LISNews: Librarian News

The Standard has a great round up on the battle between Mattel and two hackers, Eddy Jansson of Sweden and Matthew Skala of Canada who wrote CPHack, a program that lets people see a list of the sites that Cyber Patrol blocks. This is a very important case, it has issues in The DMCA, the freedom to link, copyright law, the First Amendment, and other info science interests.

\"The argument rests upon the anticircumvention provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA prohibits trafficking in devices whose primary purpose is to circumvent a technology meant to protect copyrighted works. CPHack would constitute such a device; mirroring it, as the law has been interpreted, would constitute a violation of the DMCA. So Mattel could prevail against distributors of CPHack whether or not the program itself was a violation of Mattel\'s copyright.\" -- Read More

\"The Post Gazette in Florida has this on a naughty librarian.

Dorothy \"Dot\" Corbett pleaded guilty yesterday to stealing more than $51,000 from the Bethel Park Library where she had been the director.
Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Kathleen A. Durkin ordered Corbett to make restitution to the library, but she already paid back the money in two payments last year.
Corbett disappeared in February 1999. She fled to Jacksonville, Fla., prompting an investigation that discovered more than $37,000 was missing from two of the library\'s accounts. -- Read More

Sick of reading stories about how teens use the net to cheat, build bombs, and generally do bad things? Well check out this positive story from
The State.com.

\"\"It\'s going to be a revolution,\" Stephen says. \"It\'s going to come to the point where you won\'t even have to leave your house to go to work, because you don\'t need to. Everything you can do, you can do it on the computer.\" -- Read More

Six of the world\'s leading educational and cultural institutions announced today that they will create Fathom, a new company formed to launch the premier site for knowledge and education on the web. Fathom will present the best public content and courses of universities, libraries, and museums on a wide variety of professional, cultural, and academic subjects. The consortium\'s website, Fathom.com, will introduce the first home for authenticated knowledge on the Internet, serving a worldwide audience of business and individual users.

Check out Fathom.com. -- Read More

Laura Miller at Salon has an extensive review of the Rocket E-Book. She does a review worth Reading

\"Will I keep this e-book or not? I still haven\'t decided. Over the past two weeks it has alternately exasperated and enchanted me, and in the end it may be the way that it makes Salon\'s content so much more easily accessible to me that decides the matter.\" -- Read More

The Chronicle of Higher
Education has a most interesting
Article and related Dis
cussion on how library schools are making way for
specialties that train students for high-tech careers in which skills
at handling and organizing vast amounts of information are in
great demand.

\"Today, students seeking master\'s
degrees in information at Michigan represent more than 50
majors, and only about a third of the program\'s graduates will
become traditional librarians. A growing number of them are
preparing for jobs with newfangled titles like information architect
and intelligence manager.\" -- Read More

The Globe and Mail, To mark International Children\'s Book Day, asked celebrated author Tim Wynne-Jones
for tips on feeding the reading gene.

\"

How do you put words into your children\'s blood? Talk to them. Read to them. Not just their books but delightful passages from yours, from magazines, from the newspaper. Keep reading to kids until they close the door on you. Then whisper through the key-hole that sprag isn\'t really an adjective, it\'s a chock or a steel bar used to prevent a car from running backwards on an incline, but it could describe a mountain bike if you wanted it to. Take every opportunity to lower the bucket into the well. Be the well. Give your kid an education mazuma can\'t buy. \" -- Read More

MSNBC has an interseting write up on a librarian from OK.

“I knew what I wanted to do when I graduated from Braggs High School,” Donelson said. “At Braggs, our library was a tiny little room and I’d already gone through all the books before I graduated. We had our 30th reunion recently, and no one was surprised at what I went into. The karate part is what they found a little difficult to believe. I didn’t know if I was in the right class. They were all talking grandchildren and I was talking about my karate class.” -- Read More

The Chicago Tribune
has a nice report on E-Books, past, present and future.

\"
When Jim Sachs took a few magazines for a 12-hour airplane ride back from Hong Kong in the fall of 1995, he had no idea that his folly would spawn an entire industry. After reading through the magazines, he faced a long flight with nothing to do but stare at the seatback in front of him.

Sachs, then general manager of the technology group at Hasbro Inc., said he would have needed to fill an entire carry-on bag with books to have enough reading material for the flight. If all the books were digitized and stored on his laptop computer, he thought, how much easier would that be than hauling around a small library?

Too bad reading on a laptop wasn\'t easier.

-- Read More

Amnesty International released a report today entitled \"Cuba: Short Term Detention and Harassment of Dissidents.\" The 24-page report notes that \"freedom of expression, association and assembly are severely limited in law and in practice\" for Cuban citizens. \"Those who attempt to express views, organize meetings or form organizations that conflict with government policy are frequently subjected to punitive measures.\" Independent librarians are listed among the groups of Cuban citizens whom Amnesty says have been subject to intensified repression in recent months. -- Read More

The Consortium for public library networking EARL\'s New Library Ideas Bank is our forum for discussion and information about the development of New Library content. On these pages you will find a mini-gateway of useful links to help you with the whole process of electronic content creation, an Ideas Xchange space where you can share your thoughts and some terrific examples that will inspire you
Check out The Ideabank Web Site for more. -- Read More

Publishersweekly has an intersting story on E-Boos.With more than 130 of its titles available as downloadable electronic editions, St. Martin\'s Press plans to release many more of its titles simultaneously in print and electronic editions. This could be the new standard for publishers. They are already saying Cryptography Is an Urgent Need. -- Read More

news.excite.com carried a story on
Hewlett-Packard and the MIT Libraries. They announced a $1.8 million joint project to build a digital archive at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that could serve as a model for other universities.
The archive will be capable of holding the approximately 10,000 articles produced by MIT authors annually, including a large amount of multimedia content. -- Read More

Kenjin was launched officially this week. They claim \"Autonomy Kenjin is the first Internet information service that delivers the right information to you exactly when you need it – no matter where it happens to be. From the Web, from your hard drive or from people who know.\"It works like a search engine, but the program is on your computer. They make it sound like it\'ll kill off Yahoo. I\'ll be downloading and trying it soon. -- Read More

I\'m not sure what to make of this. It scares me, and at the same time, it could be used for good, more than evil.

\"Digimarc, a company previously involved with watermarking technologies, has developed an extremely intriguing application for the PC camera which enables direct print-to-web advertising. The technology, dubbed MediaBridge, incorporates the PC camera, the Internet and print media into one streamlined advertising process. ... the MediaBridge technology is an important example of how PC cameras can be used outside of the traditional video mail, web posting and videoconferencing applications.\"

This allows you to put ads into a book that appear on a computer screen, \"Paper as Portal\" they call it.Check it out and let us know what you think! -- Read More

Riding the Bullet\" Stephen King\'s new E-Book has been released for free on the Internet. The book widely available for a download-only (the file’s encryption disabled printing) fee of $2.50 through many online booksellers, or free from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.com, was a huge success, overloading many of the servers it was on when it was released. Unknown parties cracked the file’s copyright protections and released PDF versions that were available on many Web sites. Currents.net has more on this story

-- Read More

The highly anticipated film adaptation of \"Harry Potter\" will be directed by Chris Columbus, Warner Bros. Pictures announced Tuesday.

You may remember him from such films as Bicentennial Man, Stepmom, Nine Months, Mrs. Doubtfire, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, Only the Lonely, Home Alone Heartbreak Hotel, Adventures in Babysitting

The guys who wrote the CP Hack program that showed how to bypass Cyber Patrol, the \"cphack\" program also discloses the list of sites the product blocks users from viewing.

Earlier this month, the company sued and Judge Edward Harrington issued a preliminary court order ordering a halt to the distribution of the program.

The judge also blocked distribution of the software by \"those persons in active concert or participation with them.\" Microsystems lawyers said the order extended to any Web sites that \"mirrored\" -- or made copies available -- of the \"cphack\" software.

So what will happen with the program? It was originally released under the GPL, so technically it should be alive and well. -- Read More

A couple of stories are running in the Denverpost on the Columbine High School Library.

Story 1Construction is set to start May 29 on the new Columbine High library, with many of the contractors - including those working on the new Denver Broncos stadium - donating their services to help offset the $3.1 million cost.

Story 2A group of average people has organized a not-so-average event to help raise some of the $3.1 million needed to build a new library for Columbine High School.

Donations can be sent to HOPE Columbine Atrium and Library Fund, c/o The Denver Foundation, P.O. Box 24035, Denver 80224. Make checks payable to HOPE. -- Read More

The Las Vegas Review-Journal has a report on troubling mold in the library at UNLV.

\"UNLV\'s troubled Lied Library has suffered another setback with the discovery of dangerous molds growing in the unfinished building.
Workers this week are trying to get rid of moldy materials that otherwise would pose a threat to the students, librarians and books that this summer are expected to fill the $53 million facility. \" -- Read More