October 2004

On October 25, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) began a second security review of its publicly available documents to make sure the website doesn’t contain any sensitive information. In the meantime, the NRC’s online document library, ADAMS, won’t be available to the public. After the first review, made after September 11, 2001, more than one thousand documents were removed from the NRC’s website.

The October 22nd New Westminster (British Columbia) News Leader had an article about the school district’s celebration of National School Library Day. The plan was for guest speakers–superintendents, police officers, an Edmonton Oilers goalie–to visit the Kindergarten to Grade Eight classrooms and read from their favorite books. The response was larger than expected, so School Library Day (Oct. 25) was extended to last a whole week.

Brookens Library at the University of Illinois at Springfield (UIS) and Springfield’s Lincoln (public) Library do a lot of things together. They have a reciprocal borrowing agreement, so people from UIS can borrow from Lincoln and Lincoln’s patrons can borrow from UIS’ library. Their Friends organizations hold fund-raisers together. Now the Brookens Library is looking into the possibility of building a branch of the public library on campus. A $35,000 Library Services and Technology Act grant will pay for a feasibility study to see if the plan would work and to start designing the branch.

stevenj writes “So librarian rarely makes any of those “best job” or “hottest job lists” and maybe that bums us out because we know there are few better jobs out there. But here’s one list of jobs we should be glad doesn’t include our profession. Anal wart researcher topped Popular Science’s list of worst jobs in science (hey – we have plenty of science librarians, right). Read more about this list at:
http://www.thenewstribune.com/business/story/41435 13p-3908385c.html“

Ed: people who know birdie know that it pains me to post this article, but as I am a dedicated journalist, I’ve taken a vow to post all the news that’s fit to print…even Red Sox news

If you’ve been under a rock, maybe you don’t know that the Red Sox won the World Series pennant, breaking an 86-year “Curse of the Bambino” and making fans very proud.

Here’s what one library in Hampton Falls, NH is doing to celebrate.

David Rothman writes “In Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books, author Aaron Lansky tells how he has looked beyond the brick-and-mortar incarnation of the National Yiddish Book Center and entered the digital era. Lansky and his colleagues have not just founded a home for slowly disintegrating paper books given away by aging immigrants whose sons and daughters are ignorant of Yiddish. They have also established a Virtual Digital Library Project. Led by a Lansky associate named Gabe Hamilton and financed by Steven Spielberg, the Project has already digitized 3.5 million pages of Yiddish books, making available print-on-demand versions of the works of such greats as Sholem Aleichem and I.J. Singer, older brother of Isaac Bashevis Singer.

David Rothman writes “In Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books, author Aaron Lansky tells how he has looked beyond the brick-and-mortar incarnation of the National Yiddish Book Center and entered the digital era. Lansky and his colleagues have not just founded a home for slowly disintegrating paper books given away by aging immigrants whose sons and daughters are ignorant of Yiddish. They have also established a Virtual Digital Library Project. Led by a Lansky associate named Gabe Hamilton and financed by Steven Spielberg, the Project has already digitized 3.5 million pages of Yiddish books, making available print-on-demand versions of the works of such greats as Sholem Aleichem and I.J. Singer, older brother of Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Please note that the digital library is just one detail in a book that is undeniably a bibliophile’s delight despite the horrors recounted in such chapters as “The Great Newark Book Heist.” “The library,” writes Lansky, “had been in disarray since 1969, when, in the aftermath of the Newark riots, a newly elected administration targeted it as an elitist white institution and tried to shut it down.” Further atrocities continued into at least the ’80s when a young library worker tipped off Lansky that several thousand Yiddish books were about to be tossed out. Almost one third of the collection was already gone.

More at TeleRead on the e-book angle.”

More reaction to the Phoenix city council’s decision to mandate filtering for all library computers comes from the nearby city of Wickenberg (AZ) where the city council was asked to send a letter of support.

The issue of sending a letter supporting the Phoenix City Council on its decision to censor material at its libraries died after 3-3 vote last week.

What makes this story a little more interesting is what I assume is a poorly worded statement from Wickenberg Library board Vice President Helen Dudley (emphasis mine)

It’s our opinion that we have no problem in the Wickenburg library with persons using our computers to secure pornography…. Furthermore, it is our opinion that the Wickenburg library staff is very capable of monitoring the computer room.

In this week’s (yes, this week’s) Chronicle of Higher Education, an assistant English professor talks about his bibliophilic obsessions. Why collect books? Is it because it’s cheaper to have your own reading copy of a rare book than to travel to distant archives? Is it because of the sense of continuity you get from an old book that someone else has handled and made their own? Is it the way old paper looks and feels and smells?

Today’s LibraryLaw Blog has a piece by Sheila Bryant, library student and former correctional officer, in which she explains how to look at a law enforcement officer’s badge and I.D. “My goal is to encourage communication, education, and cooperation for future interaction. I want to speak briefly about what I’ve seen when law enforcement officers interact with the mental health profession, and how this relates to the library profession.”

While we’ve all read myriad human interest stories about much-beloved school and public librarians, this is a terrific story about the difference an academic librarian can make in the lives of undergraduates. Ross Scimeca, the only librarian a the USC (CA) Hoose Library of Philosophy is as big or bigger a draw to students than the library itself, according to this portrait in the USC Daily Trojan.

Those ideas and interests are what Scimeca loves to share with his students. Known as “the answer man,” his mind is like a card catalog of knowledge. In fact, give him the name of almost any book at Hoose, and he can give you the call number off the top of his head. It doesn’t hurt that he’s read most of the primary philosophical works and many of the secondary sources in the library.