LISNews: Librarian News

Brian Kenney: "librarians are the most vocal advocates for open access to journal content—except, apparently, when it’s their own publications. I suspect this is because of ALA’s outdated, carrot-on-the-end-of-the-stick, publishing model: keep the publications locked away as the supreme benefit of membership. "

Finally, there is common sense. If you want your content to be used, then readers need to be able to discover it through a search engine and read it in a click. Or find it in their feed aggregator. We need to be able to forward it, post our disagreements with it, blog about it, and have it pushed to us on Facebook. It must, in short, be integrated into our professional lives. Or else it becomes irrelevant, no matter how good it might be.

Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large 8:9 (September 2008) is now available.

The 26-page issue (PDF as usual, but HTML versions of the individual essays are available using the links below or at the C&I home page) includes the following five essays:
Bibs & Blather: Projects and Rejects

40% less self-indulgent than the five-part post! Some new information! Otherwise, it's largely the same material. If you feel you already know all this, skip right on over to:

Perspective: Updating the Book Discovery Projects

Microsoft dropped its project--and in the process released all limits on 300,000 scanned books and gave the scanners to its partners. That and lots more in this multipart roundup.

Perspective: On Conferences in a Time of Limits

Why do we go to conferences--and will conferences change significantly thanks to high travel costs? Some semi-informed musings and non-predictions.

Old Media/New Media -- Read More

On the third floor of the Museum of Modern Art in Midtown Manhattan rests a tribute to Esquire’s glory years — a collection of 92 covers from the 1960s and early 1970s that have become, in the museum’s words, “essential to the iconography of American culture.”

That illustrious history hangs over the magazine’s effort to celebrate its 75th year. Its attempt to add to the annals of museum-worthy covers includes a nod to the digital age: an electronic cover, using admittedly rudimentary technology, that will flash “the 21st Century Begins Now,” when it appears on newsstands in September.

Read full story of how e-ink will be used on the cover of Esquire at the New York Times.

I wasn't sure if this was going to come to pass, but it does appear that my interview with Mark Shuttleworth is now available online. I knew they put some content up, but had no idea how exactly they determined what content went where.

So why do I keep belaboring that interview here? Because Mark Shuttleworth is cool, and I think that there are a few things in the interview that librarians (and educators) might find interesting. Hold on to your hats, non-techie types... Not only do we never talk directly about Ubuntu, but we don't talk a whole lot about really overtly horribly bloody tech stuff in general.

For those who do love the tech stuff (there have to be a few of you, still, right?), I've launched into a podcast adventure with Lisa Hoover (of various tech media outlets) that can be found here if you're interested. Please note that we're librarians and writers, we're located at different ends of the eastern seaboard, and between Skype, my way too sensitive mic, and our inexperience with manhandling audio (this being our first podcast), it's a little rougher sounding this week than it will be next. We hope.