LISNews: Librarian News

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

There is an interesting article by ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE, an architect in today's (Dec. 3, 2012) Wall Street Journal about changes to the New York City Library. "There is no more important landmark building in New York than the New York Public Library, known to New Yorkers simply as the 42nd Street Library, one of the world's greatest research institutions. Completed in 1911 by Carrère and Hastings in a lavish classical Beaux Arts style, it is an architectural masterpiece. Yet it is about to undertake its own destruction. The library is on a fast track to demolish the seven floors of stacks just below the magnificent, two-block-long Rose Reading Room for a $300 million restructuring referred to as the Central Library Plan."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323751104578151653883688578.html

Auckland Museum librarian scours collection of maps and charts dating back to 1700s and finds first mention on 1908 admiralty chart

Full article

Maria Popova is the mastermind of Brain Pickings, one of the faster growing literary empires on the Internet, yet she is virtually unknown.

Article in the NYT

For the Non-Artist: A Case for Taxpayer Support of the Arts

Finally, the arts are not, and should never be, limited to artists and 'arts lovers.' Creativity exists in everything that people do. It takes huge amounts of imagination and critical thinking to run a business (I grew up in a family business), or to create and manage a manufacturing process, or design a new widget, or promote different living environments. Art and creative thought is sought and appreciated by people who must turn thinking into action, and action into profit. The creative thinker - Steve Jobs, for example, and a thousand others like him - is the one who succeeds where others don't, who expand when others stay static, and who drive change toward the new, and the untried, and the next best thing - or the next best place. And the key -- perhaps the only -- place where creativity, business, art, education, youth, and experience come together is the public library. It is my absolute conviction that the Central Library should be rapidly developed in this regard. Its funding is critical to the cross-sector interactions that will continue to drive Buffalo's reimagining.

This week's program has not one but two features from the United States Department of Agriculture that may prove useful to reference librarians and selectors. In the essay we talk about the World Conference on International Telecommunications 2012 and how it may bode ill for the Internet not to mention that NPR reports about such as well.

Related links:

• ComputerWorld: Kill switch thrown on Internet in Syria -- Amid bloody civil war, communication blackout hits all of country
• Wired: U.N.: We Seek to Bring Internet to All
• International Telecommunications Union: Basic Texts of ITU
• Michael Geist: UN Internet Meeting About Who Pays, Not Who Rules
• National Public Radio: Shutdowns Counter The Idea Of A World-Wide Web
• Steve Kemp: Simple website creation tools
• The Register: Voda fails again: network melts in Melbourne heatwave -- ‘Try turning it off and turning it back on again’
• Joe Lambert: Offline First – A better HTML5 User Experience
• Fox 8 News: Boehner ‘Flabbergasted’ at Fiscal Cliff Proposal
• Fox 8 News: Coverage of the Emiliano Terry case
• The Cleveland Plain Dealer: Deadly police chase from Cleveland into East Cleveland brings questions, leaves families sorrowful

Download here (MP3) (Ogg Vorbis), or subscribe to the podcast (MP3) to have episodes delivered to your media player. We suggest subscribing by way of a service like gpodder.net. Stephen's Silly Summation of Christmas Wishes can be found here via Amazon, as always.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/.

Gary Ross has penned and directed some big Hollywood hits like Big, Pleasantville and The Hunger Games. But for the past 15 years, his obsession has been something much more personal: a Dr. Seuss-ian children's book called Bartholomew Biddle and the Very Big Wind.

It started when Ross got a call in 1996 from fellow screenwriter David Koepp. Koepp was up against a tight budget and approaching deadline with his debut directorial effort, The Trigger Effect. Its heroine had to read an as-yet-unwritten bedtime story to her child.

Koepp wanted Ross to write that story. "The only thing is, I don't have any money," he told Ross. "So it has to be for free, and I've got to shoot the day after tomorrow."

Full piece (7 minute author interview on NPR)

If you listen to the author interview you find out he created part of the fictional book for the movie The Trigger Effect. I assume they did not use a real children's book to avoid paying royalties.

See story at Teleread.org

Headline gives you the concept click the link for full details.

The current holder of the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law, Dr. Michael Geist, has a post up discussing the possible imposition of "sending party pays" rules to Internet traffic. In that scenario, sites serving content would be required to pay for the cost of sending content to requesting users while the requesting users would not be required to pay any such surcharge.

Reuters reports that this and more is set to come up at a meeting in Dubai sponsored by the International Telecommunications Union, a United Nations affiliate, kicking off next week. Reuters reports that individual nation-states are seeking codification in multilateral treaties of the ability for their nation-states to be able to shape the Internet within their countries as well as destroy the veil of anonymity. Reuters notes that some developing countries and telecommunications providers are seeking the imposition of sending party pays rules.

Forbes contributor Larry Downes writes that leaked documents from the International Telecommunications Union appear to set out a social media campaign to help ease concerns over that intergovernmental body's taking some level of regulatory control over the Internet.

As to the libraries angle...the architecture of the Internet let alone the economics of the Internet are up for intergovernmental negotiation in December which may impact how electronic services are provided by your agency in the future either directly or indirectly.

I’m collecting data for this year’s International Library Automation Perceptions survey.

http://www.librarytechnology.org/blog.pl?ThreadID=245&BlogID=1

This survey, now in its sixth annual iteration, provides an opportunity for libraries to register their perceptions of the strategic automation products they use, organizations that provide these products, and the quality of support delivered. The survey also probes at considerations for migrating to new systems and the level of interest in open source products.

While the numeric rating scales support the statistical results of the study, it’s the comments offered that provide the most insight into the current state of library automation satisfaction. Comments will be published in the survey results, redacted of text that might identify the individual or organization responding.

Please help your fellow libraries who might be in the process of evaluating library automation options by responding to the survey. Any information regarding vendor performance and product quality can be helpful when making strategic decisions regarding automation alternatives. A large number of responses strengthen the impact of the survey and the subsequent report.

If you have responded in previous years, please respond again this year to help identify any trends regarding improvement or worsening of the products or support services.

For more information about the survey, for instructions on how to participate, and to see results of previous year’s surveys, see:

The developers behind ad-tracking browser plug-in Ghostery said they'd logged 137 different trackers on the Microsoft website and 107 on Apple's site, while they logged 66 on Samsung's site and 65 on HP's. Dell has 106. All of these tech sites make greater use of trackers associated with behavioural advertising than specialist retail sites such as Tesco (64), John Lewis (46) and Dabs (12).

So, is the Rundel Library on South Avenue in Rochester haunted?

Some employees like Diane Premnath sure think so. Premnath has been working at the library for the past five years and has heard many strange noises and seen dark shadows moving on the upper stacks of the library. She says she’s gotten used to it.

“I guess the ghosts are friendly,” she says. “I don’t bother them and they don’t bother me. I guess we all have stuff to do.”

Who's Tracking Your Reading Habits? An E-Book Buyer's Guide to Privacy, 2012 Edition
See the chart here

The holiday shopping season is upon us, and once again e-book readers promise to be a very popular gift. Last year's holiday season saw ownership of a dedicated e-reader device spike to nearly 1 in 5 Americans, and that number is poised to go even higher. But if you're in the market for an e-reader this year, or for e-books to read on one that you already own, you might want to know who's keeping an eye on your searching, shopping, and reading habits.

Unfortunately, unpacking the tracking and data-sharing practices of different e-reader platforms is far from simple. It can require reading through stacked license agreements and privacy policies for devices, software platforms, and e-book stores. That in turn can mean reading thousands of words of legalese before you read the first line of a new book.

Story at Wired.com

The e-ink screen that popSLATE uses is the next generation of screens that are at the core of e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle or the Kobo. Like all e-ink screens, it only consumes power when the display is changed. This allows for an always-on ambient visual interface.

What can you do with a second screen on the back of your phone? A lot, it turns out.

A copyright law that lets authors break contracts after 35 years will start taking effect in January. The law, which is meant to give authors like Stephen King and Judy Blume a “second bite at the apple,” could provide yet another disruption for traditional publishers.

Wow!
For more than 63 years, Craven has bound books and conserved artifacts on Michigan's Ann Arbor campus.

On Friday, the 81-year-old Craven leaves campus, retiring as the longest-serving staff member in the university's history.

He began working part-time at the university in 1947 while he was still in high school in a bookbindery in the basement of the Hatcher Graduate Library.

The site unglue.it has a few more books they are trying to unglue. One is - So You Want to Be a Librarian. See unglue.it for more details.

This is the first in an occasional series of articles that will explore issues surrounding the efforts to launch and expand the Digital Public Library of America.

Library Journal - The Digital Shift