LISNews: Librarian News

The New Yorker has a nice piece on the bygone days when a president's widow wrote letters to her librarian requesting books:

About a year and a half ago, Harriet Shapiro, who is the head of exhibitions at the New York Society Library, was, in the manner of modern-day researchers everywhere, randomly Googling—looking for information about Marion King, the institution’s longtime librarian, who died in 1976. To Shapiro’s surprise, a link came up to Harvard’s Theodore Roosevelt collection, in which lay a cache of nearly six hundred letters written to King by Edith Kermit Roosevelt. ...

The letters spanned the period of Mrs. Roosevelt’s widowhood, beginning in 1920, the year after Theodore Roosevelt died. In them, she requested books to be sent to her home, Sagamore Hill, near Oyster Bay.

This article in the NY Times announces the unveiling of Job Search Central at the Science, Industry and Business Library Branch of the NYPL, Madison Avenue at 34th Street.

Free one-on-one counseling plus other services are available, as they once were doing a lean period for our current Commander-in-Chief. In an interview four years ago with American Libraries magazine, Mr. Obama recounted how a librarian at the mid-Manhattan branch of the library helped him locate the organization in Chicago that hired him as a community organizer in the mid-1980s. Hurray for librarians!!

Kristin McDonough, director of the business library estimated that more than one-third of the 1,900 daily visitors are looking for work or preparing for the loss of a job. She said about $1 million will be spent throughout the library system in the effort to help job seekers.

An attention grabbing headline from World Of Psychology: Liz Spikol is a Threat to Your Library!

Liz Spikol has a great entry today about the Treatment Advocacy Center’s (TAC) press release about how mental illness affects our nation’s public libraries. The Treatment Advocacy Center is the organization that prefers that anyone who has mental illness get treatment, even if it’s against their will. Think of it as a stodgy old grandfather from the 1800s that might say, “Hitting a child is necessary and good for the child; the more often the better! Teaches them some manners…”

Like many before him, the former head of state is writing a book...but rather than delivering a more traditional presidential memoir, he plans to explain twelve difficult personal and political decisions he has made.

According to Robert B. Barnett, the Washington lawyer who negotiated the deal with Crown on Mr. Bush’s behalf, the book will cover Mr. Bush’s decisions relating to Sept. 11, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina. Mr. Barnett said Mr. Bush would also write about why he ran for president, his decision to quit drinking, his discovery of religious faith, and his relationships with his parents, wife and siblings.

Mr. Barnett said Mr. Bush began working on a draft two days after he left office. “He’s already written 30,000 words,” Mr. Barnett said. “He has no collaborator, but he’s working with his former chief speech writer Christopher Michel.”