LISNews: Librarian News

The very first librarian of the United Nations, Sigurd Rasmussen, a Dane by birth who later became a US citizen, has died at the age of 99.

From 1941 to 1946, he was a librarian for the League of Nations Mission at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, working with such luminaries as Albert Einstein.

Fluent in a dozen languages, he later formed what would become the Library of the United Nations and became the U.N.'s first librarian in 1946. Obituary from the Washington Post .

Richard Kreimer, 55, who successfully sued the Morristown (NJ) Library for harassment (they ejected him due to his unappealing smell), is now pursuing another target, New Jersey Transit. The stakes are much higher this time, he's suing for $5,000,000.000, as the court award of $230,000 from his 1991 suit has long been spent on medical expenses from a number of chronic health problems.

Here's the news on the current suit, an audio interview from NPR and a suit from last year against the transit system in Philadelphia.

Anonymous Patron writes "A Strange One our of Massachusetts where A woman who said a man cared for her while she received cancer treatment can't believe library officials have agreed to put the name of his confessed killer on a library plaque. The killer was his live-in lover and fiancé on Feb. 7, and then fled to the woods and shot himself later in the day, according to police and prosecutors.
But city officials say they support Library Director Susan Shelton's decision to include the name on a plaque honoring hundreds of people who donated money to the new library."

Anonymous Patron writes "Not many details to this Chicago Tribune Piece but yet another sex offender was arrested in yet another library incident. This time a convicted sex offender was arrested last week after he touched a 4-year-old girl he was reading to at the Harold Washington Library Center, Chicago police and library officials said.
The girl's mother was in the children's section of the library when she gave a man permission to read to the child, said library spokeswoman Ruth Lednicer. When the mother saw what she judged to be inappropriate touching, she alerted a library guard, Lednicer said."