LISNews: Librarian News

New Haven, CT (AP) Christine O'Donnell's TV ad declaration "I'm not a witch" during her U.S. Senate campaign topped this year's best quotes, according to a Yale University librarian.

O'Donnell's quote is cited by Fred Shapiro, associate librarian at Yale Law School, who released his fifth annual list of the most notable quotations of the year. In the ad, O'Donnell was responding to reports of her revelations that she had dabbled in witchcraft years ago.

"It was such a remarkable unconventional quote to be a part of the political discourse," Shapiro said.

The quote by O'Donnell, a tea party favorite running in Delaware, tied for first place with "I'd like my life back," the lament made in May by BP's CEO Tony Hayward after the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.

"People resented the fact that he was wanting to get back to his yacht races and other aspects of his normal life when those little problems were dwarfed by the magnitude of what people on the Gulf Coast were dealing with," Shapiro said.

Shapiro noted that the top quotes stemmed from two of the biggest news stories of the year, the oil spill and the emergence of the tea party.

The original Yale Book of Quotations was published in 2006. Since then, Shapiro has released an annual list of the top 10 quotes. He said they will be incorporated into the next edition of the book.

Counterpunch has a column by Linda Ueki Absher, 'the lipstick librarian'. Here's a portion:

It's finally happened: everyone wants to be me.

Well, they don't want to be me, me. After all, who wants student loans, an undervalued house and a sweater that looks like I've just mugged a red heffalump? But everyone under thirty with skinny black jeans and artistic facial hair, or Bettie Page bangs and winsome skirts with felted bird appliqués (with an influential minority wearing all of the above) want to be what I am: a librarian. This is a surprise, to put it mildly.

A surprise because when I announced to friends and loved ones that I wanted to become a librarian, reaction was less than enthusiastic, running somewhere along the lines of what I would expect if I'd just announced I was really Joan of Arc but with less restrictive clothing and a high tolerance to heat: pity, bewilderment and resignation. It was as if I declared my intent of becoming a secular nun. I went to library school--a graduate program, no less, learned unspeakable things ("a festschrift is WHAT?") and graduated two years later. I was a librarian, with all its perks (steady income and access to books) and downsides (embarrassingly low steady income and non-existent social life)

But since library school, something odd happened: librarians became hip.

Robert Darnton, Harvard University professor and director of the Harvard University Library, outlines three problems facing the modern American research library and university: the decline of an economically viable market for most scholarly monographs published by university presses; the escalating prices of scientific journals and the role of open access journals; and the role of Google in a world of digital books and libraries. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/dec/23/library-three-jeremiads/

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — A bomb threat targeting Ohio State University was e-mailed to the FBI Tuesday morning, prompting the school to evacuate four academic buildings, including the main library. An initial search turned up nothing out of the ordinary, officials said.

The threat was in a message received Tuesday at FBI headquarters in Washington, said Paul Bresson, an agency spokesman based there. Campus police said they were alerted at 8:19 a.m. Tuesday that the threats involved the William Oxley Thompson Memorial Library and three laboratory buildings.

"This is still in our assessment a threat, and there have been no suspicious package or devices found at this time," university Police Chief Paul Denton said at a news conference.

Authorities did not identify the source of the bomb threats at Ohio State, one of the nation's largest universities, with more than 56,000 students at its main Columbus campus. The FBI's Bresson declined to provide information about where the e-mail appeared to come from or whether the bureau believed the threat was real.

More info & photos from the CBS local affiliate.