People searching their ancestry have been given an online boost after BT launched more than one hundred years of their phone books on the web.
The company hopes to tap into the nation’s huge interest in genealogy by allowing users to trawl through millions of names, addresses and phone numbers covering the period 1880 to 1984. It is not just old relations that may turn up in the pages.
Read Them @ ancestry.co.uk
Tri-City Herald: It was a long day for Richland library employees Monday, as they worked diligently to make their library recognizable again after vandals tore through the building Saturday night, leaving a path of destruction.
After two days of cleaning, the library will reopen today.
Also Monday, Richland school officials discovered that Richland High was broken into Friday night, said police Capt. Mike Cobb. Vandals sprayed fire extinguishers and damaged two soda machines and a change machine.
Cobb said police have no evidence the two incidents are connected, but the investigation is continuing.
An innovative book that has built-in links to online multimedia content has made its debut at the American Chemical Society meeting here in San Francisco.
The book is littered with barcodes that can be read by a wireless laser pen. A quick scan can trigger a computer to run related videos of practical demonstrations or molecular animations. Dubbed ChemgaBook, the tome is intended to be a teaching aid whose additional content can be continually updated by the publisher.
“It’s the first time we’ve shown it in public,” said René Deplanque, director of Fiz Chemie Berlin, Germany, who demonstrated his prototype book to Chemistry World on 13 September.
Mindy Klasky writes “There’s been a lot of discussion on the law librarian listservs lately about the public image of librarians, whether we should call ourselves librarians, etc. I am pleased to announce that my most recent novel — in stores today! — features a librarian heroine.
GIRL’S GUIDE TO WITCHCRAFT (ISBN 0-373-89607-7; published under my maiden name, Mindy Klasky), is the story of Jane Madison, a special librarian (in all meanings of the word!) who discovers that she’s a witch. You can read more about Jane here:
mindyklasky.com
Jane’s story combines the single-girl angst of BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY with the magic of HARRY POTTER. Librarianship — and social attitudes toward librarians — are vital to the plot!
If you happen to be in the DC area, I’ll be reading from GIRL’S GUIDE at Borders Books and Music on October 3 at 6:30 p.m., at 18th and L. I’d love to see you there!
(In my “day-job”, I’m the Library Director of the DC office of Kelley Drye & Warren, an international law firm.)”
A book of rhymes handed out to kindergarten classes across Maine is being criticized by some parents as inappropriate.
“Schoolyard Rhymes” is a compilation of 50 verses included in bags given to 18,000 pupils through the Read With ME literacy project supported by Gov. John Baldacci and his wife, Karen.
Karen Baldacci, who is a former kindergarten teacher, spearheads Maine Reads, the nonprofit umbrella organization for Read With ME that is funded by Verizon, the Bangor Daily News reported. The group receives no state money.
The Newberry Library in Chicago is hosting an exhibit of artifacts of Aztec life in pre-conquistadore Mexico. This Chicago Trib article describes some of the legal documents, maps (among the most spectacular is a 1524 map of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, showing buildings, temples and markets)and priceless pre- and post-conquest accounts of Aztec life from the Aztec point of view preserved in the papers of Bernardino de Sahagun, a Franciscan missionary. The exhibit, “The Aztecs and the Making of Colonial Mexico,” a temporary exhibit, opens at the library Friday and runs through Jan. 13.
Anonymous Patron writes “Sony Reader PRS-500 hands-on Connect Reader screenshots — Engadget: They nabbed an exclusive sneak peek at the oft-delayed Sony Reader, which they say is finally getting close to coming out.
Tech specs are more or less the same as when they announced the Reader at CES this past January — a 6-inch E Ink display, enough battery life for 7,500 page turns, support for DRM’d BBeB and unprotected PDF, TXT, RTF, and Word files — but the big news is that this thing will in fact support RSS feeds. Sort of. You can pick from a very limited list of feeds that have been specially formatted for viewing on the Reader (Engadget among them!), you just sync them to the device just like you do with an eBook.”
Update: 09/26 13:20 GMT by B :Gizmodo has a couple posts on it as well. One On Accessories and one Is Another Hands On look.
We really don’t have enough stories on David Hasselhoff. Luckily I found an excuse, he wrote a book! HOFF fever gripped Manchester yesterday as thousands of fans rushed to meet cult actor David Hasselhoff.
Best known for Eighties drama Knight Rider and Nineties lifeguard smash-hit Baywatch, the popularity of The Hoff appears undimmed by the years as hundreds of fans crammed into Waterstone’s in the Arndale Centre and WH Smith at The Trafford Centre.
At one point, fans not buying a copy of his autobiography, Making Waves, were ordered to leave Waterstone’s to avoid a crush.
Vandals tear apart the Richland Public Library over the weekend. Citizens are stunned. And now librarians are cleaning up the mess.
Sunday morning librarians walked in on a quite a sight. Fire extinguishers sprayed out all over the floor and library check outs, broken glass in the break room, and machines tipped over and ripped open.
“The two coin boxes that are attached to the photo copiers were totally destroyed and the money removed,” said Richland Library Manager Ann Roseberry.
Bob Cox writes “Several libraries are working on the Wire Loop Mystery
Let them know if you’ve found any.”
Over the last several years, books with a small wire loop have been found in at least three libraries across the United States. Initial inquiries found no satisfactory answer for their presence. Speculations ranged from some sort of security device (either to physically tie the book in place or as an early electronic detection system) or as a method of attaching a bookmarker to the textblock. None of these suggestions seem plausible given the nature of the device.
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