online courses fail to be the solution to educating the masses.

"

Archivists are the specialists who snatch objects from oblivion. They have long spent their careers cloistered, like the objects they protected. But now many of these professionals are stepping out. A main reason is the Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York. The group, which recently surpassed 500 members, holds monthly events that draw a young, well-dressed crowd, hungry for chances to network, train and socialize. Members not only work at libraries, where archives have long resided, but also at such organizations as the Fashion Institute of Technology, the Junior League, the Episcopal Church, the Philharmonic, the Stock Exchange and the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Full article in the NYT

A FEW weeks ago, a friend received a flier in the mail inviting her to an event in Manhattan for patients with multiple sclerosis.

“What’s in it for you?” said the flier from MS LifeLines, a support network for patients and their families that is financed by two drug makers, Pfizer and EMD Serono. “Strategies for managing and understanding your symptoms. Information about available treatments for relapsing M.S.”

The thing is that my friend, who requested that I keep her name out of this column, does not have multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease that affects the central nervous system.

But last year, she did search online for information about various diseases, including M.S., on a number of consumer health sites. She also subscribed to an online recommendation engine where she looked up consumer reviews of local physicians.

Full article

As aggravated circumstances have continued longer than expected, the engineer also took on duty as acting producer this week since we continue to be short-handed. In lieu of a news miscellany a commentary is presented about online vigilantism and the need for teaching Internet ethics in light of Zero Hedge reporting a falsely identified Boston suspect being found dead, PCMag.com reporting that Reddit apologizing for getting their bomber crowd sourcing wrong, and PJ Media's Chicago editor saying not nice thing about social media in the Boston incident.

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