LISNews: Librarian News

Jacksonville.com has this article about a library that has doubled its overdue fines from a nickel to a dime. Yeah, that will make them bring back the materials on time.
\"Clay County libraries are cracking down on delinquent book-returners. From a nickel to a dime per day late, the overdue book fine doubled on June 1.\" -- Read More

ZDNet has a very interesting Story on the coming E-Book revolution. They are worried about piracy as more books become digitized. Of course some folks already have a solution. DOCSTER should be useful in that it has copywrite concerns built in! Imagine all the researchers you know, with a new bibliographic management tool that combined file storage with a napster-like communications protocol -- docster. Be sure to check out OSS4LIB.org for more on this. Publishing executives are worried about the future.

\"We don\'t want to be in a reactive mode the way the recording industry is,\" says Peter Jovanovich, former chairman of the Association of American Publishers and chief executive of Pearson PLC\'s Pearson Education unit.\"

More on Docster... -- Read More

Pretty much every new site on the web is carrying a story on COPPA being unanimously ruled unconstitutional. A three-judge panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled The Child Online Protection Act violated the First Amendment right to free speech. Appeals court Judge Leonard Garth said \"Sometimes we must make decisions that we do not like, we make them because they are right, right in the sense that the law and the Constitution, as we see them, compel the result.\"

Here are the Friday updates for this week. Topics include updating libraries, magic highlighters, database copying, Books for the visually impaired, computers (not books) focus of library update, Blondie honored by LOC. Enjoy! -- Read More

Michigan Live has this article on another staff theft at a library. This time, it was via an unauthorized bonus. Yeah, when I want to steal money, libraries definitly come to mind first.\"When Don Dely gave himself an unauthorized bonus of $4,876 last August, it took Ann Arbor District Library administrators three months to discover the misuse of public funds.\" -- Read More

A colleague pointed this site out to me today. It\'s called mousercise and it trains people how to use a mouse. Credit is due to Chris Rippel from the Central Kansas Library System.

Cliff Urr writes \"The Napster model for distributing music is radically extended by Freenet by using a decentralized distribution network for distributing information. Check it out here (also has software to set up you machine as a distribution node):

http://freenet.sourceforge.net/ \"

Freenet is an interesting concept that I believe was discussed on OSS4Lib (who is also sponsering a speech by Tim O\'Reilly at ALA next month). It\'s required reading for all web-heads. -- Read More

Someone suggested this sad Story from In_Forum.com on the terrible flooding up in ND. There was a big flood, and fire that just caused all sorts of trouble in the library. Quite sad really.

“It’ll be years before we’re back to normal,” library director Richard Bovard said. -- Read More

R Hadden Writes :

\"Risk Management of Digital Information: A File Format Investigation.\" by Gregory W. Lawrence et al. It is impossible today to guarantee the longevity and legibility of digital information for even one human generation. The choices are: to physically preserve the format, to emulate the data, or to migrate the digital data. All these choices have risks.

You can see the PDF file at Clir.org -- Read More

R Hadden Writes : Librarians and researchers have come together to protest high prices for journals at the website, \"Create Change\" at: The ARL

CREATE CHANGE is sponsored by the Association of Research libraries, the Association of College and Research Libraries (a division of the American Library Association), and SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). Funding for this project has been provided by the three organizations and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. -- Read More

Newsday has this article on a study by the National Science Foundation which states that 54% of homes now have computers.\"If you don\'t have a computer in your home, you\'re in the minority nationally, a federal poll has found. For the first time, more than half of American adults now have home computers, according to a National Science Foundation survey. And just under half are using their computers to go online.\" -- Read More

Everyone\'s favorite comic strip is getting an medal. Here is an Article just telling everyone that Charles Schulz will get the medal he always wanted.

\"President Bill Clinton signed a bill Tuesday giving the creator of the \"Peanuts\" comic strip the Congressional Gold Medal, the country\'s highest civilian honor and the one thing that Schulz -- a World War II veteran -- had desired.\"  -- Read More

CNN.com has the exciting news about Harry Potter coming soon with the fourth book. Here is an Article telling you how some of the bookstores are going to market the book.

\"Many merchants are staying open until the early morning hours of July 8, when the as-yet untitled book is released. Others are organizing Harry Potter-themed parties with magic shows and live owls. Internet retail giant Amazon.com, meanwhile, is countering by promising FedEx quick delivery for up to 250,000 online shoppers.\"  -- Read More

Have our job descriptions changed as a result of new technologies? I would agree with most who say that they have, as we need to know about online resources, evaluating those resources, navigating the web, and training our customers in their use. However, I think that this change should not uproot the basic foundations of present day librarianship, giving the customers what they want with the best possible service... -- Read More

Should public libraries charge for services to not district residents? According to this article from Michican Live, one library district in Michigan may not have a choice.
\"If the county system closes, Grand Rapids most likely would become inundated. And possibly, those new users would deprive city residents, who pay a 2.15-mil tax, use of a large number of materials.\" -- Read More

Do librarians wear a sign that says \"harass me,
stereotype, me, annoy me?\" Here are just a few of the
comments I have heard in my short librarian career so
far. The questions are real but my replies are not.

Are you going to a library conference because a Dewey
Decimal number was changed?
My reply was do you know the dewey number for what I
think you are..uh, ignorant.

Do you have to go to school to be a librarian?
No, did you go to school for journalism to be able to ask
me a fascinating question like that because inquiring
minds want to know. -- Read More

Less popular than NFL Europe, much less accurate than Tiger Woods, and even more unfair than Judge Judy: it\'s my showdown between Yahoo! and ODP. -- Read More

R Hannden writes : \"An old work by Archimedes is
now a new work. An unique copy of a long-lost treatise
on mathematics by Archimedes has been discovered.
The 10th century manuscript, entitled \"Method,\" had
been erased and used as a prayer book for 12th
century monks, who preserved the work through the
centuries until it was re-discovered in 1881, then lost
again until only recently. Read the strange and
fascinating history of this curious and unique book in
the article by Reviel Netz, \"The Origins of Mathematical
Physics: New Light on an Old Question.\" Physics
Today, volume 53, number 6, pages 32-37, or available
online at: aip.org

The Star Tribune has this scary article about a study that concluded that 1 in 5 children who are online get solicited for cybersex...3% of which happens in libraries.
\"The congressional study, the first scientific examination of risks to children online, also found that 1 in 4 children encountered pornographic pictures while researching homework topics or checking their e-mail. Of the 1,500 children, ages 10 to 17, surveyed in the study, teenage girls were most likely to be victims of sexual approaches, while teenage boys were most likely to accidentally come across porn\" -- Read More

This Story from Wired tells about a filterware product that could supposedly tell the difference between a naughty picture, and one that wasn\'t. The company, called Exotrope Inc., introduced its \"BAIR\" program last year, to much fanfare, but Wired ran some tests, and it turns out the saftware does not perform as advertised.

\"I agree with you. There\'s something wrong,\" says Dave Epler, Exotrope operations manager. \"That\'s not the way our image server is supposed to be working.\" -- Read More