LISNews: Librarian News

New York Times Op-Ed on how new legislation on imported copies of American authors works affects issues of copyright.

LAST month, the Supreme Court decided to allow the importation and resale of foreign editions of American works, which are often cheaper than domestic editions. Until now, courts have forbidden such activity as a violation of copyright. Not only does this ruling open the gates to a surge in cheap imports, but since they will be sold in a secondary market, authors won’t get royalties.

This may sound like a minor problem; authors already contend with an enormous domestic market for secondhand books. But it is the latest example of how the global electronic marketplace is rapidly depleting authors’ income streams. It seems almost every player — publishers, search engines, libraries, pirates and even some scholars — is vying for position at authors’ expense.

First it was Goodreads....then...

(be sure to watch the video's gruesome climax!)

A positive story identifying services in NH libraries covered by a prominent NH newspaper.

http://www.unionleader.com/article/20130408/NEWS/130409256

This week's program brings a telephone interview with author Dan Flynn of FlynnFiles.com who wrote a piece at The American Spectator that was commented upon by The Annoyed Librarian. After that there are a couple examples provided by federal agencies of how not to do public service announcements. There is no news miscellany this week and there is a bit of an explanation as to what went wrong one way or another.

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. Matériel purchasing needs including subsistence support selections can be found 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/.

As we may appreciate, library buildings are nowadays as fascinating as their book collections. Often the appearance of a building outside gives us some insight of what to expect inside. What really makes a library building fascinating? The size of the building, the shape of the building, the age of the building? Perhaps the architecture of the building is groundbreaking, or perhaps it is simply a very expensive building!

Back in 2003 and again in 2006, during research work for the first and second edition of Library World Records, the author sent out e-mails to several Internet-based bulletin boards for librarians around the world, asking for a vote on the most fascinating library buildings in the world they had visited or seen at home or abroad. The categories voted for were:

1. 10 most fascinating national library buildings.
2. 10 most fascinating university library buildings.
3. 10 most fascinating public library buildings.
4. 10 most fascinating special library buildings.

The results for both the 2003 and 2006 votes on the most fascinating library buildings in the world, with photographs of all the winning library buildings voted for, were published respectively in the 1st and 2nd edition of Library World Records.

Now with a much bigger 3rd edition of Library World Records almost finished, it is time once again cast your vote. The results of this current survey on the most fascinating library buildings in the world, with photographs of all the winning library buildings voted, will be published in the forthcoming 3rd edition of Library World Records

To vote, go to
http://www.lwrw.org/formphp.html

Your votes are very much appreciated.
Godfrey Oswald
BSc, MSc,

Library World Records
London.

In a Wired opinion piece, Jonathon Keats argues that this year's Nobel Prize for literature should be awarded to Google.

"Given that literary fame is so fickle, it might make more sense to anoint a work that’s mutable—an all-encompassing text that changes at the pace of society itself. Today there is such a work. And that is why, in 2013, the Swedish Academy should award the Nobel Prize in Literature to Google.

Is Google literature? As a search engine, of course, it lacks a conventional narrative. But a traditional bildungsroman would hardly suit our era. Not even James Joyce could capture the fractured nature of 21st-century life, let alone the nearly unlimited interconnectedness among people and events these days."

Two new lions are awaiting their names at the Riverdale Library in the Bronx.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/04/2-new-library-sentries-welcome-with-more-of-a-p...

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Andy Ihnatko has an initial reaction posted to the death on 4 April 2013 of Roger Ebert.

Note: For more details, see a longer FAQ at http://librarycity.org/?p=6933. David Rothman's email is davidrothman@librarycity.org.

Q. Why a national digital library endowment?

A. U.S. public libraries now spend roughly $1.3 billion a year on books and other content in all formats, around 12 percent of operating expenditures. The figure in the 2010 fiscal year was $1.42 per capita in Mississippi and nationally just $4.22. As reported by the Economist, library sales are approximately 5 percent of those of U.S. book publishers (no wonder the ALA can get only so far in talks with the big publishing conglomerates).

Q. Why should the endowment focus on e-books and other digital content?

A. Costs and greater ease of sharing resources at a national level--while still compensating publishers fairly. Not to mention other possibilities such as reliable interbook links and extensive annotations. Librarians should curate annotations and other user content. The Amazon buyout of Goodreads is an example of the perils of libraries NOT updating their mission.

E-books can efficiently help libraries honor S. R. Ranganathan’s classic Five Laws of Library Science--such as “Books are for use” and “Every reader his book” (or her book). Even academic libraries at well-off universities have limited resources. As for the typical U.S. public library branch, it carries just 4,350 books, a fraction of Amazon's more than 1.7 million, according to the Economist.

The endowment would at least indirectly free up a bit more money for possible spending on paper books at the local level while still responding to readers’ burgeoning interest in e-books.

Q. How would the plan work? -- Read More

Recently, the Houston-based Billy Pilgrim Traveling Library (previously) traveled to Odessa to debut the bookmobile-for-hire component of its services, and to help the Ector County Library celebrate its 75th anniversary.  This blog post details the different stops they made on their two-day trip and provides some analysis on the successes and shortcomings of the venture.

Twelve videos about librarianship that spoof movies & TV from Singaporean librarian Aaron Tay.

The May 2013 issue of Cites & Insights (volume 13, number 5) is now available for downloading at http://citesandinsights.info

[If you want a shorter URL, http://cical.info will also work.]

The two-column PDF version is 28 pages long, The 6x9" single-column version, designed and optimized for e-reading, is 60 pages long.

Unless you plan to print out the issue, the single-column version may be preferable: the issue includes 31 graphs, each of which is nearly twice as large (40% wider, 40% taller) in that version, frequently with more detail.

The issue consists of one essay:
Libraries: The Mythical Average Public Library

There is no such thing as the average library. That may be obvious--but you might be surprised at just how far away from average most measures for most libraries are. For that matter, for any derivative measure, which average is average?

This essay discusses averages and a few low-level statistical terms, then shows where American public libraries stand--not only for 2010 (the most recent IMLS data) but for changes from 2009 to 2010. I believe you'll find it revealing and interesting.

Announcement links now go to the home page, where I hope you'll note "Pay what you wish" before going on to the issue itself.

From NPR's The Two-Way: The American Library Association and Barnes & Noble were among the groups named by conservative group Morality in Media in its "Dirty Dozen List" of "the top 12 facilitators of porn." The list states that the ALA encourages libraries to have unfiltered computers, and that the bookstore chain "is a major supplier of adult pornography and child erotica."

The top spot, however, went to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder for "refus[ing] to enforce existing federal obscenity laws."

Hat tip to Bobbie Newman @librarianbyday for the lead.

Digital books are triggering tectonic shifts in education. One of the most fundamental, yet seemingly invisible, shifts is happening in the back rooms of district offices—not in the classrooms, not among teachers and students, and definitely not in the board rooms of most big-name publishers and textbook companies.

This profound, significant change is happening first in school district business offices, IT departments, and cubicles among staff members who work behind the scenes to acquire materials for today’s students.

What exactly is this shift? It’s a shift in awareness. A very subtle, yet primary, change in perception.

It’s the revelation of the idea that ebooks are not books at all.

That’s right, ebooks are not books.

Full post

For the last few years, Bookish.com — the joint venture between S&S, Hachette, and Penguin — has seen a number of iterations and had its share of setbacks. Most articles — including this one — tend to lead with a description of all the difficulties Bookish has had, from CEO change-overs to more than a year in delays. Even fresh off its launch several weeks ago there’s a lot of discussion about what role Bookish.com fills in the ecosystem and whether or not it’s addressing a consumer need. When it was announced yesterday that Goodreads.com was being acquired by Amazon, one of Forbes’ headlines covering the announcement was Amazon Buys Goodreads. Take That, Bookish! As if it’s another string of bad luck in the Bookish saga.

Full article

Were people happier in the 1950s than they are today? Or were they more frustrated, repressed and sad?

To find out, you'd have to compare the emotions of one generation to another. British anthropologists think they may have found the answer — embedded in literature.

Full piece: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/04/01/175584297/mining-books-to-map-emotions-through-a-century

Teleread has a piece on hollowed out books that people are making and selling on Etsy

Excerpt: I fell in love with this idea and purchased one of the books on offer: a blue Reader’s Digest Condensed Books in which I planned to store my passport, checks and some cash we are squirrelling away for vacations.

I was impressed with the look and feel of the ‘book’ when it arrived. I liked that it was ‘authentic’ and can, of course, pass for a ‘real’ book on the shelf, since it was one.

Full piece

Article in the Washington Post Style Section proclaims the new St. Louis Public Library Central Branch "a marvel".

Washington Post Book Reviewer Ron Charles says "Bibliophiles, take note: There’s a spectacular new page on your tour of America’s great book sites: The reopened public library in downtown St. Louis.

The library closed almost three years ago for a $70-million renovation. The results of that work are now open to the public, and the 190,000-square-foot building is the most gorgeous — and usable — library I have ever seen."

The University of South Florida, a public university in Tampa with over 41,000 students, has asked the state attorney to investigate a former library director.

An audit alleges that Beverly Shattuck, formerly director of the medical library at USF, sold her Tampa-area house and moved to Virginia Beach, VA, using university funds to purchase a MacBook Air, two iPads, and a camera, supposedly for telecommuting -- even though the University never approved her experiment in running an academic library from 800 miles away. USF could not identify any legitimate business purpose for the camera or the second iPad. The former library director also used university funds for thousands of dollars worth of travel expenses, the USF audit said, in order to travel back and forth to the Tampa campus. 

The most financially significant issue, according to the audit, was over 1,200 hours of unrecorded personal and sick leave. The university says it paid Shattuck over $11,000 in salary that she ought to have taken as unpaid leave when her paid annual leave had run out, and would have wrongfully paid her $35,723 more had the problem not been discovered.

After being placed on administrative leave following the suspension of her purchasing card, USF says, Beverly Shattuck voluntarily resigned. A local news investigation confirmed that she was permitted to retire with benefits from her $150,000+/year job. According to that investigation, a spokesman for the state attorney's office said that criminal charges are pending.

from author of thirteen books, Henry David Sterry.