LISNews: Librarian News

E&P Online has a Story that talks about News librarians. They say news librarians are much better appreciated these days, and their roles are expanding. The skills the librarians possess are becoming increasingly important. Journalists run the risk of smothering in the information overload, librarians/news researchers help make sense of it all. Now why can\'t other librarians get this kind of respect?

A new book is out that should be of some use to journalists who want to be better skilled at using the Internet as an integral part of their reporting. \"Super Searchers In The News\" (Information Today Inc.), written by Paula Hane and edited by Reva Basch, takes the approach of interviewing 10 experts in using the Internet as a news research tool.

Someone pointed us to the funnytimes.com cartoon for the week of October 4, 2000, it\'s entitled \"Harry Potter and the Christian Fundamentalist\".

Check it out.

Today on the highlights, we take a look at a public library that\'s opened a used bookstore and copyright concerns at publishers. -- Read More

The DMCA continues to send shivers down my spine. Wired has a Story that has some not-so-nice things to say. Critics of the DMCA say it could lead to a pay-per-use world where consumers don\'t truly own the books, movies and music they purchase. On Oct. 28, the librarian of Congress will announce new rules governing the access provisions of the DMCA. Remember:

Fair use is not a defense to the DMCA.

\"The technological measures, which may be as simple as a password, place restrictions on who can use the digital information and often disenfranchise the public. Whereas the public may use the same print resources in a law library, in the digital arena law libraries are no longer able to provide equal access to all users.\" -- Read More

Internet
World has a nice
Story that likens the internet to a library where
books are strewn across the floor rather than arranged
in neatly organized stacks. They say libraries have
\"metadata\": specific descriptive elements like \"subject\"
and \"author\" that are recorded and indexed in a
standardized way, unlike the net, which is a big mess.
Maybe The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative will finally
take off.?

\"What we see is that the necessary expertise to
develop metadata applications is declining,\" says
Stuart Weibel, co-director of the Dublin Core Metadata
Initiative.

Ever vigilant Bob Cox sent in this Story from Boston.com on
some very rare books that went missing from Harvard.
In March, Chun Shum, a rare books specialist at the
library, discovered treasured volumes of poetry and
painting date back more than 1,000 years, had been
snatched from their protected perch in the rare book
room.

\'\'These are works of huge historic and
literary importance,\'\' said Nancy Cline, head librarian of
Harvard College, who oversees the world\'s largest
academic collection of books. \'\'It\'s very difficult to
estimate the impact of their loss.\'\'

Governor George W. Bush, during a presidential
campaign stop Sunday in Holland, told a local Christian
radio station he believes filters that block \'pornography
and smut\' should be installed on all Internet services
available in public places such as libraries. As seen on
The Maranatha Christian News
Service.

\"Gary Glenn, president of the
American Family Association of Michigan said \"On
behalf of millions of concerned Michigan parents, we
are deeply grateful to Governor Bush for his
unequivocal stand in support of Internet pornography
filters in libraries and other public places\"

From The
Times UK a shocking Story on the first
Harry Play. A 17 Year old girl will play Harry after J. K.
Rowling gave permission for a boarding school to
stage the world premiere of Harry Potter and the
Philosopher\'s Stone. North Foreland Lodge, a girls-only
school near Hook in Hampshire, wrote to the author
after two staff decided to adapt her first novel for its
Christmas production. She gave her approval, despite
a seven-year block on performing rights because of the
impending Hollywood film.

The Houston
Chronicle has a Story on a TX town that is trying to
figure out how to keep books that include vulgar words
out of classrooms.

The district\'s school libraries already require parental
permission for children to check out books from author
J.K. Rowling\'s you know what series. They say they put
the policy in place to give parents who don\'t want their
children reading such material a way to prevent
it.

\"\"In today\'s public schools, there seem to be a
lot of books creeping in that have four-letter profanity in
them,\" board member John Couch said. \"We happened
to discover some in the fifth and sixth grades, and we\'re
concerned that that kind of language is getting past
some of the teachers and into the hands of students.

Daniel Chudnov has the
Docster list up and running now.This list is
intended for
those wishing to help build and test a
docster-like prototype, and is open to all participants.

This project is
specifically aimed at shared discovery and analysis of
technical, social,
and legal changes to existing p2p (Peer to Peer)
models we will need to make to make
instant document delivery real and equitable for all
involved. See the
docster proposal at oss4li
b.org/readings/docster.php for more
background.

The list can be found on Sourceforge at :http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/oss4lib-doc
ster\">
lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/oss4lib-docster

David writes \"NRC committee released a study regarding the past, present, and future of the internet; many in the lib./info. science community may find it interesting.
See nationalacademies.org for the details.\"

The report covers Growing Pains, Regulatory Caution, Guiding Principles and more. -- Read More

Librarians in the 21st Century was created by a class of graduate students in the Master of Library Science program in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York.

Their assignment was to create an information resource for the World Wide Web that explored the nature of librarianship at the opening of the 21st Century, looking at the current state of the profession and some directions in which it is likely to evolve.

The students, spread out geographically over the country, created the site through electronic collaboration, without meeting face-to-face.

The site itself embodies both the traditional and the new in library and information science, exhibiting students\' skills in selecting, summarizing and presenting print and electronic information in useful ways, all in an electronic format.

The updates for this week include e-books, Detroit Library reopens, librarian gets fired, Internet vouchers, libraries as social centers, and filibustering. Happy Columbus Day!! -- Read More

The complaint that there is no context to validate the credibility of what we find online is creating an opportunity for a new breed of \"context providers.\" Two of them are profiled in this article on Traffick - a look at SiteSherpa and Project Napa. -- Read More

Charles Levendosky has written an excellent piece on censorship.

The campaign season often gives rise to dumb ideas. Weeks ago, the
FBI
released statistics showing that youth and school violence is at its
lowest level in more than a decade. Yet, members of Congress chose
this
month to blame the film and television industries for rising teen
violence.

The message to Hollywood: Get rid of the violence on your own, or
we\'ll
pass legislation that does it for you. The political chorus was
joined
by Democratic candidate for president Al Gore, his running mate,
Joseph
Lieberman, and Lynne Cheney, wife of Republican vice presidential
nominee Dick Cheney.

Politicians don\'t believe the American people can find the off button
on
their television sets.

There is pleanty more, be sure to read on... -- Read More

Wired has a Story on the company Gemstar-TV Guide International, which licenses the technology for e-books to Thomson Mulitmedia, appling to trademark the stand-alone word \"EBOOK\" as well as the name \"Gemstar EBOOK\". I think I\'ll trademark the word book.

\"The term e-book has a generic meaning in the industry and to the general public, said trademark lawyer Laura Hein of the Minneapolis law firm Gray Plant Mooty. She said a fundamental principle of trademark law is that in order to qualify, the word one chooses needs to identify the source of the product or the services rather than the product or the service itself. \"

Washingtonpost.com is one of the places with the Story on the big gift to the LOC. Nice guy John Kluge is giving $60 million To The Library of Congress.
The donation will establish the John W. Kluge Center for scholars and a $1 million annual prize for lifetime achievement in scholarly endeavors.

\"We must do more to bridge existing information gaps between academia and government,\" Rep. Bill Thomas said yesterday. \"Mr. Kluge\'s generous gift to the Library of Congress will help us do just that.\"

Knowledge Management Mag has an Article that caught my eye because of the opening line. \"Lessons from library science and architecture inform today\'s Web designs\". They talk with Louis Rosenfeld, president of Argus Associates [He\'s got an MLS] about information architecture and all sorts of cool tredny stuff.

\"Rosenfeld...\"We could see that the information technology revolution was going to create some problems,\" he recalls of the early days of the discipline. \"We saw an opportunity to do the kinds of things that librarians had been doing for centuries in ways to make them work in the new digital world.\"

So it turns out librarians are still usefull, but now we can be called \"Information Architects\", that has a nice ring to it. Looking for a new job?

The Industry Standard has some rather interesting Observations on the Frankfurt e-book awards. They say the books are available in digital format, BUT most of titles first gained attention as print books, and easily obtained by walking into a bookstore [or a library]. The finalists for the award are listed Here.

\"Microsoft paid for these awards, and it\'s pretty obvious they rely on big publishers to provide content for MS Reader,\" says Connie Foster, who runs the e-publisher Ebooksonthe.net in Bar Harbor, Maine. \"There was never any intention of awarding the independent publishers. This was just one big marketing ploy.\"

The Digital Divide Network is beginning the
groundwork to develop a searchable, national
database of public Internet
access points and other local digital divide initiatives.
Users will be able
to input their location and find out what\'s going on in
their community
regarding the digital divide. We\'ve partnered with a
range of national
organizations and government entities, including the
American Library
Association, the US Departments of Education and
Commerce, HUD, PowerUp, and
other institutions to gather the latest information on the
types of digital
divide initiatives available in each community across
the US.

digitaldividenetwork.org/database-form.adp

There is more... -- Read More