LISNews: Librarian News

The author of Library science degree: file that under ‘stupid’ has written this in reponse to the harassment (my words not his Sony Barari that is) he\'s had to deal with since his story broke.
-Blake

Sony Barari writes:
Sometimes negative attention forces you to stop and wonder: what exactly are we doing as comedians and satirists? While the bulk of satire may seem relatively superficial and too often topical to provide any real and lasting value from an intellectual standpoint, it does serve as a magnifying glass for that brief moment in which it is read, intensifying the reader’s scrutiny upon the subject at hand. Like any other mode of expression, however, it cannot function at all without attention. In this way it may be like a gross New York Post tabloid, but the objectives cannot be systematically simplified and subsequently relegated to some recess of literary darkness.

His story continues below... -- Read More

This one comes by way of LLRX. It\'s a book review by Donna Cavallini, Manager of Competitive Knowledge with the law firm of Kilpatrick Stockton. She discusses in her review, a book entitled \"The Invisible Web: Uncovering Information Sources Search Engines Can’t See.\" by Chris Sherman (search engine watch) and Gary Price (virtual acquisition shelf & news desk). The book talks about the vast amount of information on the web that can\'t be retrieved via search engine spiders, for various reasons, ranging from business matters to technological ones. According to the review, the book is intended to \"empower searchers to surmount these obstacles, in part by explaining the technical reasons why search engines otherwise inexplicably fail to return relevant results, and in part by providing a directory of selected subject-specific tools for accessing this valuable hidden web content.\" More

In breaking news, The Associated Press has apparently begun leaning on About.com authors to stop using quotations from AP articles to guide their readers to the complete text as it appears on other sites.

\"I have some bad news to convey to everyone - AP and other news services
have decided to be quite strict in how they interpret their copyrights.
Before, it was always assumed to be OK if we just quoted a couple of
sentences from a news story and then provided a link - it was copying all or
most of a story which we had to avoid.
But not any more. Quoting even one sentence, if it conveys the gist of the entire story, isn\'t something that they want to permit now. They are serious about this. They have already been in contact with About over Guides who have done nothing more than quote the first couple of lines
on their sites, along with a link back to the full story.\"

About.com seems ready to knuckle-under D.M.C.A-style, and I can only imagine \'blogs will be the next target.

More information is available at Politech.

I stumbled across this one earlier today and it contains some great information. Cindy Curling, Electronic Resources Librarian for a Washington DC firm, did an informal survey of librarians and others on issues of privacy and filtering, and the responses and related comments are very interesting. I recommend taking the time to read the entire article and exploring the included links. Although the title mentions law libraries, specifically, the information contained in the article goes far beyond that. According to the author herself, \"I found the comments and opinions above to be interesting, and more importantly, thought provoking. I was especially surprised at how few librarians had any influence in the development of their firm/school/agency\'s Internet access policy...\" more...