LISNews: Librarian News

That\'s about all there is to it folks: just a short notation in Nick Denton\'s weblog entry for August 27th. Some pretty high praise from the founder of Moreover Technologies which takes online current awareness to a new level. The entry in the \'blog is to Peter Scott\'s list of library weblogs.

When trustees of the Magness, (TN) library fired the librarian for wanting to relocate the library and provide patrons with improved service, the rest of the library\'s employees walked off the job. According to the article, the board member who served Librarian Susan Curtis with a piece of paper stating that \"her services were no longer needed, said, \"The board wants to strive to make the Magness Library more of what the original benefactors described it to be. We can be the cornerstone of Main Street revitalization. The library shouldn\'t just be a dusty, old book depository. Donations like the $100,000 given by Carrier Corporation could open the doors to making the library a place where piano recitals could be conducted and small community plays could be held.\" more... from The Southern Standard. ---- Also be sure and read what the community says about it at the end of the article.

The New York Times reports on the ALA\'s effort to challenge stereotypes about librarians in order to attract young people to the field:

In a Web site promoting a campaign by the American Library Association, librarians ride Harleys, surf and skateboard. They are young and hip. They wear dreadlocks and practice yoga. And like Ms. Garzolini, they are known to enjoy an occasional night at a bar. There is a cook and caterer, a \"popular culture junkie\" who started a hip-hop program for the Cleveland library and a \"surfer dude\" who owns a record company.

Colleges and universities are turning out more library and information science graduates than ever, the association says, but public libraries must compete with the growing number of higher paying jobs in the private sector, a formidable competitor even with the economy slowing. [ More ]

The ALA\'s campaign has been dubbed \"@ Your Library\" - the anti-stereotype part can be found here.

For the record, I was *attracted* to the profession by the stereotypes - I\'ll take quiet, bookish squares over jocks and hipsters any day, thank you very much ;)

Independent scholar E. Gene Smith, widely credited with preserving much of Tibet\'s literary heritage, is working to
make his massive personal library of rare texts available online:

Crammed into bookshelves and piled onto tables, about 10,000 long, narrow tablets wrapped in red and gold fabric pack the corners of a North Cambridge duplex. Printed from hand-carved wood blocks by monks over the last millennium, these looseleaf books of mulberry-husk paper feature, in ornately lettered and occasionally illustrated Tibetan characters, the mystical poetry of Milarepa, the astrological theories of Asian scientists, and the religious teachings of the great lamas of the ages. Over four decades as an itinerant archivist with a passion for preservation, a Mormon convert to Buddhism named E. Gene Smith has amassed a rare collection of the endangered Tibetan Buddhist canon: some original writings of Buddha, early commentaries by Indian Buddhists, and the writings of Tibetan Buddhist sages over the last 12 centuries. . .

[More from the Boston Globe. Smith\'s efforts to date can be seen at the site of the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center.]