The folks at Top Five have identified 15 mistakes in the upcoming movie other than that backwards-broomstick thing. They begin with #15, \”Harry is never once shown with owl poop on his shoulder.\”
July 2001
Bibliotheca Alexandrina to open this fall
Matt Eberle suggested
This One from The Washington Post on the Bibliotheca Alexandrina which is scheduled to open in the fall.
As with all large projects, they are dealing with years of delay, budget overruns and controversy over its warehouse-style collection policy.
\”We want to give maximum freedom to allow it to be an interlocutor\” with the world\’s great academic and research institutions, said Serageldin, The library director. \”One of the benefits is that it churns up intellectual activity in Egypt.\”
Unlucky library thief
Matt Eberle sent in This One on a would-be thief that tried to rob a library while the local policeman was giving a presentation on crime statistics.
The Citizen newspaper said Superintendent Christo Heunis was addressing business people last Tuesday when the building\’s alarm went off.
\”It was quite ironic. I was actually presenting crime figures at the time,\” the newspaper quoted Heunis as saying.
Open letter from librarians protesting the police violence in Genoa, Italy
There is an open letter from librarians, written by Mark Rosenzweig, protesting the police violence at the anti-globalization demonstrations in Genoa, Italy, on the web and ready for your signature. I signed it, not because I am opposed to globalization per se, but I am opposed to the way it is happening and definitely opposed to the police response in Genoa, which has been incredibly brutal. The signable letter is at http://libr.org/PLG/Genoa.html, on the PLG site. It is also copied inside if you follow the internal LISNews link. You may also be interested in the Library Juice feature issue on what has happened in Genoa and it\’s coverage in the media. Apologies to those who object to anything non-library related, but as professionals we exist in the larger world.
There is an open letter from librarians, written by Mark Rosenzweig, protesting the police violence at the anti-globalization demonstrations in Genoa, Italy, on the web and ready for your signature. I signed it, not because I am opposed to globalization per se, but I am opposed to the way it is happening and definitely opposed to the police response in Genoa, which has been incredibly brutal. The signable letter is at http://libr.org/PLG/Genoa.html, on the PLG site. It is also copied inside if you follow the internal LISNews link. You may also be interested in the Library Juice feature issue on what has happened in Genoa and it\’s coverage in the media. Apologies to those who object to anything non-library related, but as professionals we exist in the larger world.Open letter from librarians against the murder of people excercising the right to protest against corporate
globalization at the Genoa Conference, July, 2001
The undersigned librarians, library employees, library professors &
teachers of library & information sciences, library students & interns,
information professionals, paraprofessionals and service providers,
wish to express their horror at the escalating anti-civilian military
mobilizations and the planned and entirely disproportionate violence
exercised against fundamentally peaceful, certainly unarmed, protests
of the meetings of the G7+, the WTO, the IMF/World Bank and all other
gatherings of the proponents and agencies of a transnational corporate
world order.
We reject (and hold responsible the entire chain of command behind it)
the orchestrated, planned violence of the armed-to-the-teeth defenders
of the global elite against the all-too-visible political
manifestations of popular, international rejection of the agendas of
the institutions perceived as imposing policies and practices which,
rather than alleviating the problems they claim to be confronting
(hunger -famine – on an unimaginable scale; dislocations of entire
populations; marginalizations of whole sectors (class strata, nations,
peoples, ethnic groups), poverty of a degree and scale which has been
–and continues to be (for most people) unthinkable; rampant epidemics
of fatal disease; massive environmental despoliation in the
overwhelming majority of the world, and increasing attacks even on the
social & economic gains of most people in the so-called developed world
with its welfare state protections and public sectors being scrapped
and shredded, including in the self-proclaimed economic
\’super-powers\’) are merely interested in creating a stabilized global
regime in which the attempted globalized monopolization of effective
wealth and power in the hands of actors not responsible to any
democratic control is imposed, while containing the disruptions created
by the inevitable resistance of the masses of people affected by
policies over which they have no control.
We protest, vehemently, the murder of an anti-corporate protestor in
Genoa, shot and ruthlessly run-over by a military vehicle, and also the
growing number of those protestors being beaten, gassed, shot at,
trampled, jailed and subjected to both personal brutality and high-tech
crowd control techniques for the purposes of discouraging their
protests — and all such protests — and preventing them from having
any impact on those world \”leaders\” who are presently meeting in a
fortified compound in the free city of Genoa.
We call on the global economic elite meeting in Genoa — and ready to
meet in further fortified locations over the next months as they have
since the WTO debacle in Seattle — to abandon the entire
anti-democratic framework of their deliberations, to drop the
anti-popular programs and policies which they are pursuing and to enter
into free, open dialogue, transparent and unimpeded, with
representatives of civil society and of organized mass-democratic
forces and movements.
Let this murder in Genoa not be in vain! The escalation of this
confrontation with popular interests and representatives of the needs
of the ordinary people of the world should come to a halt here and
now.
The cynicism of Bush who tells the world that the protests only hurt
the cause of \”the poor\” (as if \”the poor\” were some category of humans
apart from his own species) must be rejected with the contempt it
deserves.
We call on our fellow professionals and workers, educators, cultural
activists, all those engaged in the social and cultural service sector,
to reject privatization, the destruction of the public sector where
it exists and its discouragement where it has yet to be significantly
developed, the substitution of anti-democratic supra-national
decision-making of secret bodies representing elite interests for
existing democratic structures, however weak.
Progressive librarians and information workers say NO to corporate
globalization; NO to murderous violence against legitimate militant,
mass anti-globalization protest; NO to the erosion of democratic
institutions; NO to the crushing of the claims of national sovereignty
and the equal rights of minorities; NO to the creation of a new
economic order based on the burdening of the poor nations with
increasing debt!
Mistakes and Failures at the Desk
Don Warner Saklad passed along Mistakes and Failures at the Reference Desk By Lydia Olszak
This study, based on data collected through observation and structured interviews, explores the incidence of mistakes and failures by reference staff in an academic library. Three main questions are addressed: (1) what actions or behaviors constitute a mistake or failure? (2) what techniques are used by reference staff to alert each other of mistakes? and (3) do mistakes at the reference desk conform with the typology developed by Bosk in his study of medical mistakes? Results suggest that reference librarians must deal with competing goals and that providing a correct answer may not be the most important goal for every transaction.
17th-century texts stolen from Oxford
Always helpful Charles Davis passed along This Times UK Story
on several 400-year-old theology books that have disappeared from the Bodleian Library at Oxford, just days after thieves tried to
snatch precious watches, silver and gold from the university’s
neighbouring Ashmolean Museum.
The 17th-century books, worth about £20,000, had been
available to study on request and were not in display cases.
They think ten large volumes were smuggled out of the library, concealed in clothing.
Traditional publishing’s latest horror story
Cliff writes \”This is an interesting article especially because it suggests some interesting ideas on how this technology will or could be used. It\’s too bad publishers find this a threat rather than think of it as a business opportunity, but perhaps that\’s the bias of this article\’s writer. This kind of tech will make trees more endangered than ever, as books can join the ranks of \”throwaway\” status if this technology becomes widespread. One can imagine some publishers priting very cheap copies of books, meant to be thrown away (trashy novels, for example?)
Full Story from Digital Mass \”
Gates gives $4.2 million to UK libraries
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has donated $4.2 million to British libraries, reports this story from the Times (UK). The money will be used to provide information technology learning centres in 350 libraries serving some of the most deprived areas in the UK. It will be very welcome as the government wants all 4,300 of Britain\’s libraries to be online by next year, no easy task.
The Warrior Librarian gets makeover
Earlier this month, there was a story about the very funny site of Biblia, the Warrior Librarian, written by a school librarian and full of good stuff. Now, \”in an effort to compete with sites that look nicer than Biblia\’s old site\” Biblia is getting a major makeover and the site is now called Warrior Librarian Weekly. It\’s well worth a look, there\’s some great new content there too. Following Biblia\’s example…(there is no more to read).
Sep 1st Deadline for Public Library of Science Demands
Matt Eberle writes \”September 1st is the deadline for the Public Library of Science demands to be met. 25,000 scientists have pledged to publish in, edit, review for, and subscribe to only journals that agree to make articles available after a 6 month embargo.
Recent Comments