LISNews: Librarian News

Norma Bruce Sent in her Updated presentation to the Veterinary Medical Librarians, from May 1998. You can read the entire presentation at: www.lib.ohio-state.edu/vetweb/role.html

When I read our literature, I wonder if we are at a crossroads, a crisis, a transition or a transformation. We are called everything from cybrarians, to resource managers, to intelligence professionals to dodo birds and unemployed. (Hathorn 1997)

However, let me assure you--I am a librarian. I work in a library at The Ohio State University which supports the teaching, research and service needs of the College of Veterinary Medicine independent of the format, medium or container in which information resides. -- Read More

Read this story from the Gazzette Online.

A Hiawatha couple is asking the Cedar Rapids school district to withdraw the popular Harry Potter books from school libraries.

Brad and Brenda Birdnow will present their request to remove \"Harry Potter and the Sorcerer\'s Stone\" to the district\'s PTA Reconsideration Committee at 4:15 p.m. today at the Educational Service Center, 346 Second Ave. SW.

Brad Birdnow said he and his wife object to the way the book romantically portrays witches, warlocks, wizards, goblins and evil sorcerers.

Read this article from Excite News about this unique form of protest . It would be interesting to get some responses to this article. Does this protest infringe on the right to access information? How about its impact on library staff?

Each day University students, faculty and staff check out about 300 books from the Shapiro Undergraduate Library. But Thursday a group of graduate students borrowed nearly 3,000 books in less than three hours.

The 50 students checked out the books to protest how the University administration handled the conflict between the Students of Color Coalition and the senior honor society
Michigamua. -- Read More

Someone sent in this story from The Journal of Mundane Behavior that \"considers a practical example of practical conduct\", mainly, people searching in the library. It\'s a rather in-depth look at, well, the mundane behaviors that people go through when seraching in the library.

\"In observing the practical accomplishment of searching in the library it is manifestly and unquestionably clear that space and place do not simply \'contain\' activities, as it were, but are irredeemably implicated in the organisation and accomplishment of activities, and implicated in some rather interesting and largely ignored ways. \" -- Read More

Richard M. Smith has written an excellent piece on what companies can learn about you from banner ads. He writes:

I have been tracking over the last couple of months, what information is being sent from my own computer to DoubleClick ad servers. I chose to focus on DoubleClick because they are largest provider of banner ads
on the Internet. Their servers currently send out more than a billion banner ads every day according to a recent company press release.
I used a packet sniffer to do
the monitoring. I found more than a dozen examples from different Web sites of information being transmitted to DoubleClick that most people who consider rather
sensitive. All this information can be tied to me, because all transmissions to the DoubleClick ad servers also include the same unique ID number in a DoubleClick
cookie. I found both personally identifiable information and transactional data being sent to DoubleClick servers.

Personal data I saw being sent to DoubleClick servers included:

My Email address
My full name
My mailing address (street, city, state, and Zip code)
My phone number

Read on, it\'s scary... -- Read More

Dan Chudnov writes \"The Open Source Systems for Libraries (oss4lib) site has a new home at www.oss4lib.org.
oss4lib was started by librarians at the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale University in February 1999; within a year over 30 projects have been listed there. The new site is hosted by sourceforge.net and not a minute too soon: this article in Linux Journal, while mixing its issues rather significantly, points to oss4lib amongst many ongoing initiatives to move education toward open computing. \"

If you\'re not familiar with open sorce projects you should look into them, you\'re looking at one now. Be sure to check out OSS4lib for great software.

DigitalMass has a very interesting acticle on filtering. They focus on filtering for the workplace, but this technology could easily be applied to a library. This technology would apparently give the librarians more control over what is blocked. This may, of course, put the librarian in the position of censor, but it\'s worth a read.

\"eSniff sells a box that plugs into the company\'s network. It silently monitors all traffic and flags instances of potential problem activity, saving copies on a secured disk.\" -- Read More

This is London has this story on a 73 year old man in England, borrowed The Bulpington Of Blup by HG Wells from Clapton library in August 1939, and just returned it this week, the funny thing is he paid his fine!
At least he wasn\'t Arrested!

\"He noticed on the flyleaf that the fine for overdue books in 1939 had been a penny (1d) a week. He calculated he had kept the book for 3,145 weeks, which he converted to £13.25, before sending back the book with a cheque for the same amount. \" -- Read More

You think you\'re having a bad day.
\"The computerized catalog system at the New York Public Library has been down since Monday, forcing users in all 85 branches to search the stacks visually and librarians to check out books by hand.\"

This story appears in the New York Times, so registration is required.

The Universal Studios Research Library has shut down. Read this story from the Record Online.

It\'s the place where Gregory Peck got the idea for his ordinary-Joe hairdo in \"To Kill a Mockingbird,\" where Alfred Hitchcock got the lowdown on flight patterns for \"The Birds,\" where George Roy Hill first glimpsed the bookie joints he wanted to depict in \"The Sting,\" and where Steven Spielberg learned about shark behavior for \"Jaws.\"

For 84 years, its voluminous clipping files -- organized by topic and crammed with photographs -- were used to design the look and feel of thousands of movies and television shows, from the cop shop in the 1950s TV series \"Dragnet\" and the rocket control panels in 1995\'s \"Apollo 13\" to the
restaurants in this year\'s Jacqueline Susann biopic, \"Isn\'t She Great.\" -- Read More

Publisher after publisher has introduced a line of historical fiction featuring admirable heroines. Read this story from the Record Online.

To the delight of publishers, girls are showing a voracious appetite for learning about their predecessors -- a pursuit that has propelled historical fiction into an unexpected big-bucks commodity.

Historical novels and biographies were once the preoccupation of a devoted but small band of readers. Now they\'re flying off bookshelves, particularly those books aimed at 7- to 14-year-old girls. -- Read More

David Ettinger writes:Below is the text of a letter to the editor of The New York Times I recently wrote which was published this past Sunday:

Whatever Happened to the Class of \'93?\" (Feb. 20) looked at how the Internet had defined the careers of Stanford graduates, turning some into quick millionaires. It described one graduate -- one of the first
employees of Yahoo who now heads its Web cataloging team -- as possibly the \"world\'s richest librarian.\"

I don\'t begrudge her her good fortune, but her situation contrasts markedly with that of thousands of dedicated professionals with library science degrees and extremely modest incomes who, like her, love what they do, but whose work is scarcely recognized by society, monetarily or
otherwise.

Washington, Feb. 20

David Ettinger is a librarian at the Gelman Library at George Washington University.

Publishersweekly.com has a nice story on National Poetry Month.

It\'s been five years since the Academy of American Poets designated April National Poetry Month, and this year\'s month-long literary celebration and marketing frenzy will feature more promotions, readings and bookstore events than ever. -- Read More

The LA Times has a rather interesting look at filtering programs. It\'s a look at programs for use at home, by parents, as a way to control what their children see.The author, Lawrence J. Magid , compares the pros and cons of several popular filters.

\"Whether you use a filtering program, be sure to talk with your kids about safety on the Internet. Remind them to never give out any personal information or arrange a face-to-face visit with anyone they encounter online. Filtering technology has its place, but it\'s no substitute for old-fashioned parenting.\" -- Read More

This weeks Time Magazine cover story is about E-Books, and how Stephen King has really changed things. King has some very interesting things to say on the subject, not the least of which is he expects to make $450,000 on the E-Book.
Check out Time.com for the entire story.

\"\"There\'s a lot of plumage here, but I wonder if the beast underneath isn\'t still pretty scrawny,\" he says, pointing out that the Net is still too slow and hard for many people to use.\" -- Read More

2 Librarians in Las Vegas have filed suit saying they were treated unfairly after they complained of a co-worker and his pornography. He was looking at porn on computers, and employees endured harassing comments and when new issues of playboy came in. There is a short story here on MSNBC

\"Executive Director Daniel Walter told News 3, “it is absolutely against library policy to download pornography. A violation of that policy is subject to discipline. We have a no-tolerance policy for harassment.”

DO they get Playboy at that library? -- Read More

Information on the XIX Brazilian Congress of Library Science and Documentation, the III Latin-American Congress of Library Science and Documentation, and the VII National Meeting of Legal Documentation and Information can be found at: www.pucrs.br/cbbd2000

The event will take place in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, from 24 to 30 September 2000, at the Convention Center of the Pontifica Universidade Catolica do Rio Grande do Sul - PUCRS.
Main Topic: Information for Citizenship.

You may have seen the story last week about the principal in OH that banned a book after someone compalined the language in the book made her uncomfortable as did \"the behavior of the characters and the referral to drugs, alcohol, and sex, etc.\" The school superintendent has now changed his mind, after the teacher using the book put up a fight, and the book is back in. You can read the story at Toledo Blade.com

\"After much careful thought, lengthy discussion, and debate, as superintendent, I am hereby overturning Principal Jeffrey L. Snook\'s decision to ban the book Hoops by Walter Dean Myers,\" Mr. Puchta said. \"In the interest of putting the students of our district first, it\'s time to put this matter behind us so the educational process can continue.\" -- Read More

It seems like everyone wants a piece of the potter action. Now a childhood friend of JK Rowling says HE was the inspiration for Harry Potter in this story from Book Magazine.

\"Speaking from his home in the English West Country on Saturday, Ian Potter, a childhood friend of author JK Rowling, said he would be annoyed by anyone who claimed that Harry Potter–the incredibly popular fictional character created by Rowling–was inspired by a Potter other than himself.\" -- Read More

In a follow up to infodude\'s great Story on amazon.com and patents, you may want to check out the exchange between Jeff Bezos and Tim o\'Rielly.

Jeff has his open letter on
Amazon.com and Tim O\'Reilly has his on oreilly.com