November 2007

TechCrunch reports that Google is experimenting with Digg style voting features on search results that allow users to vote up or bury search results they see.

Book Title: Why We Read What We Read: A Delightfully Opinionated Journey Through Bestselling Books. From a review by Betty Wong: This book should come with a warning: “Read at your own risk, the authors will not be responsible for any book-buying binge during or after the reading of this book.” Why We Read What We Read by John Heath and Lisa Adams is basically one long book review about nearly 200 bestselling books, most of which the authors actually took the time to read, and as the case usually is, this particular ‘book review’ has piqued my interest in at least ten books now. Luckily for me, I had already read a few of the other books they mentioned. Review continued here.

British Columbia researchers who want to work with “sensitive” archival records — including writers, journalists and university professors — must now agree to random security checks of personal computers, offices and even their homes by the government.

The Baltimore Sun reports A new National Endowment for the Arts study links drops in test scores and limited academic achievement to a decline in time spent reading. This self-evident finding offers a clear challenge to all educational reformers across Maryland and particularly in Baltimore, with its shamefully deficient school library system.

The Yale Daily News reports union leaders are now asking University Librarian Alice Prochaska to apologize for what they called an incidence of racial profiling. Dissatisfied with “inaction” and “silence” on the part of Yale’s human resources department, the union said Prochaska is in a position to rescind discipline charges against Rogers related to the incident, to initiate a dialogue about race in the library and to institute sensitivity training for the Mudd library manager who reported Rogers on Oct. 23.

Flash of bad sex wins late Norman Mailer coveted book prize | When it comes to truly deplorable writing, not even death, it seems, lets you off the hook. His phrase “coil of excrement” clinched it.

The Knesset unanimously passed an historic law Monday evening creating Israel’s first national library. The new law paves the way for a new building and a new attitude. Prof. Carl Posy, academic director of the Jewish National and University Library, is responsible for figuring out which directions the new library should take. The Jewish National and University Library on the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Givat Ram campus has acted as the national library de facto since the university’s inception in 1925 and even before.

Today’s “Woman sentenced to 10 days in jail for library theft” brought to you by Iowa City, Iowa. It’s ten days in jail for a former Iowa City woman accused of stealing more than $1,000 in materials from the city’s public library — by using her children’s library cards.

The Sydney Morning Herald Has A Review of the ABC TV Show The Librarians.

This intriguing series manages to be compelling without being either brilliant or actually hilarious. It’s funny at times but the jokes often land too hard and stray uncomfortably into the darkness, preventing it from working in the same comedic fashion as more accessible shows such as Kath & Kim and Summer Heights High.

I think I’ll start describing myself as being “compelling without being either brilliant or actually hilarious.”

InTheseTimes takes a look at libraries that are being managed by private companies. They point out the trend of farming out public libraries to a private, profit-oriented business has raised concerns. For one, private companies are not subject to the same oversight as are public institutions. More importantly, libraries have long been considered democratic bodies built on the cornerstone of information diversity, transparency and intellectual freedom.

“Libraries tend to reflect the communities they serve,” says Loriene Roy, president of the American Library Association (ALA). “[They] respond to community needs and they do so within their budget, but they are not set up to make profit. A company coming in that doesn’t exist within the community that is profit-making, you can see that there is a different attitude and there is concern about that.”