LISNews: Librarian News

In 2009, Jay DeVaughn was named the Community College of Aurora's administrator of the year.

In 2010, DeVaughn will plead guilty to sending death threats and white powder to President Barack Obama and congressional representatives from Colorado and Alabama, the U.S. attorney's office in Denver said Thursday.

DeVaughn, 42, of Aurora will be sentenced Nov. 19. His handwriting and fingerprints were found on the letters that ranted about health care reform. Federal agents also matched DNA on the letters to DNA found on items in a wastebasket in DeVaughn's office.

He was arrested in March, a few days after federal agents watched him mail four powder-laden packages at a southeast Denver post-office mailbox. The day before his arrest, DeVaughn admitted himself to Porter Adventist Hospital for mental-health reasons.

Read more: Ex-librarian to plead guilty to sending death threats - The Denver Post http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_15908605#ixzz0xoM6dTHc

SkyRiver Files Antitrust Suit Against OCLC
July 29, 2010
Emeryville, CA—In a move that could have far-reaching implications for competition in the library software and technology services industry, SkyRiver Technology Solutions, LLC has filed suit in federal court in San Francisco against OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. The suit alleges that OCLC, a purported non-profit with a membership of 72,000 libraries worldwide, is unlawfully monopolizing the markets for cataloging services, interlibrary lending, and bibliographic data, and attempting to monopolize the market for integrated library systems, by anticompetitive and exclusionary practices. -- Read More

NY Times, Dateline: NEW HAVEN — As the trial approaches for one of the men charged in the triple-homicide home invasion in Cheshire, CT in 2007, all the motions, requests for evidence, and demands that one would expect in a complex capital case have flown back and forth between the defense and prosecutors.

But one stood out, tantalizingly. The defense said it would request that the names of books that one of the accused men, Steven Hayes, checked out of a prison library before the killings not be admitted as evidence. The books, the defense indicated in one motion, included plots that were “criminally malevolent in the extreme.”

Mr. Hayes’s lawyers suggested that prison librarians might have given him what amounted to a literary blueprint for the crime, one that already has what some see as a literary predecessor of sorts: it has been compared with the 1959 Kansas killings described in Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.”

The defense lawyers’ suggestion that prison library books could have shaped the crime — or that knowing Mr. Hayes read them could turn jurors against him — has created a strange kind of guessing game about the literary interests of Mr. Hayes, 46, a career thief and drug abuser whose education topped out at a high school equivalency degree.

Moves to Make Funded Research Public
The U.S. House of Representatives has announced a public hearing to explore making publicly-funded research open to the public. Legislators in both the House and the Senate have already introduced bills calling for this. If they pass, the implications could be significant and might result in an economic jump.
Meanwhile... BP Launches Effort To Control Scientific Research Of Oil Disaster : The lucrative $250-an-hour deal “buys silence,” said Robert Wiygul, an Ocean Springs environmental lawyer who analyzed the contract. “It makes me feel like they were more interested in making sure we couldn’t testify against them than in having us testify for them,” said George Crozier, head of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, who was approached by BP.