LISNews: Librarian News

Anonymous Patron writes "Here's A Slashdot Thread that has some Good Comments on a Wired article, This Headline Is Not for Sale. The author, Adam L. Penenberg, writes about the blurring of the lines between advertising and news content.

Nowadays the wall between editorial and marketing must extend to the content itself. Marketers can have the sides, top and bottom of a page to peddle products and services, but the body must remain pure.

"

Here's an op-ed piece about the difference between what kids are "expected" to read over the summer now and what "suggested" reading was all about in decades past. It used to be all about leisure and enjoyment. Now, the idea is more equated with "work." Children's books are no longer just for fun.

"We seem to have lost sight of what children can actually process, and more important, of their own innate capacities. Instead of our children being free to roam and dream and invent on their own timetable, and to read about children doing such things, we increasingly ask our children to be sober and hard-working at every turn, to take detailed notes on their required texts with Talmudic attention, to endure computer-generated tests. And the texts we require them to pore over have become all too often about guarded, world-weary, overburdened children, who are spending their childhoods trying to cope with the mess their parents left them." Read More.

An Anonymous Patron writes sent along A Column that presents a a refreshing idea: Choose civility.The author, Steve Blow says he can't get used to is that so many people don't want to offer a conflicting opinion; they want to inflict a wound. Snide, sarcastic, belittling, profane – you name it. The intent is to sting, not discuss.
He says We do have a choice in how we will live. With strength, we can choose civility.

This is a personal essay in the Fort Wayne News Sentinel from a woman, who in college, was told "by beer chugging frat boys" that she looked like a "librarian-type," which in her mind was someone who spent the evenings alone, crying to her cat. Once out of college, she vowed to shed her bookish image, via Cosmo, tanning booths and Long Island Iced Teas. But two years out, she has re-embraced Moby Dick (heh heh) and declares, "you can take the girl out of the library, but you can't take the library out of the girl."