LISNews: Librarian News

Carl Zimmer writes: A year ago, some friends (including my three fellow Phenomena writers) and I put together a web site to review science ebooks. We dubbed it Download the Universe, and we’ve reviewed about 80 titles since then, on everything from avalanches to Leonardo da Vinci. I’ve just written an anniversary post, in which I reflect on what works and doesn’t work in this new medium, and the things that give us as reviewers hope, along with a touch with anger. Check it out.

Article about book bindery in Utica, Nebraska.

Excerpt: Houchen has acquired 14 regional book binderies over the years, keeping a small bindery of five employees in St. Louis and bringing the rest of the work to Utica. They've expanded the Utica facility from 15,000 square feet when the Osbornes bought it to 40,000 square feet today. Their customer base has grown, too, from two states to 21, covering the middle third of the United States.

Today, they serve about 200 printing companies throughout the Midwest, ranging from small, independent self-publishers to some of the biggest names in book publishing. They also have 200 individual comic book customers.

As austerity measures go, rationing toilet paper sounds pretty austere.
They're trying it at the public library in Trenton, the New Jersey capital, after repeated incidents of vandalism and theft from the restrooms. Individually sized allotments of toilet paper and other personal hygiene items are available by request only, CBS New York reports.

While you can’t yet make a trip to Washington D.C. and have casual perusal of all the world’s tweets, the technology to do exactly that is readily available—for a cost. Gnip, the organization feeding the tweets to the Library, is a social media data company that has exclusive access to the Twitter “firehose,” the never-ending, comprehensive stream of all of our tweets. Companies such as IBM pay for Gnip’s services, which also include access to posts from other social networks like Facebook and Tumblr. The company also works with academics and public policy experts, the type of people likely to make use of a free, government-sponsored Twitter archive when it comes to fruition.

Read more: http://business.time.com/2013/02/25/what-the-library-of-congress-plans-to-do-with-all-your-t...

Library administrators across the state are holding emergency meetings and hoping for the best after the Supreme Court ruled last week that a law forcing the Kanawha County Board of Education to fund its public library is unconstitutional.

"I think we're all making plans for the worst-case scenario because right now, that's the fiscally responsible thing to do," said Pam Coyle, director of the Martinsburg-Berkeley Public Library.

The local grass roots group “Escondido’s Future” partnered with CSUSM Community Service Learning Office to conduct a survey of the impact of the library closure on the community. We discovered that most of students actually went to the library for books and media and not mainly for the computers as some city leaders had presupposed. A quarter of the students went to the branch library for a safe place to be and more than a third said that with the branch library closed they didn’t have a proper place to study or do homework.

How Are Some Authors Landing On Best-Seller Lists? They're Buying Their Way

Full article

West Virginia could have saved almost $8 million had the scope of the purchase been scaled to the requirements of the state's libraries, schools and state police, the report states. Smaller, less expensive routers could have been used in the state's 172 libraries, resulting in a savings of $2.8 million; in state police facilities, for a savings of $1 million to $1.4 million; and in 368 schools with enrollments of less than 500, for a savings of $3.68 million.

Rural Indian consumers need only dial 58080 from their mobile phone to be connected with Apna Chaupal. From there they can browse various subscription packs focusing on categories including agriculture, health, education, employment, entertainment and religion. The service is available in all local languages, with highlights including Mandi crop rates, love advice, astrology, English lessons, visa information, music and more. Subscription pricing begins at INR 10 for 10 days. It is also possible to request expert advice for solutions to specific problems.

In the real world, my new floor-to-ceiling shelves are already full and bulging, and lately I wander the house eyeballing the last remaining bits of open wall space, wondering if they might hold additional shelving, as my wife shakes her head.

“For what else,” Benjamin writes of his own books, “is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?” My wife would heartily agree. And yet, the order Benjamin invokes is hardly an illusion, but rather a way to find myself in all those shelves and volumes, an assertion, a means of saying: I am here.

Continuing budget issues may push more libraries toward exploring these ideas, though the concept is a bit controversial in library-land. Some in the library world fear that inadvertent censorship may arise out of the practice, and there are also those who would like to see libraries remain advertising-free public spaces. In these tough economic times, though, the idea appears to be gaining some traction

The La Crosse Public Library in La Crosse, WI has just launched an heirloom seed library that will allow people to check out garden seeds to plant, grow, harvest and return to the library. "We are going to catalog them by genus and species eventually and have a catalog in a public area but that will be the second step. It's not hard to do but we need people that are committed to come in today and check out the seeds and come back and get them," said La Crosse Public Library Librarian Cindy Mischnick. The starter seeds are being provided by Seed Savers of Decorah, IA, the third largest heirloom seed repository in the world. The seed library is the first of its kind in Wisconsin.

The key point that I want to make in this first of perhaps a few blog posts on all of these ideas is that the human behind the keyboard is just as important if not more important than the keyboard and CPU they wield. It is also important to set forth that cyberspace is only a place in the cognitive dissonance that we are all deluding ourselves into believing. In reality cyberspace is in fact what is between our ears and the internet is a medium with which we fabricate a social contract to communicate with each other, transfer data with, and potentially wage war.

We love to find those hidden gems which those in the know often take for granted but which genuinely surprise and inspire us. Today we learn about one whose history and proposition has much to offer in our thinking out the bookstore and library of tomorrow.

Good Ol Slashdot has a neat write up on Best-Seller Lists. How Are Some Authors Landing On Best-Seller Lists? They're Buying Their Way .

This week's episode rambles around to talk about Open Access, The Sequester, and presents a miscellany of brief items.

Related links:

• librarian.net: Another victory for public and open access
• The Travelin' Librarian: Increasing Public Access to the Results of Scientific Research
• e-prints in library & information science: Interview on Open Access with Dr. Stevan Harnad
• Reuters: White House directs open access for government research
• Wall Street Journal: Noonan--Government by Freakout
• Catalog Matters podcast number 18
• The Annoyed Librarian: Author Says UK Libraries Should Close Because He Says So
• CBC News: OK for police to search cellphone if no password, says court
• Evan Prodromou: Building the core of a federated future

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. Equipment purchasing desires can be found here via Amazon, as always.

LISTen: An LISNews.org Program -- Episode #233 by The Air Staff of Erie Looking Productions is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org/2013/02/20/s06e00-season-6-is-coming/.

Three independent bookstores are taking Amazon and the so-called Big Six publishers (Random House, Penguin, Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan) to court in an attempt to level the playing field for book retailers. If successful, the lawsuit could completely change how ebooks are sold.

Full article

Check out this cool film project Free To All:

Inside the Public Library is a multi-platform documentary project that brings together library stories from all across America. Whether historic or contemporary, humorous or heartbreaking, these individual dramas shed light on how public libraries have shaped our society. The project's centerpiece is a feature-length film chronicling a year inside San Francisco Public, a very unquiet library. Shorter films bring alive other extraordinary chapters of the public library story - from the puritans and robber barons who launched it, through the immigrants, suffragettes and civil rights activists who transformed it, to the millions of Americans whose lives are changed at the public library today.

Filming at the San Francisco Public Library in progress...(trailer)

This week, we were psyched to hear the news that selections from the famed Riot Grrrl Collection, part of the Fales Collection at NYU’s Bobst Library, will be published in a book later this year. The book, which was edited by senior archivist Lisa Darms, who launched the Riot Grrrl Collection several years ago (and who lived in Olympia throughout the ’90s), will feature some 350-odd printed artifacts, including fliers, posters, and zines, some of which — like Girl Germs 3, Johanna Fateman’s Artaud-Mania, and Kathleen Hanna’s My life with Evan Dando: Popstar — are even reprinted in full for your complete consumption.

Full article

New CEO Marissa Mayer launched a redesigned version of the Yahoo homepage on Wednesday, but the site’s new features seem like a lukewarm rehash of the company’s old portal strategy and imitations of what Facebook offers.

Full piece