LISNews: Librarian News

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.

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...

About nine months ago, the founders of Readmill noticed a trend was crystallizing. The makers of the popular book-reading iPad app kept receiving requests for an iPhone version. It was the most common request among Readmill users, and it just kept reappearing. Demand never slowed down; it only increased.
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So while the practice of reading is breaking out of its traditional confines – first bounded pages, then Kindles and Nooks, and now even away from tablets – its economics will, at least for now, continue to very much be dominated by the Internet-era’s traditional overlords. Sadly, even the snazziest iPhone app in the world isn’t going to change that.

David Lee King with an interesting question, what do we think is important? Do our users agree?
Think about some of these things libraries have, for example:
-Library Catalog – interesting to our customers?
-Article Databases – interesting to our customers?
-Periodicals reading room …
-Reference desk …
I think our goal should be two-fold:
1.spend time, money, and expertise on stuff our customers care about
2.do stuff that our customers care about