LISNews: Librarian News

Here\'s one from the Atlantic Monthly an article entitled \"The Kept University\". It focuses more on medical and science end of things, but it helps to explain the decline in support for many socially valued
disciplines like Library and Information Science. With more and more universities accepting the market driven model it is what brings in the money that begins to shape policy. The authors mention other signs of the universities selling out to the marketplace. These include distance learning, overuse of adjuncts, etc...

Commercially sponsored research is putting at risk the
paramount value of higher education -- disinterested
inquiry. Even more alarming, the authors argue,
universities themselves are behaving more and more like
for-profit companies

The BBC has a story on how computers will start to decompose with important records.

Vital archaeological records could be
lost forever because the computers
they are stored on become quickly
obsolete.

The physical site is nearly always
completely destroyed during a dig,
but archaeologists claim the
knowledge they glean from the
ground is then available for posterity.\"The irony is that archaeological
information held in magnetic format
is decaying faster than it ever did in
the ground,\" warns William Kilbride of
the Archaeology Data Service (ADS)
at the University of York. -- Read More

Boston.com has an exciting archivist
Story on the troubles facing todays archivists.

Actually, the biggest problem is one scholars and archivists already confront. It\'s not an excess of access but the reverse. For the wonderful world of digitized information and on line everything has a dark archival underbelly: The more sophisticated information technology becomes, and the more readily accessible in the present, the harder it is to preserve and the less accessible it becomes in the future.

news.excite.com has a Story on flooing at the Bringham Young University in UT.

\"Thousands of Brigham Young University students and library employees were startled in the Harold B. Lee Library when they heard: \"Please gather your belongings and immediately evacuate the building in an orderly fashion\" around 12:15 p.m. on Thursday.\" -- Read More