Anonymous Patron writes “New York Daily News takes a look in the records of state Supreme Court. The archives form an irreplaceable populist history of America as it came of age. Located on two floors of Surrogate’s Court, the collection is “technically” open to the public, Goodman says, but it’s not set up to accommodate school groups or “large numbers of people coming in off the streets.””
May 2006
Cleveland investigative reporter tackles porn in libraries
Carl Monday, an investigative journalist from a TV station in Cleveland, turns his attention to porn on the library computers in two video segments here and here. The segments contain all the hallmarks of Geraldo Rivera style reportage, including shoving microphones in people’s faces, dramatic family confrontations, and lots of cursing. The reporter also has a blog entry on his segments with 49 comments so far.
Do Bookstores Have a Future?
The Village Voice asks Do Bookstores Have a Future? The last decade has not been kind to the traditional corner bookshop. Battered by online discounts and chain superstores, the American Booksellers Association has crumbled from 5,200 bookstores in 1991 to 1,702 stores in 2005. So if you were to seek a summary of their dilemma, this one might sound apt: “The old-fashioned bookstore was a charming place, but charm alone will not solve the problem of modern book distribution. . . . Hard though it may be to face the fact, the bookstore of today cannot primarily be a place for those who revere books as things-in-themselves.”
Library/Internet debate and Scrolling Forward
The discussion of the book Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age is going to be very interesting. Recently Blake posted an article called 10 Reasons Why The Web Is Almost A Substitute For Libraries which was a counter piece to an older article called 10 Reasons Why the Internet Is No Substitute for a Library. Scrolling Forward deals with this debate. Chapter 7 of the book is titled Libraries and the Anxiety of Order. We will cover this entire chapter later but I want to give a few tidbits from the chapter to demonstrate why this is an excellent book to discuss.
Here is one paragraph from Chapter 7:
Of course it isn’t just stores or shopping malls that need to be constantly maintained. Everything does. Gardens go to seed, bridges fall down, clothes become frayed and stained, The same is true for documents. Without proper care they decay, lose their intelligility and intellectual currency, and become inaccessible. And this isn’t just true of paper documents. We are quickly discovering that digital materials, too, need to be properly tended. Web pages disappear and links break. Digital media – floppy disks, CD-ROMs, and so on – degrade after a matter of years, and the files stored on them have to be copied to new media if they are to be preserved.
Later in the chapter the author provides the opening paragraph from a 1909 Library Bureau Catalog. Library Bureau was the company founded by Dewey to sell library supplies.
The paragraph reads:
The development of library science during the last quarter century has made it evident that a library in the true sense is not merely a certain number of books, but rather a collection of books so arranged that they may be conveniently used for reading or reference. Five thousand well-choosen volumes classified and administered according to modern methods may better deserve the name of library than four times the number carelessly or erratically arranged, even though the larger collection might contain every volume to be found in the smaller group.
I think these paragraphs are enlightening in regards to the discussion of the two articles discussing why or why not the web may be a substitute for the library. Chapter 7 in it’s entirety is wrestling with this debate.
If you would like to join in the discussion all you need to do is obtain a copy of the book Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age by David Levy. You then are welcome to post replies to any of the LBC posts. If you would like to create your own post on any aspect of the book you choose just submit it as a story to LISNEWS and one of the LISNEWS authors will approve your posting. Note: If you don’t have access to the book your are still welcome to comment in the discussion. This is an open forum.
The discussion of the book Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age is going to be very interesting. Recently Blake posted an article called 10 Reasons Why The Web Is Almost A Substitute For Libraries which was a counter piece to an older article called 10 Reasons Why the Internet Is No Substitute for a Library. Scrolling Forward deals with this debate. Chapter 7 of the book is titled Libraries and the Anxiety of Order. We will cover this entire chapter later but I want to give a few tidbits from the chapter to demonstrate why this is an excellent book to discuss.
Here is one paragraph from Chapter 7:
Of course it isn’t just stores or shopping malls that need to be constantly maintained. Everything does. Gardens go to seed, bridges fall down, clothes become frayed and stained, The same is true for documents. Without proper care they decay, lose their intelligility and intellectual currency, and become inaccessible. And this isn’t just true of paper documents. We are quickly discovering that digital materials, too, need to be properly tended. Web pages disappear and links break. Digital media – floppy disks, CD-ROMs, and so on – degrade after a matter of years, and the files stored on them have to be copied to new media if they are to be preserved.
Later in the chapter the author provides the opening paragraph from a 1909 Library Bureau Catalog. Library Bureau was the company founded by Dewey to sell library supplies.
The paragraph reads:
The development of library science during the last quarter century has made it evident that a library in the true sense is not merely a certain number of books, but rather a collection of books so arranged that they may be conveniently used for reading or reference. Five thousand well-choosen volumes classified and administered according to modern methods may better deserve the name of library than four times the number carelessly or erratically arranged, even though the larger collection might contain every volume to be found in the smaller group.
I think these paragraphs are enlightening in regards to the discussion of the two articles discussing why or why not the web may be a substitute for the library. Chapter 7 in it’s entirety is wrestling with this debate.
If you would like to join in the discussion all you need to do is obtain a copy of the book Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age by David Levy. You then are welcome to post replies to any of the LBC posts. If you would like to create your own post on any aspect of the book you choose just submit it as a story to LISNEWS and one of the LISNEWS authors will approve your posting. Note: If you don’t have access to the book your are still welcome to comment in the discussion. This is an open forum.
Berners-Lee NET NEUTRALITY Keynote at WWW2006
http://search-engines-WEB.com/ writes “The web should remain neutral and resist attempts to fragment it into different services, web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has said [MP3 Link].
Recent attempts in the US to try to charge for different levels of online access web were not “part of the internet model,” he said in Edinburgh.
He warned that if the US decided to go ahead with a two-tier internet, the network would enter “a dark period”. The BBC Has More“
Digital library set for Iraq
Kelly writes “Not everything in Iraq is going badly. Some of it is, almost miraculously-seeming, going well, like the project described in this newspaper article. According to this article, “When scientists think big, sometimes big things happen. The Iraqi Virtual Science Library (IVSL) never was intended to be a small matter, but its existence — electronic access to 17,000 cutting-edge scientific journal titles for Iraq’s scientists, engineers and scholars — has elicited praise of the kind usually reserved for a major breakthrough in basic research. A breakthrough it is, although of a different kind. Given the number and variety of public and private institutions involved in its creation, the project is considered unique. Partners in the venture total 28, including six U.S. government agencies, 13 journal publishers, Sun Microsystems, the Civilian Research & Development Foundation (CRDF) of Arlington, seven Iraqi universities, the Iraq Ministry of Higher Education, and Iraq’s quasi-public International Center for Science and Industry, all aided by the National Academy of Sciences.” For rest of article:
See The Washington Times“
Two Textbook Tales
Battles over school texts are nothing new (see related stories links below).
Now a California State Senate Bill is gaining attention. It requires that public school curricula includes the historical contributions of homosexuals. Similar laws exist for other groups such as women and minorities.
Compare to a new report covered on Morning Edition (text story) about schoolbooks in Saudi Arabia containing such phrases as, “hate for the sake of God.” This is the country where most of the 9/11 hijackers came from.
So from your own school board to the far side of the world, two examples of how educational choices for impressionable age groups may have an impact.
Harry & the Potters -Playing at a Library Near You
http://search-engines-web.com/ writes “Do Re Me
… reuters.com Has A report on A new guitar-driven rock band, ”Harry and the Potters” has muggles head-banging away in America.
The brothers perform for free in venues like libraries, bookstores and art galleries and hit the touring circuit at clubs like New York City’s NorthSix”
Canadian Library Association Election Results
Anonymous Patron writes “The results of the 2006 Canadian Library Association Elections are in!
Elected are:
- Alvin Schrader, professor at the School of Library and Information Science, University of Alberta, was elected Vice-President/President-Elect.
- Terri Tomchyshyn, head of library information services at the Department of National Defence in Ottawa, was elected
Treasurer for a three-year term. - The new Councillor-at-Large will be Shelagh Paterson of the CNIB Library in Toronto.
More details on the CLA Web site.”
‘Lost’ book mention may be good for small press
Talk about a strange cultural pairing.
It would be difficult to think of a better example of mainstream American entertainment than the hit ABC show “Lost,” about plane-crash survivors on a mysterious island. Last season, an average of nearly 17 million viewers watched the Emmy-winning show’s 25 episodes. As many or more are expected for the second season.
By contrast, the Illinois-based Dalkey Archive Press is famous in literary circles for publishing experimental and avant-garde books. The firm is lucky if it sells 90,000 books in a year.
Story continued here.
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