July 2007

Floods delay new Oxford library building: Oxford University has postponed plans for a £29m extension to the world famous Bodleian Library on the banks of the Thames while the impact of this week’s severe flooding is assessed.
A presentation to Oxford city council’s planning committee was deferred this week at the university’s request, but the university authorities remain confident the proposed repository, which will hold nearly 8m books, will withstand flooding even on the scale seen in recent days when hundreds of people were evacuated from their homes.

I am passing along this message from Debbie Lucas, a colleague of mine:

I am involved in a new project with the editor of the Encyclopedia of Time. We are putting out a call for authors for our next project, the Handbook of 21st Century Anthropology, also published by Sage.

The editor is seeking anthropologists and librarians with undergrad or grad degrees in anthropology. The work involves writing book chapters of 7,000 words. For those interested, I can provide more information on the guidelines Sage provides for construction of the chapter.

I am passing along this message from Debbie Lucas, a colleague of mine:

I am involved in a new project with the editor of the Encyclopedia of Time. We are putting out a call for authors for our next project, the Handbook of 21st Century Anthropology, also published by Sage.

The editor is seeking anthropologists and librarians with undergrad or grad degrees in anthropology. The work involves writing book chapters of 7,000 words. For those interested, I can provide more information on the guidelines Sage provides for construction of the chapter.

Sage’s description of the handbook reads:
Via 100 entries or “mini-chapters,” the SAGE 21st Century Reference Series volumes on Anthropology will highlight the most important topics, issues, questions, and debates any student obtaining a degree in the field of anthropology ought to have mastered for effectiveness in the 21st Century. The purpose is to provide undergraduate majors with an authoritative reference source that will serve their research needs with more detailed information than encyclopedia entries but not so much jargon, detail or density as a journal article or a research handbook chapter.

If you are interested, and are a librarian with an anthropology background, or know of anthropology scholars, please contact me via email at [email protected]. I can provide further details on the chapters available and the guidelines all authors adhere to.

Strike spreads to Vancouver libraries: All Vancouver Public Library branches and services were closed Thursday morning after unionized library staff walked off the job.

The library’s 22 branches and all services, including InfoAction, the Virtual Library, outreach services and online services are shut down.

Striking library workers in Vancouver picket the main branch downtown on Thursday morning.
(CBC) Pickets are only set up at Central Library in downtown Vancouver but not at individual branch libraries.

Those Darn Kids: Ann Arbor Police believe a couple of teens used pepper spray or a similar chemical agent as a prank at a library branch and nearby supermarket that sent five people to the hospital Wednesday night.

Investigators have not identified the teens but saw the same two boys on surveillance cameras at both the Ann Arbor District Library branch in the Westgate Shopping Center and the neighboring Kroger store before dozens of people complained of burning eyes and dizziness, said Detective Sgt. Jeff Connelly.

“Thus far, it appears to be some kind of prank committed by a few teenagers that we haven’t identified, but we’re following leads,” Connelly said this morning.

The title was ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and the leader of the discussion at the Cheshire (CT) Correctional Institute was former 18-year inmate James Tillman, recently exonerated and released for a rape he didn’t commit.

In discussing the book, the prisoners saw parallels in today’s society, where, one inmate said, “justice is for sale.”

They were taken with Atticus Finch, one of the book’s protagonists, a father who set an example for his children by bucking the racist conventions of his time and teaching his children “you can’t judge anybody until you’ve walked in their shoes,” as another inmate said. The men spoke of their pasts, indignities of the justice system and those experienced by the wrongly accused, and relatives who grew up in the same bigoted South depicted in the book. Interesting story of the juxtaposition of literature and life from the Hartford Courant.

Residents not living in a community have no constitutional right to borrow books from its library, a divided Michigan Supreme Court ruled today. The court voted 4-3 to dismiss the lawsuit of George Goldstone, who sued after Oakland County’s Bloomfield Township Public Library refused to sell him a nonresident library card. Goldstone lives in nearby Bloomfield Hills, which does not have a library.

Metafilter points the way to The Reading Experience Database The Reading Experience Database (RED) was launched in 1996 at the UK Open University. Its mission is to accumulate as much data as possible about the reading experiences of British subjects from 1450 to 1945.

Do kids books always have to be grammatically correct?

Kids don’t usually give a hoot, but some parents do. Here from the New York Times the subject is debated, and the book(s)…the Junie B. Jones series.

“More than a few parents have taken issue with Junie B., as she is called. Their disagreement is a pint-size version of the lingering education battle between advocates of phonics, who believe children should be taught proper spelling and grammar from the outset, and those who favor whole language, a literacy method that accepts misspellings and other errors as long as children are engaged in reading and writing.

The spunky kindergartener (first grader in more recent volumes) is prone to troublemaking, often calls people names and isn’t averse to talking back to her teachers. And though she is the narrator of the stories, she struggles with grammar. Her adverbs lack the suffix -ly; subject and object pronouns give her problems, as do possessives; she usually isn’t able to conjugate irregular past tense verbs; and words like funnest and beautifuller are the mainstays of her vocabulary.”

Anonymous Patron writes: “Here’s a story from The New York Sun about how the New York Public Library is planning to transform itself, merging the administration of the branch and research libraries and making what the library’s president, Paul LeClerc, called “very large investments” in its digital resources and online presence.“

Cost cutting is on the books at the Toronto Public Library.

Service cuts, including closing 16 of 27 branches on Sundays from September to December, a hiring freeze and fewer new books on the shelf, were agreed to by the library board yesterday in a move that slashed $1.2 million from its 2007 operating budget.

All city agencies, boards, committees and divisions were told to look at cost-cutting measures after city council chose last week to defer a vote on Mayor David Miller’s proposed new taxes.