July 2006

Anonymous Patron writes “english.eastday.com reports Although China is a nation of avid readers, with large crowds browsing almost every urban bookstore and a 100 million newspapers printed daily, China’s rural residents have long had a dearth of reading material.
That’s expected to soon change as the country plans to fund 200,000 village libraries to bring more of the written word to the country’s 900 million farmers, according to the State Press and Publication Administration of China.
By way of cpmparison, The ALA Says There are an estimated 117,664 libraries of all kinds in the United States today.”

Todd Gilman, a librarian at Yale University offers up his latest column for fellow Ph.D.s looking for jobs as academic librarians.

Sound familiar? –“An opening is posted for an academic librarian. Applicants promptly and eagerly forward their materials. Then they hear nothing. For months and months, they are trapped in — to paraphrase the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser — an “endlesse searche.” More from the Chronicle for Higher Education.

A “lifelong reader,” Lesley Williams works at a public library in the Charlotte and Mecklenberg county system, maintains her own literary blog and has just started, with help from her husband Mike, Bookwormzonline, a site that lists independent bookstores in the U.S., including those that are not members of the American Booksellers Association .

Since May, when Williams left her work at an ad agency, she’s been at PLCMC. She also maintains a blog, A Life In Books . For her, the new site is a labor of literary love. “Books and reading have always been a part of my life,” she said. “And I’d like to share that with others.”

An Anonymous Patron and JET both sent in links To News that A grand jury has accused a man of sucking on a woman’s toe at the public library in nearby Boardman after he asked to kiss her feet to see her reaction as part of a sociology project.

andrewb writes “LibraryThing has introuced it’s long-awaited “groups” feature. This allows like-minded members to join a group – where they can discuss topics on the message board, as well as search the collective libraries of the group as a virtual catalogue, and see stats on the group’s collections from the Zeitgeist.

Full scoop at the LibraryThing blog post.”

How do students find, judge and use information online?

Well, most of them can manage Google quite well, but a study by the Educational Testing Service of 10,000 high school and college students found that half could not correctly judge which on-line database was the most objective, reliable and timely.

“What we’re finding is not only does it [digital literacy] need to be taught at the higher education level, it needs to be taught a lot younger than that,” said Terry Egan, project manager for the assessment. “I’m hoping that having an assessment like this available is going to change the paradigm of what people think is important to test.” Story from the Texas Star-Telegram.

Search Engines WEB writes ” Here’s how the Israel-Hezbollah conflict is playing out on the Internet’s latest window into the human experience, YouTube.com: Videos of young girls driving around smoking and joking about Hezbollah, next to shaky footage of grieving men toting dead bodies through rubble as sirens wail. Old propaganda films alongside homemade documentaries about the conflict”

Anonymous Patron writes “Bloomberg.com: As the International Christian Retail Show wrapped up in Denver earlier this month, the hot topic was not the lackluster box office of “The Da Vinci Code.” Instead, it was the news that Multnomah Publishers, a modest-size Oregon- based evangelical Christian publishing house, had been put up for sale.

Not the best-selling religious-themed book, but the best- selling book, period.”

Durst writes “You may have heard that the current Administration is proposing to cut funding for EPA Technical Research Libraries, thus closing those libraries. The latest installment is at the SLA Divisions Blog about literally thousands of EPA Library patrons who have written to Congress on behalf of keeping those libraries open and saving access to those materials.”

mdoneil writes “A lawsuit against AT&T has been dismissed by a Federal Judge in Chicago citing National Security.

The suit filed by the ACLU on behalf of Terkel and others who felt their rights were violated. Read more on it at Yahoo News , because I can’t make this stuff no matter how hard I try.”