madcow writes “I wasn’t aware that congress had restored copyright in 1994 to several works which had lapsed previously, but boingboing.net tipped me off to this site which is collecting horror stories to fight this 1984’ish sounding event.
Note that this is different from copyright extension.”
Biblia, the Warrior Librarian writes “Warrior Librarian Weekly is the first to break the news on the New Alphabet and the implications for libraries. See: The New Alphabet online.”
Daniel writes “The April 2004 issue of Computers in Libraries has an article titled: “Building and Running a Collaborative Internet Filter is akin to Kansas Barn Raising” Those of you who have access to EBSCO’s MasterFile Premier can view the article here.
The article describes the hardware, software, and policy governance behind the open source filter Kanguard, in use in libraries around Kansas. The lists appear to be open, the filter easy for librarians to disable if needed, an online, anonymous form to “add this URL/delete this URL” from the filtering product are available. Challenges to filtered materials and requests to filter materials are run past a committee of five librarians.
This article seems worth checking out. It was authored by Thomas M. Reddick, the automation coordinator at the Northeast Kansas Library System in Lawrence.”
Hillel Italie of The Associated Press Reports million-copy sellers such as Rick Warren’s “The Purpose Driven Life” and the “Left Behind” novels by Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye have transformed a specialized part of the book business into a billion-dollar, highly competitive market.
This wider recognition for Christian books actually has hurt Christian booksellers. Books such as “The Purpose Driven Life,” which once would have been sold exclusively in Christian stores, are now available at superstore chains, department stores and price clubs such as Sam’s Club, often at much lower cost.
This week marks the end of Ref Grunt, everyone’s favorite place to read about the day in the life of reference librarian, Peter Burd. He recorded, to the best of his ability, “every reference desk transaction from May 14 2003 to May 14 2004.”
Don’t be confusing this with sound-alike, Ref Grunt-inspired Refgrunt.com where reference librarians can post, anonymously, the most inane, befuddling or enlightening of transactions at the ref desk.
Anonymous Patron writes “Interesting One Out of Vietnam where The imperial and public libraries built up during the Nguyen dynasty (1700-1850) were either cleaned out by French colonists or destroyed by war and natural disasters.
These days, the city’s libraries do not have the budgets to acquire rare books, leaving scholars and history buffs at the mercy of private collectors who passionately maintain their collections.”
Peter Morville (you may know him from such websites as semanticstudios.com and such books as Information Architecture for the World Wide Web) dropped us a note announcing his new website findability.org.
The website is a “selective, seriously incomplete, and perpetually evolving collection of links to people, software, organizations, and content related to findability.
What is findability?
Findability refers to the quality of being locatable or navigable. At the item level, we can evaluate to what degree a particular object is easy to discover or locate. At the system level, we can analyze how well a physical or digital environment supports navigation and retrieval.
Check it out at http://findability.org/, even though LISNews isn’t listed in the Libraries & Literacy Section it’s still a great site.
Search Engine Optimization writes “Microsoft Has Announced Microsoft and Amazon will embelish and add a new dimension of Esoteric Searching capabilities in their quest to FINALLY develop their own search engines. Relevancy SERPs is not the only priority – it seem ease of use and non-standard searching will also be prioritized. This was revealed at The 13th annual World-Wide-World Conference currently taking place in New York CITY and their prestigous keynotes.”
An Anonymous Patron sends news of an effort based at Carnegie Mellon U. to digitize and web publish 1,000,000 books free of charge by 2007. A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article is here and a web page for the project is here. Apparently some 80,000 texts have been scanned and about 14,000 are fully processed and available for download. The texts are in a wide variety of languages, including Sanskrit, Urdu, Arabic, French and Hindi.
Story from the Philadelphia Inquirer about renewed efforts to collect overdue fines from scofflaw book borrowers, part of a program to recover lost income after a significant budget cut last year.
According to Cecy Keller, Director of the Chester County System, a debt of over $50 to the library will go onto your
credit report, preventing library patrons from obtaining mortgages or bank loans not to mention withdrawal of library privileges.
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