LISNews: Librarian News

Bob Cox suggested this.The Register has a spooky Story on long dead authors leaving comments on their books.

\"Einstein has revealed that he got it wrong about quantum mechanics and God does play with dice. And Fyodor Dostoyevskywrites that he still likes his work even though he\'s dead.\"

They call them \"an amusing fake author posting\", I think they are real! The dead speak to us through the web. -- Read More

Simon & Schuster has announced that they are going to be offering E-books this fall. Read the article from Mercury Center.\"Consumers will be able to download the electronic books, or e-books, at the Web sites of online retailers such as Barnesandnoble.com. They can read the books on their computer screens using Microsoft Reader or Glassbook software, on an eBook or SoftBook device, or on personal digital assistants.\" -- Read More

A woman in Virginia brought her three children into a library, left them there, and did not return. The article is provided by The Atlanta-Journal Constitution.
\"She just dropped them off and walked away,\" Carey said. \"When we arrested her, she didn\'t even ask about the children. She didn\'t care about their whereabouts or their health. She wasn\'t remorseful.\" -- Read More

Greetings Lisnewsteers. Thrice weekly the Studio B Buzz goes out from the folks at Studio B (including moi) and Blake\'s been kind enough to give me permission to post some of the highlights here. So for news on a new reading program from B&N, new reading devices from Thomson, and the Lightning Source deal with Versaware, read on... -- Read More

Knowledge Management Magazine has a nice Interview with Brook Manville to discuss his views on how knowledge and learning management fit into today\'s quickly evolving, Internet-enabled business environment. You might learn a thing or two from this Knowledge Management stuff

\"What do you see in the future of Web-based learning?
The future will be about creating a mix of different kinds of learning opportunities and events, which would include collaborative spaces with networks of people or with instructors or moderators. -- Read More

Peacefire.org has a neat Little Trick that allows a user to get around filtering programs, another simple trick that renders filters useless.

Found this over on Slashdot.

Someone sent in a cnn.com Story on \"The Plant\". It seems some readers have been paying extra money -- in $2, $10 and even $20 -- to make up for less honorable readers who downloaded the files without paying. King won\'t finish the book without enough folks paying, so the fans hope to tip the scales.

\"As it is, some 76 percent of readers are volunteering to pay the $1 King is asking for each copy -- just above the amount King says he wants for the project to continue -- so the project appears set to continue for now.\"

A couple of strike updates:
Teamsters back library workers
Teamsters will march in downtown Canton today in support of striking library workers.
The Solidarity March, as it’s being called, is to begin at 2 p.m. at the Hilton on Market Avenue S.
Between 300 and 350 people are expected, said Paul Bair, city safety director.

Teachers union tells students to avoid librarySam Dorto, president of the 1,000-member Canton Professional Educators Association, said he hopes teachers will forgo giving library-based assignments while District 925 of the Service Employees International Union is on strike.“The library is a tremendous resource, but we won’t put the kids in a position where they have to cross the picket line.”Dorto said he is concerned about the kind of service that nonunion library workers will provide to students. He also questioned whether they would be safe, citing the library’s decision to hire security guards from Troy, Mich.-based Huffmaster Cos.

Never heard of Daniel Radcliffe? Well, you can now call him Harry Potter. Daniel Radcliffe, an 11-year-old British boy has been chosen by Warner Bros to play Harry in the upcoming movie. There will be other people in the movie, but no one seems to care. Bookwire has the Full Story. -- Read More

“IT IS impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist, while such an instrument has been created for the exchange of thought between all the nations of the earth.” Think that was written about the internet? Think again. The Economist has an interesting Story on the never ending hype surrounding the internet.

\"The extent to which the Internet will transform other fields of human endeavour, however, is less certain. Even when everyone on the planet has been connected to the Internet, there will still be wars, and pollution, and inequality. \" -- Read More

Wired has a Story that scares the hell out of me. In an unprecedented expansion of traditional copyright law, it is no longer merely illegal to distribute a potentially infringing computer program -- but now even linking to someone else\'s copy could be verboten. You can now break the law by linking to DeCSS. Related Case.

\"I think that Judge Kaplan does not know his head from his ass,\" says Adrian Bacon, owner of Linux News Online. \"Outlawing a site from linking to another site that has DeCSS is just plain wrong.\" -- Read More

Slashdot has a cool Article on Open Source software for maintaining a small to medium sized library
card-catalog. Someone asked for, and got, many suggestions.

\" It seems all the tools are available: a perl module for working with MARC records,
several for working with Z39.50 and XML, and even a web site apparently devoted to nearly this exact
topic. An actual, working, catalog, however, seems to be missing. Is this something that would be valuable?
I, for one, have nearly 5k volumes in my collection, and they\'re begging for some discipline.\"

Be sure to check out oss4lib.org is this kind of thing interests you. Open Source = Free

Cantronrep.com continues the strike coverage. The Latest Story is more bad news, the Federal mediator who thought he could resolve strike last week, has canceled his proposed talks and adopted a \"wait-and-see attitude\". The State Employment Relations Board has scheduled a meeting for Wednesday.

\"“I thought there was flexibility enough to (resolve the strike), but when this happened, everybody took a step back,” Connelly said Monday.\"

Anyone from Stark County have anything to add? -- Read More

Bob Cox suggested this. courier-journal.com has a Nice Story on Thomas Fountain Blue Sr., the first librarian of the old Western Colored branch of the Louisville Free Public Library in 1905, he was the only black librarian in the country at a library with an all-black staff.

\"EDUCATION WAS everything to him,\" Hutchins said. \"It was always most important.\" The free presentation is one of five programs planned this fall at branch libraries. The programs are designed to preview The Encyclopedia of Louisville, which the University Press of Kentucky plans to publish in October. -- Read More

The Boston Herald has an interesting Archives Story. It seems that Brandeis and Clark universities are afraid of the writings and memorabilia of Abbie Hoffman. Instead they will be kept at the University of Connecticut, which has no connection to the late Chicago Sevenster.

``Good Lord, why didn\'t they give it to Brandeis?\'\' asked Boston University professor Joseph Boskin, who lectures on the counterculture and regards Hoffman as a hero. ``They (probably) didn\'t want to be associated with Abbie Hoffman. Maybe his ethics offended them. What other reason might there be?\'\' -- Read More

The remains of Native Americans are going back into the ground after a stint on display at a public library. Good move. Read the story from the Foster\'s Daily Democrat.\"The ceremony took place when members of the New Hampshire Intertribal Native American Council and representatives from the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Association came to prepare the remains for burial in an undisclosed, sacred location. They performed part of the ceremony in the park behind the Gale Memorial Library.\" -- Read More

Here is an excerpt from the hard-to-categorize (here) A Political Economy of Librarianship?\" by William Birdsall, in the new issue of Hermès: Revue Critique:

No profession concerned with the administration of a public institution, such as the library, can ignore the need to pursue serious research into the politico-economic sphere of public policy. Understanding the enduring link between economics and politics is crucial to understanding the current political realm of librarianship. Achieving this understanding is the reason for the need to develop a political economy of librarianship. Currently, the primary attention librarians give to politics and economics is political advocacy for the purpose of generating enhanced funding of libraries. Such advocacy is admittedly very important and librarians have become increasingly sophisticated at doing it. However, I assert that librarians need to devote more effort researching the political and economic dynamics that define the past and current environment of libraries. Libraries are the creation and instrument of public policy derived from political processes. Understanding these processes includes appreciating the connection between the polity and the economy. This connection between the polity and economy defines the political realm of the library and the basis for this paper’s claim that there is a need to develop a political economy of librarianship.

News-Record.com has a rather funny
Story on the stuff found in book
returns, and the books themselves. We ran a story
awhile back on a cat found in a book return.

\"One
patron kept his place marked with a condom. Family
photos are a favorite, tucked inside books that often
weren\'t checked out from the High Point Library in the
first place.

\"It\'s wild,\" Akoje said. \"We get a whole lot of stuff back
here.\"

What kind of stuff have you found
in the return, or left in a book? -- Read More

R Hadden Writes: Information on how the Amish
are served by a library bookmobile in
Middlefield, Ohio, is provided by the Associated Press
article in an
article
published in the Canton
Repository.
You may also want to read other articles and
opinions in this newspaper about the current strike by
employees of the local public library.

Does anyone have any updates on the strike? -- Read More

The NY Times has a Story on plans from Houghton Mifflin, Merriam-Webster and Microsoft, and Oxford University Press (The OED Folks) to sell electronic versions of their dictionaries, in one form or another.

\"Stifled for years by low margins and flat sales, publishers are salivating over digital licensing as a new source of revenue growth and promoting new features like audible pronunciations. But word scholars worry that the new pressures of the online market may end up favoring well-connected or well-positioned dictionaries -- some sniffingly cite Microsoft\'s Encarta -- over more authoritative lexicons. \" -- Read More