LISNews: Librarian News

In her new book, "The Roberts Court," Marcia Coyle of the National Law Journal and regular NewsHour contributor takes a look at the landmark decisions that have reached the Supreme Court during the tenure of Chief Justice John Roberts. She talks to Jeffrey Brown about her observations and interviews with the justices.

Poor eyesight can no longer be an excuse for not playing Scrabble at the Highland Public Library.

Vincent Alcorn, a Lakeland High School senior, made sure of that, creating a giant Scrabble set for the library for his Eagle Scout project.

“I worked along with librarian Dawn Dittmar to come up with the idea,” Alcorn said.

Full article

An Emory University law librarian is suing Delta Air Lines, claiming she suffered permanent brain trauma when books and other items fell on her after a flight attendant opened an overhead bin two years ago.

Full article

From New York's "Picture Newspaper", the Daily News:

" The New York Public Library’s newest branch is going to sparkle like fine crystal. "

The W. 53rd St. center will be an airy, vibrant structure with multiple public spaces, modern computer labs, an audio-video collection, and walls of books, library officials said Monday as they unveiled new renderings of the three-story facility designed by Enrique Norten’s TEN Arquitectos.

The new library will also feature a sizable auditorium.

Meanwhile, the city is sucking dry its existing libraries. The Daily News also reports:

"Not only the Queens Library, but the city’s three library systems — Queens, Brooklyn and New York (which serves the Bronx, Manhattan and Staten Island) — that have had a tough time over the last five years, as Bloomberg has made it an annual ritual to propose major cuts to their budgets. It’s true that much of the cuts are restored by the City Council, but never in full.

One would think that Bloomberg, who supposedly values efficiency and cost-effectiveness, would go out of his way not to put the libraries through budget hell every year.

After all, they have really been able to do more with less: Despite their shrinking resources, over the last 10 years New York’s public libraries have seen a 40% increase in program attendance, and 59% in circulation, according to a Center for an Urban Future study. -- Read More

Did you push a button for your book to appear below? How useful was a book vending machine with only eight or so different titles? And how, in the 1950s, did you automate checking out a book without something like barcode technology?

CBS Money Watch reports: Librarian wins at least $1M in Lay's chip promo.

Fans voted to keep the potato chip maker's Cheesy Garlic Bread flavor on store shelves for at least the end of the year as part of the company's nearly year-long "Do Us a Flavor" promotion.

The campaign is the latest promotional stunt from companies trying to engage customers through social media and direct interaction. Toy maker Hasbro Inc. recently held a Monopoly contest that ended with the addition of a cat game token and the demise of the iron for the classic board game. Online retailer Amazon.com Inc. is asking people to watch show pilots on its streaming video service and vote for which one to turn into a full series.

Karen Weber-Mendham, a children's librarian from Land O'Lakes, Wis., submitted the Cheesy Garlic Bread flavor and will receive $1 million or 1 percent of sales, whichever is higher. (The company said it hasn't tallied sales numbers yet.) The creators of the Chicken & Waffles and Sriracha chips will be awarded $50,000 each.

Weber-Mendham came up with the flavor because her three kids love to order cheesy garlic bread at Italian restaurants. Earlier this year she traveled to Frito-Lay's Plano, Texas, headquarters to taste the chips. Frito-Lay is a unit of PepsiCo Inc. "I was actually shocked at how good the chips came out," Weber-Mendham, 45, said in an interview after she was named the winner late Monday in Los Angeles.

I liked the Sriracha chips :(

Syria has largely disappeared from the Internet since May 7 at 2:45pm Eastern Time. Both Google and a Web security company called Umbrella Security Labs are indicating that the entire country of Syria may have been severed from the Internet. Google has a screen shot of Syria's Internet traffic at that time at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/files/2013/05/syria-google-taller.jpg

Who cut the Internet connections, whether the Syrian government, anti-government forces, or outside powers, in unknown at this time.

At 11:00AM EDT today, On Point, WBUR's outstanding NPR show, spends an hour asking, How Can Libraries Survive The Digital Age?

The guests are Anthony Marx, president and CEO of the New York Public Library and Eli Neiburger, associate director of information technology and production at Ann Arbor District Library.

The show is also available later in the day as a podcast.

YouTube Is Said to Plan a Subscription Option

Newspapers have digital subscriptions. Record labels have iTunes and Spotify. And YouTube is about to have special programming for paying customers.

This week YouTube, the world’s largest video Web site, will announce a plan to let some video makers charge a monthly subscription to their channels. There will be paid channels for children’s programming, entertainment, music and many other topic areas, according to people with knowledge of the plan, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they had been asked by YouTube not to comment publicly yet. Some of the channels — there will be several dozen at the outset — will cost as little as $1.99 a month.

Full article

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.