June 2000

Crime is down…bad for the library

Michigan Live has an article on fine collecting at libraries. Should we be so dependant on fines for our budget?

\”Fewer Ogemaw County court cases mean fewer fines from law violators. Shrinking penal fines, in turn, are slicing about $52,000 from the library\’s budget this year and last. That\’s a deeper cut than the 95-year-old institution can stomach.\”

Michigan Live has an article on fine collecting at libraries. Should we be so dependant on fines for our budget?

\”Fewer Ogemaw County court cases mean fewer fines from law violators. Shrinking penal fines, in turn, are slicing about $52,000 from the library\’s budget this year and last. That\’s a deeper cut than the 95-year-old institution can stomach.\”



\”So library planners are turning to voters. The Aug. 8 primary ballot asks voters to decide whether the West Branch District Library is worth a new .3-mill tax.\”


The proposal is for West Branch and Ogemaw, Edwards and West Branch township residents only – the region the district library serves.\”

\”We\’ve never had a library millage here,\” said Marsha Boyd, district librarian. \”We\’re dependent on penal fines for 80 percent of our funding.\”

\”The .3-mill levy would generate nearly $49,000 yearly for the library – nearly what the institution has lost in penal funding since last year.\”

\”You can see we don\’t have grandiose plans like building a second story,\” Boyd said. \”We just need to maintain our library at the level we\’re operating now.\”

\”That level is already skinny, board members say. The district library recently cut a full-time position – its children\’s librarian – its hours and its book budget. It operates 40 hours weekly on a $185,000 annual budget, Boyd said.\”

\”We\’ve reduced and reduced again,\” she said. \”I don\’t know what\’s left other than to completely cut our book budget. But libraries are books.\”

June 28, 2000 by Uncategorized 0

McCain Renews Porn-Filter Push

Even after COPPA was just found to be unconstitutional, John McCain feels compeled to puch filtering again. This time he introduced a sex-filtering amendment to a spending bill. It seems to be very obvious the Supreme Court is not allowing this kind of thing.

McCain said the measure was necessary to protect American children from the \”technological sophistication of online predators\” and websites featuring sex, racism, anti-semitism, drug-making information, and bomb recipes.

It\’s always for the children. Maybe we should out law everything that is no good for children. He did say conservative icon Laura Schlessinger agreed with his proposal. Which leads me to believe it\’s a terrible idea.
Good Story at Wired

Even after COPPA was just found to be unconstitutional, John McCain feels compeled to puch filtering again. This time he introduced a sex-filtering amendment to a spending bill. It seems to be very obvious the Supreme Court is not allowing this kind of thing.

McCain said the measure was necessary to protect American children from the \”technological sophistication of online predators\” and websites featuring sex, racism, anti-semitism, drug-making information, and bomb recipes.

It\’s always for the children. Maybe we should out law everything that is no good for children. He did say conservative icon Laura Schlessinger agreed with his proposal. Which leads me to believe it\’s a terrible idea.
Good Story at WiredOther senators said McCain\’s proposal went too far.


Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican, proposed an alternative scheme: Allowing schools and libraries to decide for themselves how to protect against \”access by minors to inappropriate matter on the Internet.\”


Santorum\’s amendment, also called the Neighborhood Children\’s Internet Protection Act, does not require administrators to install often-buggy blocking software and would let them employ codes of conduct instead

June 28, 2000 by Uncategorized 0

Collection Development

Blaira writes \”I would like to know how other medium sized public libraries do their collection development (specifically the staffing component) Does one librarian do all the buying for a system, or a committee, or does each branch order separately.
Which works better, both for the library budget and the patrons? \”

My question is, are committees ever the best way to get something accomplished?

June 28, 2000 by Uncategorized 0

Linking may get a day in court

Wired has a Story on the continuing battle between the RIAA and the web. This ruling could call into question all linking. Remeber a U.S. District Court has ruled that websites can legally provide links to any pages on all other sites (deep linking). The RIAA wants to make it illegal to link to anything that is illegal.

\”If this kind of automated hyperlinking is ruled illegal, the Internet is going to grind to a halt,\” said Ira Rothken, legal counsel for MP3Board.com.

Wired has a Story on the continuing battle between the RIAA and the web. This ruling could call into question all linking. Remeber a U.S. District Court has ruled that websites can legally provide links to any pages on all other sites (deep linking). The RIAA wants to make it illegal to link to anything that is illegal.

\”If this kind of automated hyperlinking is ruled illegal, the Internet is going to grind to a halt,\” said Ira Rothken, legal counsel for MP3Board.com. An RIAA representative said this case isn\’t about hyperlinking at all.


\”This isn\’t about automated versus not-automated hyperlinks, this is about what they know and what they don\’t know,\” said Steve Fabrizio, the RIAA\’s senior vice president for legal and business affairs.


\”This isn\’t the RIAA coming out against hyperlinking. This is about the fact that the sources MP3Board.com are linking to are blatantly pirate sites which they are aware of. They link to sites that say \’Super Pirated MP3s.\’ They even have a genre labeled as \’Legal MP3s.\’\”

June 27, 2000 by Uncategorized 0

Library art books destroyed

MassLive has a sad, sad, Story on books being trashed and thrased at the Forbes Library.

\”According to library director Blaise Bisaillon, dozens of volumes of art, photography and music books have been vandalized over the last 10 months by an unknown assailant.

MassLive has a sad, sad, Story on books being trashed and thrased at the Forbes Library.

\”According to library director Blaise Bisaillon, dozens of volumes of art, photography and music books have been vandalized over the last 10 months by an unknown assailant. In about a quarter of those cases, the entire contents of the book have been removed, leaving an empty cover.


\”In other instances, they just sliced out a few pages,\” Bisaillon said. \”You wouldn\’t realize the books have been vandalized until somebody checks them out and takes them home and sees that some pages have been sliced out.\”

June 27, 2000 by Uncategorized 0

Kids and Web Searching

Brian writes \”At the 6th Conference on Human Factors and the Web last week, some researchers delivered a paper called, \”When Kids Use the Web: A Naturalistic Comparison of Children\’s Navigation Behavior and Subjective Preferences on Two WWW Sites.\”


Although the study used a small group of subjects (eight 12yo\’s and eight 16yo\’s) and was limited to fact-finding activities on only two websites, it does seem like it may have some useful information for librarians who either design the youth services areas of their institutions\’ sites or train tweens and teens to do research on the Web.
Read more at :
pantos.org
\”

June 27, 2000 by Uncategorized 0

Huge flood on Director’s First Week

You think your first day on the job was a tuff one?

In-Forum has
another Story on the flooding at NDSU. It turns out
the new director just started 2 weeks ago! Her fourth
day at work was a flood that caused incredible amounts
of damage to the library.

\”What Pamela Drayson
calls \”our own Niagara Falls\” came crashing through
the library\’s southside windows and engulfed full
bookshelves and map cases Tuesday, her fourth day of
employment at NDSU. Marooned in the south Fargo
house where she moved one week earlier, Drayson
could not reach the library, even by
telephone.\”

What a trooper! Kudos to her and
her staff for all the hard work.

You think your first day on the job was a tuff one?

In-Forum has
another Story on the flooding at NDSU. It turns out
the new director just started 2 weeks ago! Her fourth
day at work was a flood that caused incredible amounts
of damage to the library.

\”What Pamela Drayson
calls \”our own Niagara Falls\” came crashing through
the library\’s southside windows and engulfed full
bookshelves and map cases Tuesday, her fourth day of
employment at NDSU. Marooned in the south Fargo
house where she moved one week earlier, Drayson
could not reach the library, even by
telephone.\”

What a trooper! Kudos to her and
her staff for all the hard work.
In two weeks it\’ll look like we\’re gliding on top of the
water,\” she said. \”But underneath we\’ll be paddling like
mad.\”
The library is being watched by others around the
country, especially those with an interest in agriculture,
physics and the other sciences, for which NDSU is
considered a resource.
\”We loan far more nationally than we borrow,\” Drayson
said.
Asked whether the deluge has inspired her to return to
her previous post at Kansas City (Kan.) Community
College, her answer was an emphatic no.
\”I\’m having too much fun working with these people,\”
she said.

June 27, 2000 by Uncategorized 0

library can’t find time capsule it buried

I wasn\’t sure whether or not to put this under
humor.

Mary Musgrave writes : \”this article that was in
Saturday\’s Dallas Morning
News. Haltom City is a
suburb of Ft. Worth.\”

\”Ms. Deaton and former
Haltom City librarian Laura Cleveland remembered
putting the time capsule in an area west of the library.

Ms. Cleveland, now the children\’s librarian in Watauga,
said while digging at the initial location they hit
something, but it turned out to be the sprinkler system.

After digging 10 or 12 more holes – and using a metal
probe to search them – they conceded their time
capsule was gone.

I wasn\’t sure whether or not to put this under
humor.

Mary Musgrave writes : \”this article that was in
Saturday\’s Dallas Morning
News. Haltom City is a
suburb of Ft. Worth.\”

\”Ms. Deaton and former
Haltom City librarian Laura Cleveland remembered
putting the time capsule in an area west of the library.

Ms. Cleveland, now the children\’s librarian in Watauga,
said while digging at the initial location they hit
something, but it turned out to be the sprinkler system.

After digging 10 or 12 more holes – and using a metal
probe to search them – they conceded their time
capsule was gone. The two women agree that the time capsule was
probably unearthed when the irrigation system was
installed in the early 1990s.

Ms. Cleveland said, \”We tried to make it waterproof, but
if [workers] opened it and water had leaked in … they
might have thrown it away.\”

Future summer reading programs may include time
capsules, Ms. Deaton said. But next time they\’ll do
some careful planning and draw a map.

\”The moral to this story is measure everything and draw
a map with a friend,\” Ms. Cleveland said. \”Don\’t try to
rely on memory.\”  

June 27, 2000 by Uncategorized 0

Research Libraries on their way out?

Zdnet has this lengthy and interesting article about copyright and its effect on research libraries. In addition, are research libraries \”virtually\” kicking themselves out of businnes.

\”As is so often the case when established industries meet the Internet, there is a paradox here: The libraries\’ rush into digital technologies may be a sprint toward their demise. At the very least, a monumental transformation seems inevitable. Yet, there is no turning back.\”

Zdnet has this lengthy and interesting article about copyright and its effect on research libraries. In addition, are research libraries \”virtually\” kicking themselves out of businnes.

\”As is so often the case when established industries meet the Internet, there is a paradox here: The libraries\’ rush into digital technologies may be a sprint toward their demise. At the very least, a monumental transformation seems inevitable. Yet, there is no turning back.\”

\”Research libraries around the country have embraced bits and bytes as their future, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to become \”libraries without walls,\” as the University of Virginia\’s librarian, Karin Wittenborg, described it.\”

\”Do we need a building?\” wondered Deanna Marcum, an internationally renowned librarian and president of the Council on Library and Information Resources in Washington, DC. \”The question I like to ask my students is: What happens to the library when we don\’t have to go there, when the library acts as a service instead of a place?\”

\”Paper, ink, books, shelves, dust: These were the hallmarks of research libraries all of 10 years ago. And for all its concentration on matters cerebral, the act of research itself was steeped in the physical: People traveled to libraries, sifted through card catalogues, walked the stacks hunting for books, fished tomes from shelves, lugged them to photocopy machines, leafed through pages and penned notes on paper.

But the research library as an embodiment of a tactile universe of research is changing.\”

There is pointing. There is clicking. There is light on a screen. It is becoming a digital enterprise.\”

\”But as it embraces the Digital Age, the research library is increasingly under assault from the software publishing industry, which is working to see copyright law upended. Even more ominously, experts say, the software industry is working hard to eliminate for digital content the built-in exemptions that libraries enjoy under existing copyright law – exemptions that enable them, for example, to lend information or to archive it.

\”The research library, an institution grounded in more than 200 years of creaking, ponderous, slowly evolving tradition, will not resemble itself five years from today, many leading librarians and experts say.\”

June 27, 2000 by Uncategorized 0

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