LISNews: Librarian News

Steve Fesenmaier writes \"The Charleston Daily Mail, the evening Republican newspaper, reprinted the recent West Coast story on activist librarians. Five days latter the Charleston Gazette, the morning Democratic newspaper, wrote an editorial, \"Librarians Fighting many battles.\"
They said, in part, today\'s librarians are more apt to be making noise than shushing anyone, we have led opposition to unfair copyright laws, and an anti-pornography law that would require content filtering on Internet computers in libraries.

The ALA\'s agenda is not radical or extremist. Librarians are opposed to censorship, so they oppose attempts to mandate that they limit what adult patrons may access from library computers. \"

This was from the Thursday December 5, 2002 issue, you\'ll need a subscription to Read It Online.

George S. Porter writes: \"Walking in a local mall this weekend, I passed a Doubleday bookshop. I mean
it; I passed right on by. This is a singular event, since my family is well
aware that I am constitutionally incapable of not entering a bookstore (new
or used). Simply put, a single publisher\'s output is more likely to be
frustrating to browse than it is to delight or surprise.

Scirus, with a preponderance of Elsevier content and a dearth of society
publications, is similarly nearly worthless in the overall scheme of things.
PubScience was hamstrung by the refusal of the American Chemical Society,
among learned associations, to participate. Scirus benefits from corporate
synergy, gaining references from Elsevier\'s Beilstein database. Scirus also
scores some society journal citations through Medline(!), which provides
basic bibliographic data for a host of material which does not receive the
full intellectual effort of indexing. Still and all, Scirus falls well
short of the mark of a research caliber bibliographic database. -- Read More

The following editorial appeared in the November 24, 2002 edition of the Binghampton, NY Press & Sun Bulletin: \"Binghamton Mayor Richard A. Bucci has probably done as good a job as anyone could have presiding over the city during a prolonged economic slump, but he\'s likely to go down in history as the mayor who closed the city\'s libraries. Some legacy.\" Read More.

Ron Force writes \"The Wall Street Journal has an Opinion column by Lisa Singh on turning the library into a coffee house to attract users:

\"...the Starbucks effect goes beyond mental stimulation. It is, so to speak, a way of life, suggesting leisure rather than study and entertainment rather than work. It is in the general culture, whether there is a Starbucks nearby or not. One librarian I know says that she spends most of her time these days telling patrons to pull up their pants, put on some shoes and stop cracking gum, in between signing them up to use the computers, in front of which they often idle the hours away on Yahoo chat or even, occasionally, some porn site.

In many ways, you can sympathize with the attempt of library administrators to make their buildings \"relevant\"--especially to the young. It is probably a losing proposition, but you can understand the logic. Little wonder that so many look to Barnes & Noble--and Starbucks--for inspiration.\"
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