LISNews: Librarian News

Library related fortune cookie.

From the New York Times blog:

New York Public Library is running a pre-National-Poetry-Month Twitter poetry contest through Sunday, in which you submit three very short poems and compete for a chance to win a set of books by America’s leading poets. Here's where you can enter the contest .

One poem has to be about libraries, books, reading or New York City, but the other two can be about whatever you like. It is the “whatever” ones that, naturally, drew our attention as we made our way through some of the hundreds of entries submitted just in the past two days. Some rated impressively high on the what-the-heck scale.

Here are a few of our favorites, a few about books but most not. It is possible that some of them were not meant as poems but were just tweets with @NYPL in them.

@NYPL i ripped the wings off the wind and fed them to the birds / they aren’t as holy as they thought they were. — Drew Knapp (@drew_knapp) 6 Mar 13

Paper @NYPL / pulped rags shucked from corpses / the fibers embracing type / like teeth meat / we’ll taste every word. — Matthew Wills (@backyardbeyond) 6 Mar 13

@NYPL To become dead even for a moment is not prudent says Yevtushenko, so resist the gentle pull of the steering wheel always to the right — Peggy Delmas (@PeggyDelmas) 7 Mar 13

Susan Orlean's next book is going to be about libraries. More details here.

The 2013 Book Calendar -- see all the books that have been selected this year. You can click on a flipcard to see more information about the book.

To see the current book selection click here.

Companies and governments have access to an unprecedented amount of digital information, much of it personal: what we buy, what we search for, what we read online. Kenneth Cukier, co-author of the book Big Data, describes how data-crunching is becoming the new norm.

Full piece on NPR

Link to book: Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think

Getting a glimpse into the curious minds of others has never been so beautiful – or so bright.

Designers Brian W. Brush and Yong Ju Lee of E/B Office New York created an extensive fiber-optic installation for the Teton County Library grand opening in Wyoming that visualizes library searches in flashes of colored light. Dubbed Filament Mind, the installation, which opened at the end of January, uses over five miles of fiber-optic cables and 44 LED illuminators to collect, categorize, and render searches from libraries all across the state of Wyoming into glowing bursts of color.

See and read more from Wired.

Kingman Daily Miner tells the story:

Former Mohave County (AZ) Library Director Danielle Krol said she wanted to expand services for the public and bring better pay and more opportunities for library employees, but was fired by the Board of Supervisors before she had a chance to get the ball rolling.

But with every trend, however modest, you have to wonder, why now? Is it possible that book browsing is already strange and unusual enough to be considered material for art? Everyone agrees that the future of publishing is electronic, with words beamed to us instantaneously. But in that case, what will happen to all of the books beside the book—and the places that store them? When they’re gone, where will we randomly stumble on the knowledge we didn’t even know we wanted to know?

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/03/the-art-of-browsing.html

Innovative Interfaces said yesterday that it has decided to pull the case that it and sister company Skyriver Technology Solutions filed in 2010 in Ohio. Instead, the company said it would integrate Skyriver’s operations into Innovate and would focus on competing with OCLC and working with OCLC as a potential collaboration partner.

This grand challenge would require librarians, information scientists, telecommunication experts and specialists on space flight. The lessons learned could be applied to earth-bound libraries and could re-envision how libraries are connected to each other and to the resources that they use. It could also impact other industries and how they communicate or share information. The work could place libraries and librarians front and center in a number of communities because we would need to be involved in creating the solution.

"Looked at the right way, Wikipedia can be a big help in making online readers aware of their library’s offerings. One of the things we spend a lot of time on in libraries is organizing information into distinct, conceptual categories. That’s what Wikipedia does too: so far, their English edition has over 4 million concepts identified, described, and often populated with reference links. And Wikipedia has encouraged people to add links to relevant digital library collections on various topics, through programs like Wikipedia Loves Libraries and Wikipedian in Residence programs. But while these programs help bring some library resources online, and direct people to those selected resources, there’s still a lot of other relevant library material that users can’t get to via Wikipedia, but can via the libraries that are near them."

Smash Pictures now has responded to the lawsuit with a counterclaim, and it's quite scintillating.

"On information and belief, as much as 89% of the content of the allegedly copyrighted materials grew out of a multi-part series of fan fiction called Masters of the Universe based on Stephenie Myer's (sic) Twilight novels. On information and belief, this content was published online between 2009 and 2011 in various venues, including fanfiction.net and the person website of Ericka (sic) Leonard. On information and belief, much or all of this material was placed in the public domain."

Publishing houses have a well-worn relish for sweeping change, or at least for plugging it on the covers of the works they put on the bookshelves. Just run a search for “books changed America” or “books changed world.” In 2005, Ben Yagoda wrote a New York Times essay on this lack of originality in book labeling, titled “The Subtitle that Changed America.”

Library Wars: Romantic Comedy That Kicks Ass
"When I told my two teens that I could get one manga by using my awesome powers at GeekMom, they both said, “Library Wars! Library Wars! Library Wars!” We had been checking them out from the library before, but it’s a popular series and we often had to wait. Viz Media graciously gave me seven volumes, and then I had to wait for my kids to go through them again before me. Library Wars: Love & War, written and drawn by Kiiro Yumi, is based on the original (non-manga) series by Hiro Arikawa. I did short updates on the series through Comic Book Corner awhile back, but decided it deserved a longer review. It’s that good"

Following the White House officially coming out and saying that mobile phone unlocking should be legal, the Librarian of Congress has issued what feels like a passive aggressive response, basically saying that their job is not to consider the public policy, but just to follow the specific rules under the DMCA.

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.