LISNews: Librarian News

A new book documents the murders, murderers and capital punishment overseen by the highest court in the U.S. Jeffrey Brown talks with veteran journalists Martin Clancy and Tim O'Brien about their new work, "Murder at the Supreme Court," about some of the most notorious crimes and subsequent penalties.

Interview with authors here.

Were we really expecting a different outcome? Several months after Google bought Frommer's to bolster its location efforts, Skift hears that the iconic travel guide maker has completely stopped publication of print editions as its focus swings to the online realm.

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Will this have any impact on your library? What do you think of this move by Google?

A standoff over financial terms has prompted the bookstore chain Barnes & Noble to cut back substantially on the number of titles it orders from the publishing house Simon & Schuster, raising fears among other publishers, agents and authors that the conflict may harm the publishing industry as a whole.

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This week's program starts off with a brief essay talking about the disintegration of having a coherent "popular culture" in the United States then turns to the strange case of the Harlem Shake in Oxford. After that the episode wraps up with a news miscellany.

Related links:

• Jim Geraghty: How Do We Win Arguments in a Fragmenting Culture?
• LISNews: Sad Harlem Shake Story
• The Huffington Post: Claypso Nash, Librarian, Fired For Harlem Shake Video Filmed At Oxford University
• The Independent: Oxford university students call for sacked librarian to be reinstated after Harlem Shake at St Hilda's College -- Students fined after recording of viral dance track appeared on YouTube
• The Daily Mail: Oxford University librarian is SACKED after students do the Harlem Shake in her prestigious library
• The Telegraph: Oxford University librarian sacked after students perform Harlem Shake dance and post recording on YouTube -- An Oxford University librarian has been sacked after a group of students recorded a version of the viral dance hit the Harlem Shake in her library and then posted it on YouTube.
• Public Libraries News (which discusses public library closures in the UK)
• Voices for the Library (library advocacy group in the UK)
• Bruce Schneier: The Internet is a surveillance state
• Michael Geist: Federal Librarians Muzzled Under New Code of Conduct
• The Annoyed Librarian: Creeping Canadian Totalitarianism
• The National Post: Digital divide persists in Canada, both in access and Internet fluency
• John C. Dvorak: Put Google Reader Into the Public Domain
• The Travelin' Librarian: 7 Ways Librarians Can Participate in Open Access/Source/Education Communities

Download here (MP3) (Ogg Vorbis) (Free Lossless Audio Codec), 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. Operational support items can be purchased for the Air Staff here via Amazon.

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/.

The Verge asks: "What if best-selling albums had been books instead? That's the question graphic designer Christophe Gowans asked for his new collection, The Record Books. Gowans took album titles and artist names and constructed a fictional backstory behind each. The full collection is up on Gowans' site"

Author of "Living and Dying in Brick City" on PBS Newshour

Just in time for the tournament, Bookreporter.com has some book brackets.

"As the NCAA brackets were announced we decided to have some fun with the lineups. While everyone was searching stats and scoring potential, we naturally looked at the selected schools another way, as bookworms are apt to do.

We researched alumni and faculty from each school --- as well as some notable facts. From there we culled a list of authors --- and their books --- and chose one to represent each school on our version of the “bracket.”"

Sad story from Huffington Post of the librarian who shook herself out of a job.

Students and politicians alike are calling for an Oxford University librarian to be reinstated after she was fired for the filming of a Harlem Shake video in one of the school's libraries.

Though the librarian, Calypso Nash, did not actually take part in the making of the video, she allegedly lost her job because the filming took place on her watch, the Independent reports.

Rhetorical question from The Atlantic Cities:

In 2010, Poland's National Library performed a survey to determine the reading habits of the Polish citizenry. The results were not buoying: 56 percent of Poles had not read a book in the past year, either in hard or electronic form. Just as bad was that 46 percent had not attempted to digest anything longer than three pages in the previous month – and this included students and university graduates.

So architect Hugon Kowalski conceived of a new kind of library that he hopes will one day be built in Mosina, a town just south of Pozna?. On its first floor, it's all bibliotheca: Patrons squat on moddish stools among stacks and stacks of books. But then it gets weird: In the middle of the library is a glass column full of water and flailing human bodies. Go up one level and you're suddenly in the middle of a vast swimming facility, complete with a snaking water slide that takes whooping swimmers on a ride inside and outside of the building.

Kowalski got to thinking about his watery wonderland of reading after consulting surveys that showed Poles "rarely indicated" a desire to build new libraries. Rather, they wanted to see more sports halls, pools, kindergartens and retail shops. So the architect decided to supply the public with a fun reason to repeatedly visit a mixed-use library facility. If it so happens that bathers exit the pool's locker room with a fierce desire to consume Hans Fallada, that's just a happy side effect of the building's design.

Book: Creating Room to Read: A Story of Hope in the Battle for Global Literacy

What’s happened since John Wood left Microsoft to change the world? Just ask six million kids in the poorest regions of Asia and Africa. In 1999, at the age of thirty-five, Wood quit a lucrative career to found the nonprofit Room to Read. Described by the San Francisco Chronicle as “the Andrew Carnegie of the developing world,” he strived to bring the lessons of the corporate world to the nonprofit sector—and succeeded spectacularly.

Article about Room to Read

The Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that U.S. companies that make and sell products abroad cannot prevent those items from being resold in the U.S.

For example if a textbook that is sold for $100 in the U.S. is sold in Brazil for $20 this ruling makes it legal for someone that purchases the $20 book to bring it to the U.S. to sell.

Full article

This is a unique reading list – these books were all written by librarians and most of them were recommended to us (AbeBooks.com) by librarians. If any profession is well qualified to write books then librarians truly fit the bill.

The best known works by librarians, excluding Chairman Mao's Little Red Book but including books by Strindberg, Borges, Ann Tyler etc.

Check them out in all their glory, courtesy of Library Journal. Lists include Change Agents, Innovators, Marketers and Advocates. Community Builders and Tech Leaders are forthcoming.

This week's program starts off with a bite-sized edition of Tech for Techies led by the owner & engineer of Erie Looking Productions, Mike Kellat. News is also highlighted relative to Google Reader and its impending demise. The new comment line is mentioned as being 1-206-299-2120, extension 1580. For those willing to risk using a SIP client, sip:1580@sip.sdf.org is also usable addressing.

Related links:

• LISNews: Google Reader to Disappear
• John C. Dvorak: Google Reader Bites the Dust. Who's Next?

Download here (MP3) (Ogg Vorbis) (Free Lossless Audio Codec), 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.

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/.

New business book out by Bob Garfield one of the host of the radio program "On the Media"
The book is called -- Can't Buy Me Like: How Authentic Customer Connections Drive Superior Results

On of the major premises of the book is authentic customer relationships.

Excerpt from book blurb on Amazon: So what does work in this bewildering new era? Where do “authentic customer relationships” come from? The answers will make some leaders sigh with relief while others rip their hair out: Honesty. Transparency. Shared values. A purpose beyond profit. Sure you still need a high-quality product or service to offer, but that’s not enough. Now that people can easily discover everything that’s ever been said about your brand, you can’t manipu­late, seduce, persuade, flatter or entertain them into loyalty. You have to treat them like flesh-and-blood human beings, not abstract consumers or data points on a spreadsheet.

This is an interesting contrast when you look at the book on Amazon. The book has all 5 star reviews on Amazon. I challenge people to read the 5 star reviews on Amazon and find one that you think is truly authentic.

A 20-year-old Racine, WI man who's accused of engaging in lewd behavior in a library has been banned from "all the libraries on the face of the earth."
Best Headline EVER!
[Thanks Marge!]

The website for Library World Records, the Guinness Book of World Records for libraries and books is now back online.

Library World Records is fascinating book first published in 2004 after research work began on the book in 2002. The book was further extensively updated in a second edition in December 2009. Library World Records provides hundreds of intriguing and comprehensive facts about ancient and modern books, manuscripts and libraries around the world.

A much bigger brand new 3rd edition of the book is being researched at the moment and further details of this brand new edition will be revealed on this website later in 2013.

Link:
http://www.lwrw.org

Godfrey
BSc, MSc.
London, Britain.

On March 13th, Google announced that its Reader application would disappear on July 1, 2013. Dan Seifert wrote at The Verge about the matter where it was indicated that Google is doing this as part of a regular service reduction exercise and that Google clims usage of Google Reader has declined. Chris Ziegler later noted at The Verge that this has generated some backlash.

Debian developer Richard Hartmann noted that this shows some of the dangers of relying solely on cloud services. Work is underway to bring the self-hosted reader Newsblur into the JuJu Charm Store for easy deployment to the Amazon Web Services public access cloud to have your own personal web-based RSS reader. The personal cloud platform ownCloud is available with an RSS reader mode added to the latest version. Ars Technica writer Casey Johnston speculates this closure is an attempt to make RSS reading social by moving it into Google+ perhaps.

The situation continues to develop especially as librarians like Michael Sauers explain how to migrate from Google Reader back to Bloglines.

Two industry groups argue that the retailer's plan to control several generic top-level domains, including .book, .author, and .read, would be anti-competitive.

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Authors are snubbing publishers and insisting on keeping e-book rights. How one novelist made more than $1 million before his book hit stores.

Excerpt from article: In a highly unusual deal, Simon & Schuster acquired print publication rights to "Wool" while allowing Mr. Howey to keep the e-book rights himself. Mr. Howey self-published "Wool" as a serial novel in 2011, and took a rare stand by refusing to sell the digital rights. Last year, he turned down multiple seven-figure offers from publishers before reaching a mid-six-figure, print-only deal with Simon & Schuster.

"I had made seven figures on my own, so it was easy to walk away," says Mr. Howey, 37, a college dropout who worked as a yacht captain, a roofer and a bookseller before he started self-publishing. "I thought, 'How are you guys going to sell six times what I'm selling now?' "

Full article