LISNews: Librarian News

This weekend I caught a special on the Food Network, Food Network Unwrapped 2. In amongst the backstage secrets of Iron Chef America, Paula Deen, and Tyler Florence was a brief segment on Jonathan Milder.

Milder is the research librarian for the Food Network. The show had him showing off the cookbook stacks (over 4,000 titles!) and making some calls to verify key information (is there a difference between rice vinegar and rice wine vinegar?) for an upcoming Food Network show.

A little digging also found me an interview with Milder at the StarChefsJobFinder website (scroll down a screen to see it). Here's a snippet:

I can't imagine there's any direct route to doing this sort of thing. This position is an odd mix of food writer, journalist, trend-watcher and librarian. The next person to hold this position will have trodden an entirely different path from the one I traveled. This is a position for voracious readers, bookworms, and aspiring polymaths, a position for people who find nearly as much pleasure in reading about food as in eating it. And those people can be found in the most unexpected places.

The show will air again on May 19 and 20, in case you want to catch it.

CBS News fires producer for plagiarism: "We were horrified," CBS News spokeswoman Sandra Genelius said. "It was almost verbatim." A CBS News producer was fired and the network apologized after a Katie Couric video essay on libraries was found to be plagiarized from The Wall Street Journal.
An editor for The Wall Street Journal called CBS News to point out the similarities of the April 4 notebook item to Zaslow's article, headlined "Of the Places You'll Go, Is the Library Still One of Them?" The pieces talk about how libraries are seen differently by children from their parents.

Update: 04/12 00:44 GMT by B :The Raw Story informs us that the plagiarized April 4 post is still up on the CBS News website...lots o' links too and sources for cached versions of the YouTube clip. But, as Newsweek reports, ""Couric apparently faces no repercussions, because she doesn't actually write 'Katie Couric's Notebook';though many of the entries are presented in the form of first-person essays, as was the controversial piece. Addressing her audience, Couric began: 'Hi everyone, I still remember when I got my first library card.'"

ABC TV Turns A New Page In Comedy: "The Librarians" starts production in Melbourne on March 5. The six-part series centres on the trials and tribulations of Frances O'Brien, a devout Catholic and head librarian. Her life unravels when she is forced to employ her ex-best friend, Christine Grimwood - now a drug dealer - as the children's librarian. Frances must do all she can to contain her menacing past and concentrate on the biggest event of the library calendar - Book Week.

Kelly writes "Today's LISNEWs about C-Span dinging Nancy Pelosi using some of their footage reminded me of a story from today's stash of Boing Boing articles. In this story, this guy is ripping Congress webcasts, which are streaming only, and archiving them! (Like a good librarian?) This is cool. Here's the scoop from the article: `The U.S. Congress provides webcasts for many of their hearings. In all cases, the hearings are streaming only, in many cases they are "live only" (no archive of the stream). In some cases, the committees even put a "copyright, all rights reserved" notice on the hearings! This is really dumb. So, I've started ripping all congressional streams starting with the house and posting them in a nonproprietary format for download, tagging, review, and annotation at Google Video and another copy at the Internet Archive (just to prove this is a nondenominational issue. This is a Tom Sawyer hack, a la "painting this fence is *loads* of fun!" I intend to prove to the Congressional webmasters that it is so much fun doing their web sites for them that they'll want to do it themselves so that I go away. Until then, look for "Carl Malamud on behalf of the U.S. Congress" for official news. Link to Boing article Link to ripped videos"