February 2007

Good News for Buffalo Librarian William A. Miles.

The Buffalo and Erie County Public Library will honor Miles by putting his name on the African-American Resource Room in the new Frank E. Merriweather Jr. Library at 1324 Jefferson Ave.

More than simply acknowledging his 43 years of service, the event will celebrate the collection he started a few years into his tenure.

It grew to include thousands of books, pictures, microfilm and other materials, housed in what has become Western New York’s largest repository of information on African-American history.

Anonymous Patron writes “Yucky News From The Plains: Federal grand jurors in South Dakota have indicted a North Dakota librarian on charges of traveling across the border to have sex with a teenage girl. David Boschee, 37, of Bismarck is in the Sioux Falls jail.

According to court papers, he and a 15 year old girl chatted online several times before arranging to meet in Sioux Falls to have sex. She told investigators she changed her mind but that Boschee made the trip anyway and rented a motel room where they had sex that included sado-masochistic abuse.”

Tina Burger sent in Some Good News for Liblime. “LibLime, the leader in open-source solutions for libraries, has announced it will acquire the Koha Division of New Zealand-based Katipo Communications, Ltd.”

LibLime is the global leader in open-source solutions for libraries, with a mission to make open source accessible to libraries. Rather than sell software licenses for static, hard-to-customize software products, LibLime educates libraries about the benefits of open source, enabling them to make choices about how best to provide their communities and staff with better technology services. LibLime then facilitates implementation of open-source in libraries by providing outstanding development, customization, support and training solutions – solutions tailored to each library’s needs. For more information, see Liblime’s Site.

The Buffalo News has a piece on Janya, a local software company that designs programs to help computers “read” vast chunks of text has won a $5 million research contract from the Air Force Research Laboratories.

“We pick up where search engines leave off,” Srihari said.

First, the program converts documents into words. Then, it scans each word and determines – based on context and rules of grammar – whether it is a name, place or other entity and how each is connected.

It was in a library where “Fahrenheit 451” was born. Bradbury began to seriously ponder the subject of book-burning in the early 1950s when McCarthyism was sweeping the nation, and fear was abundant. The title of the book is the temperature at which paper burns.

Bradbury, who had two young daughters at home, needed an office in which to work. He found refuge in the UCLA library, where there was a typewriter room. There was a 10 cent charge for each half hour spent on the typing machines.

“I got a bag of dimes, and $9.80 later, I had written the first version of ‘Fahrenheit 451,'” Bradbury said. “It was so exciting to write in a library, in a place where the spirits of great authors impinged my soul.”

More on the legendary author’s appearance at the Temecula (CA) Library from the North Country Times.

In case you haven’t seen it yet, Did You Know? has been making the rounds the past few months. It’s a slideshow which summarizes some of the changes taking place around the globe these days, with a focus on information. Bonus points if you can name the background music.

If you’re like me, and you know you want to be, you’re probably getting sick of seeing the word “scrotum” everywhere these days.

But I just couldn’t let this Toronto Star article go unoticed. Linwood Barclay deserves a major award for what is by far the funniest title I’ve seen in a loooong time, and I read hundreds of titles a day.

I know humor is subjective, but this one really made me laugh: Book brings a sack of trouble .

“We knew we had all sorts of things down there, but fortunately there weren’t writers like Susan Patron around then or we’d have been scandalizing our parents by calling all our bits by their proper names, instead of using crude, juvenile substitutes.”

And in case you were wondering, yes, controversy sells. Criticism of an award-winning children’s book over the word “scrotum” has brought Susan Patron’s “The Higher Power of Lucky” into the top 40 on Amazon.com.

Eric Lease Morgan took a A Trip to Rochester to Learn about XC. He had the opportunity to visit the University of Rochester River Campus and meet with a number of very smart people to discuss a thing called XC (eXtensible Catalog, extensiblecatalog.info). This travel log documents the experience.

Communities and cooperation are a large part of what it means to be libraries. If libraries were to pool their resources and work together, I am certain the sum will be greater than its parts. XC is a manifestation of this idea.

News From Australia where the perils small publishers face are being demonstrated once again in the ongoing story of Fremantle Arts Centre Press. One of Australia’s oldest small publishing houses – it published Elizabeth Jolley’s first novel and best-sellers by Albert Facey and Sally Morgan – it is waiting to hear as early as next week how much it will receive in a rescue package from the West Australian Government.

A couple meetin’ room stories.

1. How public is your library?, from CA, where The public library director is consulting with city attorneys after an immigrant-rights nonprofit closed library meeting room doors on a man with opposing views.

2. Library opens its community room to sectarian meetings from KY, where the Paul Sawyier Public Library Board voting unanimously last week to delete a reference in its “meeting rooms policy” that would prohibit a sectarian group from using the community room.