November 2003

News From IL where 117 hardcover cookbooks mysteriously disappeared in 2001, most likely a few at a time, from the Bettendorf Public Library.

Now, after a search of a Bettendorf apartment, police said Wednesday that they have located those books and about 300 more that had turned up missing from other Quad-City area libraries.

Although an arrest has not yet been made in the case, Bettendorf police expect to charge a suspect with first-degree felony theft. Exactly how the books were spirited out of libraries and why remains unclear.

At the time of their initial disappearance, Clow called the missing volumes “big, beautiful, specialty and general cookbooks — an amazing list of wonderful things.�
Purchased at retail, they would have cost more than $2,300. The value listed by the library was actually $1,391, a number that represented about 5 percent of its $28,000 budget for purchasing nonfiction books.
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No books were found to be missing from other subject areas at the Bettendorf library, but various types of publications were stolen from other area libraries.

Horror writer Stephen King, lauded by readers but panned by many critics, called for support of other popular fiction authors last night as he received the prestigious Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the U.S. National Book Foundation. The Toronto Star, AP, Boston Globe, CSMonitor and an NPR Piece.

An Anonymous Patron suggested we were too harsh in our criticism of MSN, and we need to re-visit the Microsoft/Google issue with the following.

If you go to the msn.com site, you will indeed find 440 pages listed for the search term “Linux”. At the top of that list, however, you will find a number of sub-searches.

Click on “all topics“.

Click on “United Linux“.

msn.com now reports 725,405 pages. (Many of the other sub-searches also involve very long hit lists.) Google reports 2,010,000 pages for the same search, but keep in mind that Google has a larger database. Anonymous Patron says unitedlinux.com was at the top, while only msn lists www.linux.com (3rd) on the first page of responses. My results were very different for this search.

Anonymous Patron has more below.

An Anonymous Patron suggested we were too harsh in our criticism of MSN, and we need to re-visit the Microsoft/Google issue with the following.

If you go to the msn.com site, you will indeed find 440 pages listed for the search term “Linux”. At the top of that list, however, you will find a number of sub-searches.

Click on “all topics“.

Click on “United Linux“.

msn.com now reports 725,405 pages. (Many of the other sub-searches also involve very long hit lists.) Google reports 2,010,000 pages for the same search, but keep in mind that Google has a larger database. Anonymous Patron says unitedlinux.com was at the top, while only msn lists www.linux.com (3rd) on the first page of responses. My results were very different for this search.

Anonymous Patron has more below.”The two sites have different databases and different algorithms for selecting sites. One of the hardest problems in designing algorithms is what to do with terms that have ‘too many’ hits. NOBODY scrolls through 700,000+ hits. Few people scroll through 400+. Deciding what to display so it is the most useful to the searcher is not a straight forward problem.

Google has generally done the best job in the industry, and it is still private IIRC. They are also one of the few .com type operations that make money. Quite frankly, Microsoft is most interested in getting their hands on the PEOPLE who work at companies like that.

BTW: Google doesn’t give you ‘pure’ results. If you advertise with them you’ll find your pages have a tendency to show up higher in the list of matches than they otherwise would.”

Anna writes “The Portales City Council passed an amendment to an ordinance that will now define library book theivery as a misdemenor punishable by a $50 to $100 fine. The Portales Public Library will offer a two week amnesty for overdue books to be returned, as well as an alternative for juvenile offenders. The loss of books the cost of replacement combined with deadbeat offenders has become a serious problem for the library.

“

Steve Fesenmaier spotted A Column by Tim Whitaker who “kind of jests” someone should order the main branch of the Free Library at 19th and Vine streets gutted, all the passé books written by the long since dead and decayed–books that nobody looks at anyway, thrown out, and replaced with computers.
When all was in place and ready (this could be done over a long weekend), the doors to the new Free Workstation Center of Philadelphia would swing open. There’d be great fanfare and hoopla. Thousands of city residents who’d been priced out of the Information Revolution for well over a decade would rush to the free computers to experience the online rush that comes with access to the Whole Wide World.

He says Amazon’s new service “search inside the book” is the first glimpse of a full-bore revolution in the way research will be conducted and books will be distributed in the future that spells the death of libraries.

He bounced this idea off of Steven Levy, a Philadelphia native who writes about technology for Newsweek, and he says “It’s not that crazy, The future of libraries is a hot topic with librarians all over the country.”

“Once the Web has become a full-service digital archive of the whole wide written word, it’ll only be a quick innovation or two before we’ll have the technology to order and bind books on our own home book-printing systems. Ebooks will finally become reality. Libraries will become mini-museums, where old books are kept under glass, relics of the pre-“inside the book” revolutionary age.“

Anna writes “This new product, FIRSTConsult, is an enhancement of their PDxMD point-of-care clinical information resource. It’s a combination of desktop and portable handheld tools for physicians, residents and medical students.”

This weird little blurb showed up in Library Journal’s People section:

“Varina Howell Davis and Mary Todd Lincoln were named joint Directors, John Brown Historical Center and Library, Harpers Ferry, WV.”

Kudos to Nann Blaine Hilyard for being such a diligent reader.

This catalog, Despair, Inc. has been making the rounds in our office. Looks like it’s been around for awhile, but it’s the first time I’ve seen it.

Lee Hadden writes: “There are a few funny snippets in the current comic strip, “Pearls
Before Swine,” that show the readers how not to do reference work. Although
the panels for November 17th, 18th and 19th are about a rat at an
information desk at a commercial bookstore, they do show what reference
service can be like when served with an interesting attitude towards the
public. Any questions? See the Rat.

Read more about it. See the comic strip at: unitedmedia.com“

This is a personal essay in the Fort Wayne News Sentinel from a woman, who in college, was told “by beer chugging frat boys” that she looked like a “librarian-type,” which in her mind was someone who spent the evenings alone, crying to her cat. Once out of college, she vowed to shed her bookish image, via Cosmo, tanning booths and Long Island Iced Teas. But two years out, she has re-embraced Moby Dick (heh heh) and declares, “you can take the girl out of the library, but you can’t take the library out of the girl.”