From the North Shore News:
In the past 18 years, Elizabeth Nash has listened to 4,000 audiobooks. \”I\’m a big user,\” she confides. \”My life depends on them.\”
The West Vancouver resident has only peripheral vision. \”I can\’t read a book or read my mail or write a cheque – but I listen to about six hours of tapes a day.\”
So Nash was less than impressed when the Liberals slashed the B.C. Library Services\’ audiobooks program as part of their civil service cuts last week . . .
More.
Or what you ought to be thinking, anyhow 😉
Attorney General John Ashcroft is reportedly considering a plan to relax restrictions on the FBI\’s spying on domestic religious and political organizations. The proposal would loosen one of the most fundamental restrictions on the conduct of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and would be yet another civil rights casualty of the Bush Administration\’s war on terrorism.
The guidelines were originally imposed on the FBI in the 1970s when it was discovered that the Bureau had engaged in widespread unchecked domestic surveillance to monitor antiwar protesters, the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Panthers and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., among others, in an effort to undermine and discredit them . . .
Read more and send a free fax to the Justice Department (courtesy of the American Civil Liberties Union) here.
Cavan McCarthy writes \”The sale of netLibrary assets to OCLC was finalized at 5 p.m. Jan. 24 in Boulder, Colorado. The sale includes both the eBook Division, which will become a division of OCLC, and the MetaText eTextbook Division, which will become a for-profit subsidiary. Both operations will remain in Boulder.
Press Release \”
rick sent in
This Story on The federal depository library program and how libraries are being ordered to pull materials from their collections.
\”It\’s really hard,\” the head librarian of the Government Documents Library at the University of Illinois said recently. \”We\’re librarians. We don\’t want to prevent access to information. We feel very strongly about that. That\’s why we\’re in the business.\”
Lee Hadden writes: \”Today\’s Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2002, has an article on page
B1 by Gautam Naik, \”BioTech Firm Bypass Journals to Make News.\”
The article discusses the increasingly common trend of announcing the
results of experiments, not in refereed science journals, but in press
releases. The end result is the public is exposed to claims which may be
exaggerated or worse, undermining the authority of the rest of the
scientific community.
\”It used to be that a scientific breakthrough was taken seriously only
if it first appeared in a peer-reviewed journal. But in the race to grab
the spotlight, some companies are rushing to release information via
esoteric publications that have less-stringent criteria or in news
releases.\”
Read more about it at: wsj.com\”
Bob Cox sent along the Salon Story on the death of Astrid Lindgren, creator of the braided, freethinking Pippi Longstocking, died Monday. She was 94.
\”I write to amuse the child within me and can only hope that other children may have some fun that way too,\” Lindgren once wrote.
Someon writes \”The Seattle Times has a story
about the Governor\’s plan to close and disband the Washington State Library because of budget problems. It seems that the library has many fewer visitors than the local public library. The library was moved from its building on the Capitol grounds so that its building could be used to house legislators… \”
Here\’s Another that says In saving $9 million in library operating costs, local and county libraries lose $3 million in federal grants and will individually have to replace other services costing more than $8.3 million. Add the capital cost of replacing the State Library by a subsequent administration and the proposal adds up to bad arithmetic.
A bit of rhetoric, plus a petition and (possibly) some lawyers, and we\’re off to the races!
The American Library Association doesn\’t want any libraries to have filtering systems on their computers, yet librarians are seeing rising levels of child abuse occurring and must deal with trench-coated pedophiles who loiter around libraries to view pornographic materials–or to sexually molest children . . .
The Traditional Values Coalition has recently launched an effort to challenge every public library that refuses to install filtering systems on their computers. TVC will be filing a series of class-action lawsuits against libraries refusing to filter pornography from their computers.
Given the wording of the petition itself, I can only imagine this page is being filtered as we speak 🙂
Thanks to Politech.
The new issue of the Marginal Librarian, put out by McGill library school students, is now available.
Is Am̩lie Poulain an MLIS Student? РMichelle Atkin
How I Became a Mail Artist – Francesca Maniaci
Panslav – Donald Prochera
The Database Culture of the Postmodern – Robert Kelly
Copyright and Book Piracy – Eric Anctil
Profiles of 1st Year Students – Carolyn Littlejohns
Mike Winter writes \”Most of us learned in library school, or on our own, that librarianship became \”feminized\” in the US in the latter part of the 19th and the early part of the 20th centuries.The sources are writers like Dee Garrison, who wrote Apostles of Culture (1979) but there are many others.
I wonder if in fact this long-established trend is now in the process of being reversed. In a recent book by Christine Williams (Still a Man\’s World), the numbers from the census bureau suggest that this trend probably peaked about 1930 and has been falling slowly since then. According to these figures librarianship went from being about 90% male, in the period before 1870, to being about 90% female, in the period ending about 1930. But since that time, the mix has been shifting, and it seems like at present the only subfields where this historic trend still holds is in public and school librarianship.
If this is accurate (and partly this depends on whether or not the census numbers are valid)I suspect it is because in the postwar period a number of subfields developed more rapidly than the earlier ones (academic, research, and special librarianship, for example) where there are far more males.
But maybe even more important than this historic shift of numbers, if that is what it is, is a cultural shift in which librarianship is being increasingly defined in terms much more favorable to males than to females. This is very clear from Williams\’ book, where it is very convincingly argued that being male is a great advantage in librarianship and other female-intensive occupations. Much of this has to do with automation, networking, and other male-dominated technical fields.
What do others think about this?\”
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