LISNews: Librarian News

Apparently over 40 phone calls or so to your local public library that are harassing in nature may lead to charges being filed against you, according to WOIO news in Cleveland. Further details are available from The Akron Beacon-Journal.

The fight to keep libraries open has dominated the headlines but the UK has quietly lost more than 200 branches over the past year, according to a detailed national survey.

The rate of library closures has increased, reveals the annual report from the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy: 146 branches closed between 2010 and 2011, with the number stepping up to 201 this year. The UK now has 4,265 libraries, compared with 4,612 two years ago, and the number of closures is likely to grow. Campaigners in Newcastle are currently fighting plans to close 10 out of the city's 18 libraries, with Billy Elliot playwright Lee Hall calling on the council to protect the city's heritage last month.

Wired's This Day in Tech Blog remembers Paul Otlet and his dream of organizing the world's information. Sound familiar?

"Some historians see in Otlet’s work a prototype of the World Wide Web and the hyperlink. Although unsuccessful, it was one of the first known attempts to provide a framework for connecting all recorded culture by creating flexible links that could rapidly lead researchers from one document to another — and perhaps make audible the previously unheard echoes between them."

And as the cloud grows more integral, both for businesses and people, the browser companies are engaged in a new battle to win our allegiance that will affect how we use the Internet.

It’s an echo of the so-called browser wars of the 1990s, when Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator fought for dominance on the personal computer. This time, though, the struggle is shaping up to be over which company will control the mobile world — with browsers on smartphones and tablets. Entrenched businesses are at stake. Google’s browser-based business apps, for instance, threaten Microsoft’s desktop software, and mobile Web apps threaten Apple’s App Store.

The Bedbug Bunk: How the New York Times Used Fear and Misinformation to Spread Public Library Hysteria

But Reluctant Habits has talked with many of Saint Louis’s sources and has learned that the Times article is misleading. Bedbugs are not the major threat that Saint Louis suggests they are. In fact, some of the library directors who Saint Louis spoke with have never had a bedbug epidemic at all. They were merely taking preventive measures in the wake of recent media stories.

“The odds of you picking up a bedbug from a book in a library are so low that it’s not even worth talking about,” said Potter.

The grass is always greener, and now so are two of Cornell University’s libraries.

Students from the Department of Design and Environmental Analysis have installed small lawns in the lobbies of Olin and Mann libraries, as well as Duffield Hall and the Physical Sciences Building. The grass is surrounded by potted plants and chairs and, in at least one spot, a plastic caution sign warning students to beware of snakes.
The project was intended to help students relax during one of the most stressful times of the school year.

Former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's comments about 47 percent of the population being dependent on government and about "binders full of women" have been selected as this year's best quotes.

Fred Shapiro, associate librarian at Yale Law School, has released his seventh annual list of the year's most notable quotations.

Springwise pointed the way to http://www.result.ly Instead of making computer users repeatedly search multiple sites over time to find what they want, Resultly monitors changes in results and combines them into one stream of information.

This week's program has a somewhat cheerful essay talking about cultural balkanization as seen through the lens of mid-season television show cancellations. Notice was also given that there will likely be a special dropped into the feed without warning during the week as proceedings continue at the World Conference on International Telecommunications.

Related links:

• The Register: US drops ‘net regulation bombshell, threatens WCIT exit -- Pique-propelled pacifier projectile launched at ITU
• ZDNet: WCIT-12 leak shows Russia, China, others seek to define 'government-controlled Internet'
• LISWire: Kudzu Kidz, LLC Launches a New Book, Counting and Rhyming with Friends, fun for all ages!
• Security4Lib - IT Security For Libraries
• Reuters: Internet governance talks in jeopardy as Arab states, Russia ally
• Chronicle of Higher Education: What if We Made Fewer Ph.D.'s?
• AEIdeas: November Jobs Report -- Another nasty, ‘new normal’ month for US workers

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According to Teleread, Amazon Canada now has a Kindle store.

THIS is what poverty sometimes looks like in America: parents here in Appalachian hill country pulling their children out of literacy classes. Moms and dads fear that if kids learn to read, they are less likely to qualify for a monthly check for having an intellectual disability.

Full article

Agence France-Presse via France24 reports that the Washington Post is reviewing erecting a paywall to its online edition in 2013.

Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers 2013
The gold open-access model has given rise to a great many new online publishers. Many of these publishers are corrupt and exist only to make money off the author processing charges that are billed to authors upon acceptance of their scientific manuscripts.

There are two lists below. The first includes questionable, scholarly open-access publishers. Each of these publishers has a portfolio that ranges from just a few to hundreds of individual journal titles.

The second list includes individual journals that do not publish under the platform of any publisher — they are essentially independent, questionable journals

In both cases, we recommend that researchers, scientists, and academics avoid doing business with these publishers and journals. Scholars should avoid sending article submissions to them, serving on their editorial boards or reviewing papers for them, or advertising in them. Also, tenure and promotion committees should give extra scrutiny to articles published in these journals, for many of them include instances of author misconduct.

There are still many high-quality journals available for scholars to publish in, including many that do not charge author processing fees. An additional option is author self-archiving of articles in discipline-specific and institutional repositories.

The author is grateful to the many colleagues who have shared information about potential predatory publishers. Last year’s list included 23 publishers, and this year’s has over 225, evidence of the rapid growth in the number of predatory journals and publishers. This list will be updated throughout the year at the blog Scholarly Open Access, http://scholarlyoa.com.

The criteria for inclusion in the lists can be found here. The author’s email address is: jeffrey.beall@ucdenver.edu.

Sigh.

READING in bed, once considered a relatively safe pastime, is now seen by some as a riskier proposition according to this article in the New York Times.

Mark Lillis of Schendel Pest Services examines quarantined crates filled with library books in Wichita, Kansas.

That’s because bedbugs have discovered a new way to hitchhike in and out of beds: library books. It turns out that tiny bedbugs and their eggs can hide in the spines of hardcover books. The bugs crawl out at night to feed, find a new home in a headboard, and soon readers are enjoying not only plot twists but post-bite welts.

I did the math.

Of the New York Times‘s 100 Notable Books of 2012, there are 39 women, 16 authors of color, and only seven women of color. Of their 10 Best Books, there are three women and one writer of color, who is also the list’s only woman of color. The numbers are striking.

Full piece at Library Journal

Like many of his third-grade classmates, Mario Cortez-Pacheco likes reading the “Magic Tree House” series, about a brother and a sister who take adventurous trips back in time. He also loves the popular “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” graphic novels.

But Mario, 8, has noticed something about these and many of the other books he encounters in his classroom at Bayard Taylor Elementary here: most of the main characters are white. “I see a lot of people that don’t have a lot of color,” he said.

Full article

We're late to the party, admittedly. But it has come to our attention that the sex columnist for U.C. Berekley's Daily Californian wrote an autobiographical column about coitus in the library -- and the Internet has reacted.

Full piece here

Glen Creason is the map librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library. He's often invited to browse through maps left behind when people die, and recently found hundreds of thousands of maps crammed into every corner of an old bungalow. He rented a truck and doubled the library's map collection in a single day.

Treasure Maps on "The Story" on APM

Download MP3 of show here.

The decision to sell a piece of North American history has sparked intense debate at Old South Church in Boston. The church's historian says the book is simply not theirs to sell.

Full piece