LISNews: Librarian News

A Doll’s Magic, Free to Renew
These have been the many phases of Kirsten Larson, an American Girl doll who sat on a shelf in the Ottendorfer branch of the New York Public Library, in the East Village, until a resourceful children’s librarian began lending her to girls, many of whose parents, because of financial or feminist reasons, resist buying the dolls.

Cites & Insights 13:2 (February 2013) is now available for downloading at http://citesandinsights.info/civ13i2.pdf

The issue is 40 pages long. A single-column 6x9 version, optimized for online reading and intended for e-readers and reading from the screen, is 75 pages long and available at http://citesandinsights.info/civ13i2on.pdf

This issue includes:
The Front (pp. 1-3)

Doing the numbers: notes on C&I readership during 2012 and since it moved to its current website. Also a quick note on the (failed) HTML challenge.

Intersections:
Catching Up On Open Access 2 (pp. 3-40)

The rest of the megaroundup that began in January. This installment includes Upping the Anti, Controversies, Predators, Economics, Elsevier, The Future!, A Little Humor, and a closing note on progress, snipers and inquisitors.

Cites & Insights is no longer available as HTML separates.

Psst: Have you heard the ongoing common knowledge that nearly all academic libraries have had falling circulation for quite a few years now? If your own library had rising circulation, say between 2008 and 2010, did you think you were a special flower?

A March essay looks at the reality behind "nearly all" based on NCES data. Let's just say the common knowledge is just a wee bit off. But for that, you'll have to wait for the March 2013 issue...

David Lee King with an interesting question, what do we think is important? Do our users agree?
Think about some of these things libraries have, for example:
-Library Catalog – interesting to our customers?
-Article Databases – interesting to our customers?
-Periodicals reading room …
-Reference desk …
I think our goal should be two-fold:
1.spend time, money, and expertise on stuff our customers care about
2.do stuff that our customers care about

One might not expect to find VHS covers of pornographic movies or prostitutes' trade cards at the library, but those items are among the racy ephemera Cornell University has been compiling since 1988 as part of its Human Sexuality Collection.

Perhaps the most groundbreaking aspect of “Library Services in the Digital Age,” the report released today by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project is how non-groundbreaking its findings are.

Based on “a survey of 2,252 Americans ages 16 and above” conducted between October 15 and November 10 of last year, the Pew reportassures us that, even in the digital age, libraries continue to serve a variety of functions, with nearly 60% of respondents having had some kind of interaction with a library in the last 12 months, and 91% saying that “

Pippert concludes, “It might ultimately be a human problem to solve: capture content from others mindfully and use it thoughtfully, with good communication. Let others know you’re using the content and make sure you are clear to friends your preference about your content being redistributed.”

This is yet another reminder that anything you say anywhere on the web, private or not, is always subject to being shared via third party apps, screenshots, or good old fashioned copy and paste, so never say something online that you wouldn’t say in public, because there really is no such thing as privacy, which is sad and unacceptable, but true.

"I don't personally use the library. I kind of have the feeling that libraries are going the route of the video rental stores but I'm probably... wrong about that," said Coun. Ian Paton. "With the access to information now, with everyone having computers in their home, why do we spend so much money? Do the people out there even know we spent $2.3 million a year of our money to run our libraries in Delta and just how many people use libraries any more?"

Read more.

Jessamyn West:
"As librarians, I feel we have to be prepared to find content that is freely usable for our patrons, not just content that is mostly freely usable or content where people are unlikely to come after you. As much as I’m personally okay being a test case for some sort of “Yeah I didn’t read all 9000 words on the JSTOR terms and conditions, please feel free to take me to jail” case, realistically that will not happen. Realistically the real threat of jail is scary and terrible and expensive. Realistically people bend and decide it’s not so bad because they think it’s the best they can do. I think we can probably do better than that."

Fans bombarded Amazon with dozens of negative reviews of a new biography, got several favorable notices erased and even took credit for Amazon’s briefly removing the book from sale.

Full article

This week's episode looks around the LISHost galaxy while looking at some ambiguous information in a speculative manner.

Related links:

• LISWire: Worch Memorial Public Library Joins COOL and Goes Live on Evergreen
• Pwnie Express: Pwn Plug Elite
• Wired: The Little White Box That Can Hack Your Network
• The Verge: Wikileaks claims Aaron Swartz was an ally and possible source, breaking anonymity
• CNET: WikiLeaks says Aaron Swartz may have been a 'source'
• The Guardian: Libraries crisis set to get 'much worse' this year
• Galileo 0.012 released!

Download here (MP3) (Ogg Vorbis), or subscribe to the podcast (MP3) to have episodes delivered to your media player. We suggest subscribing by way of a service like gpodder.net. A way to send gifts of replacement hardware to Erie Looking Productions is available here via Amazon, as always.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/.

Sign in the Manly Library Australia reassigns his titles to Fiction

Lance Armstrong's fall from grace after admitting to using performance-enhancing drugs shows no signs of slowing.

The professional cycling fraternity has shunned him, the sponsors have dropped him and just about everyone else he's ever crossed is about to sue him.

And now, his books - once an inspirational story of how to overcome adversity - have been re-shelved and re-categorised from 'must-read autobiography' to 'fiction.'

On August 28, 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. did what he’d done countless times before: he began building a sermon. And in his sermons King relied on improvisation, drawing on sources and references that were limited only by his imagination and memory. It’s a gift — and a tradition — on full display in the "I Have A Dream" speech, but it’s also in conflict with the intellectual property laws that have been strenuously used by his estate since his death. In a segment originally aired in 2011, OTM producer Jamie York speaks with Drew Hansen, Keith Miller, Michael Eric Dyson and Lewis Hyde about King, imagination and the consequences of limiting access to art and ideas. Download MP3 Full piece -- On the Media (Includes links to transcript etc)

On January 11, 26-year-old hacker, programmer, and activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide. He had a history of depression and faced federal prosecution for downloading millions of articles from the online academic article repository JSTOR. Brooke talks to Gawker's Adrian Chen, who wrote about Swartz's legal troubles this week. Download MP3 of piece here.

The public library has the real ability to add real value and to be a real community hub in social network community world. But does it understand this, or as in the UK, is it obsessed with its statutory obligations and keeping everything ‘as is’ at all costs? Are the ‘Shhh, no noise’ signs actually hiding a sleeping environment that is simply not listening to the market and its customers?

We are witnessing harsh funding cuts, a worrying migration to voluntary services, the wholesale dumping of every customer facing civic service into the library’s ‘underused space’ and a general lack of leadership and digital direction within the public library community.

An armed man robbed the Kittitas Public Library of about $20 in cash and also took the librarian's wallet.

Full piece

Brooklyn Public Library's New Logo Misspells 'Brooklyn'

Full story

Chris Meadows at TeleRead referred to the recent suicide of Internet activist Aaron Swartz as a gross miscarriage of justice. Law professor Orin Kerr digs into the basis of the charges that were filed against Swartz while law professor Ann Althouse questions the end result of the situation while noting that something does not add up.

McDonald's has launched a two-year children’s books campaign, committing to "hand out more than 15 million books by the end of 2014” through a £1 book offer on its Happy Meal boxes.

Full article

Article from 1979 to show that there is nothing new under the sun.

NPR had a piece that was titled - What Should We Be Worried About In 2013?

Some of the discussion is about information literacy.

Excerpt:
Many worried about the impact of technology on individual minds and human relationships. My own entry was among them, raising the concern that fast and efficient access to information isn't always better access to information. Thanks to features of human psychology, effortless information retrieval can engender illusions of knowledge and understanding.

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