As the city of Boston is currently central in the American focus (at least it was through last night), a difference of opinion is cropping up about where the first U.S. public library was situated.
This entertaining article was written by Walter Skold, a card-carrying member of the ALA and the BPL, and an independent librarian and journalist currently living in Freeport, Maine… click here for the straight scoop.
The Telegraph Says a website set up by J K Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, has had a record 220 million visits in eight weeks and now receives 27 million “hits” a week. Sky.com adds one day day it received a peak of 600 hits per second with a huge 16 million in just 12 hours.
The LBC has choosen the reading selection for Aug-Sept. The book selected is “Envisioning Information” by Edward Tufte. Additional information on the book can be found at the LBC website.
The good news is, thanks to super generous LISNewsterz LISNews is as good as paid for through the end of the year. The bad news is, of course, that leaves us with an infinite number of other years to pay for. There’s really no way I can possibly thank everyone for their generosity, especially those of you who sent me a check or cash. Also thanks to everyone who paypaled money and everyone who just clicked a google ad. I’ve tried to send a thank you email to everyone I could identify, hopefully you got yours, if not, thanks, and sorry I missed you. Adding up the paypal donations, checks, and cash (yes, a few brave souls sent me cash) I’ve received just over $1500 out of the $1620 it’ll cost for 9 months of hosting I was hoping to pay for. Unless there are almost no clicks (clicks=$$!!) on the google ads for the remainder of the year, the server is paid for. So, now what? I’m looking for feedback and ideas on what to do next. More below…
The good news is, thanks to super generous LISNewsterz LISNews is as good as paid for through the end of the year. The bad news is, of course, that leaves us with an infinite number of other years to pay for. There’s really no way I can possibly thank everyone for their generosity, especially those of you who sent me a check or cash. Also thanks to everyone who paypaled money and everyone who just clicked a google ad. I’ve tried to send a thank you email to everyone I could identify, hopefully you got yours, if not, thanks, and sorry I missed you. Adding up the paypal donations, checks, and cash (yes, a few brave souls sent me cash) I’ve received just over $1500 out of the $1620 it’ll cost for 9 months of hosting I was hoping to pay for. Unless there are almost no clicks (clicks=$$!!) on the google ads for the remainder of the year, the server is paid for. So, now what? I’m looking for feedback and ideas on what to do next. More below…First, background for those of you that haven’t been following along, if you have been following along, just skip down a bit.
LISNews is sitting, alone, on a $180/month server, something I really can’t afford so for the first time since I started LISNews almost 5 years ago I asked for some help in paying the LISNews bills. For a few years LISNews sat on a big shared (Sun OS) server at Pegasus Web Technologies. We eventually out grew that server (more accurately they threatened to throw us off because we were too busy). So in December of 2002, I moved it to a dedicated server. The idea was I’d host LISNews, and to help defray the cost, sell space to a few other folks to cover as much of the $180 a month as I could. That idea did actually work, the server pays for itself, that is the amount others paid for hosting paid for the cost of the server, but that’s about it, it doesn’t really cover my time, which is, at this point, fine. So, a few months ago I bought (rented is the more accurate term) a new server (Red Hate Enterprise) because the operating system on the old server (Red Hat 7.3) had reached the end of life from Red Hat, which means no more official Red Hat updates. The new server should have updates for a few years to come, so I shouldn’t need to make any more moves for quite awhile, which is great, because the move was a royal pain, and took way too long to finish. So, I moved everyone from the old server, to the new, except us, LISNews was, and is still running on the old server. It turns out Slashcode does not play nice with Apache2, RHEL, the new mod_perl, and whatever else is on there. I love LISNews, it’s been a big part of my life longer than my wife, my house, my car, my job, and just about everything else, but I needed to draw the line somewhere and ask for help in paying for the site. My goal was to raise enough money (by just asking for donations from the LISNews readership) to pay for the second server for the remainder of this year (9 months counting April @$180 a month, that’s $1620) and just leave LISNews sit on it’s own server, which is where Slashcode really likes to be anyways (does not play well with others). Maybe by the end of the year there’ll be some updates to Slashcode and I can easily move it over to LISHost, or maybe I can just leave it be, and try to raise enough money to again pay for the server next year.
So that’s where we are now. The way I look at it, we’re all set until the end of ’04, but what to do come January? What are my options?
That’s about all I can come up with. If you’ve got a better idea I’d love to hear it. At this point any or all 5 seem like possible options. Since it’s only August, I’ve got plenty of time to think about it, and you have plenty of time to let me know what you think.
Pete writes “It is always interesting to learn how contemporaries viewed what are now considered classics and the BBC does just that with this piece.
“The Fellowship of the Ring, the first instalment of JRR Tolkien’s fantasy trilogy The Lord of the Rings, was published 50 years ago. But what did critics of the day make of the book?
One of the most popular books in literary history it is also a regular winner of recent polls to find the nation’s favourite novel – last year it topped the BBC’s Big Read survey.
But Tolkien’s public did not always look so favourably upon this epic work.””
/. pointed the way to a gizmodo article on ebooks.
They say display technology, a sticking point in making attractive readers, has come a long way. And the idea that eBooks and books printed on paper can’t coexist peacefully is an almost Luddite belief.
For now, they say, things looks grim, no one is going to get really hot for eBooks until the display technology supports full color.
“Like iPod, none of the eBook enhancements need be especially novel in concept; true genius will lie in the packaging: content, convenience, and, of course, cool factor. Without a truly compelling alternative to print, the eBook revolution will stall at its own forward-thinking rhetoric.“
Although not officially either a librarian or a library patron, the new Geekman action figure might represent another breed of information maniac.
This story from the LA Times (registration required…but here’s another w/o registration from the Seattle Times) portrays Geekman as “altogether hip.” When asked what his hero’s superpowers are, Kris Schantz, founder of Happy Worker toys and creator of GeekMan, listed “opposite-sex repulsion, analytical reasoning, the ability to create technical acronyms and less-than-ideal personal hygiene.”
Geekman is available at local toy stores and on the web. This reporter thinks he’d play well with the loveable Nancy Pearl shushing librarian doll.
Cabot writes “He worked as a researcher among the quiet stacks of the Toronto Reference Library for more than a decade, supporting a wife and children. But 55-year-old Douglas Freeman — whose real name is Joseph Coleman Pannell — is accused of hiding a secret, violent past.
See theglobeandmail.com for the full story“
The USA Today Looks At the problems with digital preservation.
“In the digital era, consumers worry about the staying power of their sacred possessions. They fret about the permanence of computers and electronics gear. They read about “CD rot,” short-lived iPod batteries and pricey plasma TVs with traces of static images “burned into” the display. And they pray that the most prized digital treasures — family photographs — will last from one generation to the next.
Fang-Face writes “Boston Globe has an article about the government ordering the destruction of Justice Department pamplets that provide how-to instructions on prosecuting asset forfeiture cases. The reason for the move is that the documents were produced for government use only. The American Library Association said they don’t know why the pamphlets were ordered destroyed, and they intend to challenge the order as an infringement on a century-old guarantee of public access to unclassified documents that the government publishes.“
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