December 2003

Former Talking Heads frontman and artist David Byrne has parlayed his love for and fascination with Microsoft’s PowerPoint software into a book/dvd combination titled “Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information.” While Byrne claims that the material was not intended as a serious statement, its publication has given additional fuel to the ongoing heated debate about the usefulness and dangers of PowerPoint. More from the Seattle Times.

And you can just keep your pocketbook shut, as all 1500 copies of the $80 set were sold by mid-December.

AshtabulaGuy writes “Clarion University of Pennsylvania will be begin with the Spring 2004 semester offering a web-based cohort graduate program in library science. The cohort program would allow a student to pursue totally online a graduate degree in library science with coursework geared toward the needs and interests of those going into rural and small libraries. Check out the details from Clarion’s Department of Library Science as well as from the Keystone University Network.”

Anonymous Patron points us to “this ABC News story about a naked guy found stuck in the chimney of a Minneapolis bookstore early Christmas morning. Police assured the public it was not Santa Claus and pronounced the guy lucky, saying ‘he’s lucky he didn’t get cooked.'”

Anne writes “A news report at USA Today
tells about the discovery of smallpox scabs in a book providing an over-the-top sample of the amazing things that can be found in old books. Note that the librarian in this story could do the research necessary to document the authenticity of the material. This won’t surprise us, but perhaps some members of the reading public will notice the mention of her research skills.”

AshtabulaGuy writes “Academic librarians in the PA State System of Higher Education will soon be facing the possibility of walking out in a ‘job action’ in January. Negotiations between the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties and the State System of Higher Education broke down recently and may lead to such concerns for academic librarians and all others holding faculty rank in those institutions. Catch the story from GoErie.com, The Valley Independent, and from APSCUFblog.”

Slashdot pointed the way to A NYTimes Piece on a program that can automatically generate paraphrases of English sentences.

The program gathers text from online news services on specific subjects, learns the characteristic patterns of sentences in these groupings and then uses those patterns to create new sentences that give equivalent information in different words.

The Levi E. Coe Library (Middlefield, CT), found itself without heat before Christmas, after a grinchy person emptied the library’s fuel tank of over 500 gallons of heating oil valued at $750. Replacing the oil has put a dent in the small library’s budget, but the library has purchased a lock for the tank. More from the Stamford Advocate.

Here’s a New York Times piece about the Donnell Branch of the New York Public Library, its “Teen Central” area and librarian, Sandra Payne, who is charged with making the library more teen-friendly. Most of the article focuses on Payne, her background, and her work as the acting coordinator of youth services. The article serves as a foil to all the recent high-visibility publicity about the (love-it-or-hate-it) Librarian Action Figure.

A group of US Senators, headed by Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) and Jon Corzine (D-NJ), is urging the Library of Congress to make more content available on its THOMAS website. The Senators would like citizens to be able to access the same government information available to them on the Legislative Information Service (LIS). The senators who signed the letter to LOC head James Billington deemed THOMAS “insufficient as a portal to the Congress of the United States.” More here from Federal Computer Week. And from the Project on Government Oversight, a comparison of LIS and THOMAS.

An anonymous donor brightened up the holiday season for the Queens Borough (NY) Public Library with a gift of a million dollars. The gift was made through a financial services firm and was likely in response to an emergency fundraising campaign begun in May 2003. The library has been hard hit by budget deficits, resulting in reduced hours and a decrease in acquisitions, programming and outreach services. More here from PubLib archives.