LISNews: Librarian News

It's the bane of many a public librarian. The phone rings, you answer it, and then politely decline the caller's offer to donate the last 60 years of National Georgraphic magazine to your library.

"Yes, I'm sure they're in fine condition. Oh? Been in your mother-in-law's house for the last 60 years huh? Yes, I know you want to help out, but we've got several years of it already. Yes, sir I can tell you're happy she's dead but we just don't have any use for that many magazines. No, actually they're not all that valuable - you do realize they print several hundred thousand at a time, right? Yes, so they're not exactly rare or anything."

Now there's a much easier way to get every single issue of National Geographic from the last 120 years and it doesn't involve any donations. You can buy it on its very own hard drive. That's right, you can get every issue of National Geographic since the dawn of humankind on a 160 GB external drive. As a bonus, the collection only takes up 60 GB, so you've got another 100GB to do with as you please.

I wonder if that'd be enough room for every issue of Popular Mechanics...

Austin Statesman: Nathan Snyder worked as a bibliographer and cataloguer at the Perry-Castañeda Library, the main library on the U. of Texas campus. The Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at UT dedicated a library to him in May — the Nathan I. Snyder Library. Snyder created an endowment of his personal collection of books and documents, worth between $15,000 and $20,000, which is at the center.

Snyder died of a brain tumor Sunday. He was 65.

Robert Abzug, a UT history professor and the director of the Schusterman Center, said Snyder single-handedly built up a collection of books used by Jewish studies scholars around the world.

"It's fair to say he helped create one of the most remarkable collections of Jewish studies at any public university in the United States," Abzug said.

Robert King, a UT linguistics centennial professor, said Snyder was shy and eccentric and lived for his work. King said Snyder toiled to build the library's collection — one of his biggest additions was a rare copy of the Torah from Czechoslovakia — and often stayed at the library until 8 p.m. and worked weekends.

Rest in peace.

If you've been following along with OCLC’s recently revised—and suspended—policy regarding record-sharing, here's a couple of stories you'll want to check out.

OCLC’s recently revised—and suspended—policy regarding record-sharing: Norman Oder covers a Lively discussion at Midwinter Meeting, he writes OCLC's Karen Calhoun defends intent, apologizes about communication while others question OCLC’s path.

DON'T MISS Consideration of OCLC Records Use Policy: "We build bibliographic records as surrogates for the desired object, meaning that the surrogate is a means to an end – retrieving the described object – and not an end onto itself. We build indexes of these surrogates for patrons to use to discover information. All other factors held constant, the better the surrogate, the greater the chance the user will find the information they are seeking. The following discussion looks at the sources of records, the way they are built, and what it means to try to share them."

OCLC may be trying to pull something sneaky with its new policy of claiming contractual rights over the subsequent use of data created by OCLC. In other words, the data in library catalogues couldn't be used to make anything which competes with OCLC in any way.

Needless to say, this would have a hash chilling effect on the creation of open databases of library content.

As you might expect, the library blogosphere is on fire with the news. The podcast presenter at LISNews gave a commentary in the matter during LISTen #47.

Story from Slashdot.