LISNews: Librarian News

The Boston Globe has a report on a program, called CPHack, that will let any Cyber Patrol user decipher the list and that also deciphers the main password for Cyber Patrol. Anybody with this password can turn off Cyber Patrol, thus defeating the purpose of the program. Slashdot has a great story on this issue too. Now Mattel attorneys are bulk-emailing subpoenas even to people who linked to the cphack code! -- Read More

The Roanoke Times Has this nice story on how well the
Chesapeake Public Library System is doing.

\"Last year,
an article in the magazine American Libraries ranked the
Chesapeake system seventh best in the nation among libraries
serving a population between 100,000 and 250,000.
    On the local level, 99.4 percent of Chesapeake\'s
residents approve of their library service, the highest mark
earned by any branch of the city\'s government. -- Read More

Michigan Live has This Story on Gary Glenn and his speach for the Holland Area Family Association\'s annual spring breakfast at Hope College\'s Maas Center. The breakfast typically focuses on anti-pornography issues.

\"There is no doubt in my mind there will be filters on the computers at Herrick District Library and every other library in the state,\" Glenn, president of the American Family Association of Michigan, told a Holland audience Saturday.\" -- Read More

A story at APBNews.com has some ways to help battle Plagiarism as it becomes more and more popular.

\"The Glatt Plagiarism Screening Program replaces every fifth word in a suspect paper with a standard size blank and asks the student to replace the missing words. The number of correct responses, the amount of time it takes to complete the task and other factors are considered in assessing the final \"plagiarism probability score.\" -- Read More

Thomas J. Hennen Jr. writes \"Three things have made the news lately that brought parts of the web to a halt:
the hacker attacks on Yahoo,
Brittanica\'s launch as a free online encyclopedia,
and Stephen King\'s e-book \"Riding the Dollar - oops I mean- Bullet.\"

Isn\'t it nice, in a way, that two of the three were book related?

But I have a serious concern! :-)

What will happen to collectors? How does one get a first edition of an e-book? King may have missed an historic chance here! Why didn\'t he and the publishers issue a first edition for e-book collectors? -- Read More

Barb O writes \"I would like feedback from those \"in the field\" regarding if there are set policies for restriction of \'R\' rated videos in place, how long have they been in place and are they working? \"

A few weeks back we had a few stories on this topic from MA and PA, check them out, and let Barb know what you think. You can get Links to the stories by clicking below. Is 13 too young to view \'R\' rated videos from the library? Is it our job to decide what children watch? What Would The Librarian Do? -- Read More

The
Salt Lake City Tribune is reporting that the declined to
set aside $1 million for state college and university
libraries, so some colleges are in a pinch for funds.

\"The schools had hoped the Legislature would earmark
funds to bolster their holdings and keep pace with journal
costs, following up on $1 million it provided for that
purpose last year. The money was to be divided among the
state\'s nine public institutions. But this year\'s request
was ignored.
    And now schools are grappling with the loss of
anticipated funding. -- Read More

Dan Chudnov over at OSS4Lib.org has written an excellent article for those not familiar with what open source projects, and how they can be used in libraries.

The biggest news in the software industry in recent months is open source. Every week in the technology news we can read about IBM or Oracle or Netscape or Corel announcing plans to release flagship products as open source or a version of these products that runs on an open source operating system such as Linux. In its defense against the Department of Justice, Microsoft has pointed to Linux and its growing market share as evidence that Microsoft cannot exert unfair monopoly power over the software industry. Dozens of new open source products along with regular news of upgrades, bug fixes, and innovative new features for these products are announced every day at web sites followed by thousands. -- Read More

Canadian Poetry Archive now available!

The Canadian Poetry Archive features some 1,000 poems, dating from 1826 to 1925, by more than 100 early English- and French-language Canadian poets.
The database also includes biographies of some of this period\'s more prominent poets, including Pauline Johnson, Archibald Lampman, Susanna Moodie, Émile Nelligan, Charles G.D. Roberts and Duncan Campbell Scott.

\"The richness and diversity of the poetry represented in our Canadian Poetry Archive remind us that Canada has a long and distinguished literary tradition,\" said National Librarian Roch Carrier.
The Canadian Poetry Archive can be found on the Internet at:
The National Library of Canada

Edweek.org has a report on an interesting study done that has shown a correlation between appropriate and sufficient library collections and qualified library personnel an performance on standardized tests.

\"

The reports conclude that test scores increase as school librarians spend more time collaborating with and providing training to teachers, providing input into curricula, and managing information technology for the school.

The full results will be reported in next month\'s School Library Journal.\' -- Read More

Andover, NH (Not MA) is a town with two libraries, and TheConcord Monitor has an interesting
story on the goings on in this small town.

\". This is
a true tale of two libraries, after all. And truth, as it
turns out, is stranger and sweeter than fiction. So bring on
the happy ending.
It has all the makings of a best seller: a small-town drama
twined with courtroom suspense, a plot crammed with history
and mystery, a quirky little subplot sketching life in this
poetically named setting, a cast of characters that includes
good guys and good guys and . . -- Read More

Owed an estimated $160,700 in books and fines, this library intends to collect. Read this story from the Greensboro News & Record.

The well-worn library copy of \"War and Peace\" shoved underneath the bed with the dust bunnies could cost you some percentage points on your next loan.

Nearly one year after the High Point Public Library turned its truant members over to a professional collection agency, more than 2,200 people have faced paying the fines or putting a seven-year blemish on their credit reports, according to the library\'s latest report released at its monthly Board of Trustees meeting Wednesday. -- Read More

Read this story from the Greenville News.

A Greenville County Library board with six new members aboard opened the possibility of filtering the Internet Wednesday by sending the controversial issue for a committee revamp.

\"I think site-oriented filtering might be the answer,\" said operations committee chairman Doug Churdar, a new member who said he will try to craft an Internet policy for board consideration within two months. Site filtering is a method of policing in which a filter blocks entire Web sites based on content rather than certain key words. -- Read More

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