LISNews: Librarian News

The results of the annual VIDA Women in Literary Arts survey, which compares the number of female and male authors featured in major literary publications, were released yesterday. The study found a strong preference for male authors in 2012, as in recent years. The New York Review of Books (89 reviews of female authors in 2012 to 316 of male authors), the London Review of Books (74 female authors to 203 male) and the Times Literary Supplement (314 female authors to 924 male authors) fared especially ill. (NPR wasn't included in the survey, but has been criticized for gender bias in author coverage in the past.) Major female authors like Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult have been vocal in recent years about the sometimes rapturous media coverage of white male authors like Jonathan Franzen.

Deleting accounts you've created on Facebook, MySpace, AOL, and elsewhere on the Web isn't always easy. Here are the details on leaving 23 services behind.

I thought you might be interested in this new video and article for Reason.com on Tom Tryniski, who has digitized 22 million old newspaper pages and is getting 6 million views per month on his website (beating the Library of Congress 2 to 1).

http://reason.com/reasontv/2013/03/05/amateur-beats-gov-at-digitizing-newspape

A U.S.-based publishing company says it is dropping at least one of its lawsuits against a McMaster librarian after scholars across North America came to his defense.

Edwin Mellen Press (EMP) had filed two lawsuits against Dale Askey and McMaster University, claiming a total of $4.5 million in damages.
Edwin Mellen PressIn the first filing, submitted in June of last year, the company alleged that statements Askey made in a Sept. 2010 blog post, while he was working at a Kansas university, were both “false” and “defamatory in its tone and context.”

Troubles for Jonah Lehrer, journalist wunderkind turned plagiarist and disgraced author, will not abate.

On Friday night, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which published all three of Mr. Lehrer’s books, confirmed that after an internal fact-checking review of his second book, “How We Decide,” it would no longer offer it for sale.

The publisher stopped selling his third book, “Imagine,” last summer after an investigation revealed that it contained fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan.

It's common knowledge that Harvard's libraries house the country's second largest book collection. To those of you unimpressed by shelves upon shelves of dusty tomes, these more eccentric acquisitions may pique your interest. We at Flyby have compiled a list of the quirky, the bizarre, and the questionably useful relics found in Harvard's libraries.

Not your average librarian Far from the soft-spoken, matronly librarians of yore, Savannah-born Carolyn Goolsby on paper seems more like a character from a fantasy novel than the approachable Fort McMurray Public Library director she is.

A world-record setter for weightlifting, a crafter of homemade mozzarella and beer and a former Jeopardy champion — yes, Alex Trebek is as nice as he seems — Goolsby could be a contender for most interesting person in the world.

The proud owner of a red Swingline stapler (the sign of a true Office Space fan), she holds a masters in Library Science from the University of Maryland and a bachelors in Music and Voice Performance with a double major in Theory and Composition, Goolsby says she is professionally in her ideal position.

Great grandparents love telling stories about treks to one-room school houses on 20-below mornings.

But as far as we know, only one great grandma is still making the trip.

At age 89, Ruth Boldan is still a volunteer librarian at the under-heated, over-stuffed 1890s school house that is now home to the Hazel Dell Library.

Of about 250 bundlers who raised more than $500,000 — counting couples or business associates as one unit — 21 were from Chicago or the suburbs and none were from Obama’s native state, which has been publicly angling for the library. The University of Chicago is waging a covert bid. See the list of Obama’s Illinois super-bundlers at the end of the column; the fourth-quarter list had no local surprises.

This week's program is brief as it propounds an alternative in a providing support in a particular case and provides some news briefs.

Related links:

• LISNews: Dale Askey Support Facebook Page
• Canadian Government Offices in the U.S.
• PCMag.com: Barnes & Noble Founder Wants to Buy Retail Business, Dump Nook
• The Atlantic: The Enduring Myth of the 'Free' Internet
• CBC News: Hands-free calls impair drivers' brains, study suggests
• Duke University Libraries: New Library Service: Digitize This Book

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Sydney Australia will be getting a new library; library as learning space, meeting space and playing space.

Attention Librarians and Library Lovers: We Need Your Support!

Dale Askey is an Associate University Librarian at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. He is being sued for $4,000,000 by Edwin Mellen Press because he critiqued the quality of the information they produce. If Mellen wins the case, the professional right to academic freedom possessed by librarians, professors and others in the academic community will be in jeopardy. Let’s spread word about the injustice that Dale Askey is facing, and let’s not let one company’s interest in profiteering outweigh our need for academic freedom.

To show your support for Dale Askey, please visit the Facebook support page we created. You can find more information about the lawsuit on the page and updates will be provided as they arise. Be sure to “like” the page and ask all of your librarian colleagues to “like” it as well. The more supporters the page receives, the more likely a major news media company will present this issue on radio or television. Here is the page link:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dont-Punish-Dale-Librarian-Being-Sued/313371185432030

Blind dates can be nerve-wracking, stressful, exciting and fun. Throughout the month of February — and with a focus on the last two emotions — Howard County libraries are helping their patrons go on blind dates of their own: with books.

“This is a way to read something new, that you may not have read otherwise,” said Aimee Zuccarini, a research specialist and instructor with the Howard County Library System, as she stood in front of the display in the East Columbia Branch filled with books, each with their covers and spines wrapped in pink and red paper.

When patrons check the books out, they have no idea what book they're actually getting. But the books try to make their own case: a sign on the display declares “I'm a Keeper — check me out.”

Mini-libraries are letting storm-shattered neighborhoods turn the page on Hurricane Sandy.

Bright orange boxes filled with up to 100 books have popped up outside flooded branches that remain closed in Coney Island, Gerritsen Beach, and Red Hook — and users of the free literature exchanges don’t have to worry about late fees or that pesky Dewey Decimal System!

Would best-selling novelist Len Deighton care to take a walk? It was 1968, and the IBM technician who serviced Deighton’s typewriters had just heard from Deighton’s personal assistant, Ms. Ellenor Handley, that she had been retyping chapter drafts for his book in progress dozens of times over. IBM had a machine that could help, the technician mentioned. They were being used in the new ultramodern Shell Centre on the south bank of the Thames, not far from his Merrick Square home.

The library in 2020 is the last bastion of truth. Sure, you can search yottabytes of free data by simply batting an eyelash. But it's dangerous to believe what you see through the iGlass lens. As you learned the hard way back in the Facebook era, if you're not paying for it, you are the product. That research study about the safety and efficacy of Lipitor Lollipops™ was sponsored by a subsidiary of a subsidiary of Pfizer. That consultant you almost hired wrote his own customer reviews. And while you can't tell for sure because the algorithms are opaque, it sure seems like the first page of web search is pay-to-play. You routinely skip past the top ten results.

Participating libraries will host dedicated co-working spaces for the program, as well as both formal classes and informal mentoring from the university’s start-up resources. The librarians themselves will be trained by the university to help deliver some of the material. The network will offer everything, in short, but seed money. “As we develop this pilot and start to scale it out,” Lea adds, “we would like to be able to direct people on how to find those resources.”

“With the glut of self-published books on the market, the biggest obstacle for authors is discoverability – to rise above the noise and clutter and distinguish one’s work. A Rotten Tomatoes sort of rating system seems inevitable.

Inside an old box factory in Brooklyn, N.Y., there are shelves upon shelves of discarded texts -- bizarre how-to manuals, grossly outdated atlases, back number encyclopedias.

It sounds like a place where old books go to die. But at the Reanimation Library, these paper orphans are getting a second life.

"Most of the books I collect would be considered useless, and most libraries would have taken them out of circulation," said Andrew Beccone, a New York City resident and founder of the Reanimation Library. "But you can show their continued relevance by pointing to the visual material."

Read more: http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/article/Reanimation-founder-to-speak-at-Ferguson-Librar...

I have noticed over the years that every so often magazines (and now blogs) feature beautiful spreads of book-filled rooms, with headlines like “Living With Books” or “The Pages of Our Lives.” Usually the images feature poetic, far-off places where leather volumes fill 15-foot-tall, wood-paneled shelves, or sparse rooms with gauzy curtains have stacks of books on the floor, standing like architectural columns. As a book lover, I find these rooms transporting and inspirational but totally out of touch. A growing number of people, I think, don’t have books. After all, who wants those heavy, clunky volumes when you can store a seemingly endless library on a device that weighs less than a single paperback?