November 2007

The National Book Critics Circle has launched a Best Recommended List of books in the categories of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, to be posted monthly starting in 2008 on their blog, Critical Mass:

… with all this connectivity, it felt like a moment had yet to be seized about finding out what a lot of people said was good. And what better people to ask than award winning novelists, historians, poets, critics and biographers?

These are the pie-in-the-sky notions that prompted the National Book Critics Circle to create a monthly Best Recommended List. Polling our nearly 800 members, as well as all the former finalists and winners of our book prize, we asked, What 2007 books have you read that you have truly loved?

Tops on the resulting inaugural Best Recommended List are The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (fiction), Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat (nonfiction), and a three-way tie in the poetry category among Time and Materials: Poems 1997–2005 by Robert Hass, Collected Poems: 1956-1998 by Zbigniew Herbert, and Gulf Music by Robert Pinsky.

Best-seller “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins has been translated and published in many languages, and now as a result, Turkish prosecutors are considering whether or not the Turkish publisher should be charged with blasphemy and “insulting Turkishness”.

The investigation follows controversy about free speech in Turkey after Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk went on trial in 2005 over comments about historic abuses in Turkey.

Publisher Erol Karaaslan could go on trial if the prosecutor concludes the book incites religious hatred and insults religious values, and faces up to one year in prison if found guilty, Milliyet newspaper reported. Story from The International Herald Tribune.

Lifehacker has posted some common sense searching strategies will make it harder for engines (or anyone else) to put together a detailed profile of you.

None of these tips will keep you anonymous from a search engine 100%. The best way to keep your information private would be to get off the webernets completely, but as that’s not an option for most of us, the second best is to use a combo of security methods to cover as much of your virtual booty as possible. What are your best search privacy tips?

A glimpse into how it’s been done for the last forty years…seven days a week, from 9 a.m. until 11 p.m., librarians at the Enoch Pratt Free Library are working “The Wheel”-a five-platter lazy Susan of almanacs, encyclopedias, and other reference books containing the answers that callers to the Pratt’s Telephone Reference Service desperately need.

If you aren’t familiar with Google Alerts, check out this posting from webware.com on what they are and can do for you. Yahoo has a similar service as well. I use them to keep an eye open for library related articles, blog postings etc. Very cool stuff that comes through.

Michael over on LibraryDust posted this a few days ago about a reference question that he was apparently asked. Anyone want to give it a shot? If you find the answer e-mail Michael.

Merriam Webster has created a new online “visual” dictionary. Its decent enough for certain topics, but at this time only has 6,000 entries and its selective. If you type in “Mona Lisa” nothing comes up. Its based upon the published version, so perhaps over time they’ll add more.

Courtesy of Resourceshelf.com

There is apparently now a conclusion to the woman that stole over a $1,000 worth of items from a library in Iowa earlier this year. She’s been sentenced to 10 days in jail as well as monetary costs. It doesn’t seem like quite long enough

As the website LivresHebdo.fr has it, “Une bibliothèque incendiée à Villiers-le-Bel” (http://www.livreshebdo.fr/actualites/DetailsActuRub.aspx?id=1168&rubrique=3) Roughly translated by Google (see http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.livreshebdo.fr%2Factualites%2FDetailsActuRub.aspx%3Fid%3D1168%26rubrique%3D3&langpair=fr%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF-8) we read the following:

The library Louis Jouvet, who was standing near 30000 loan documents a year, was one of three facilities near the town. “It was actually the most popular library in the old Villiers-le-Bel,” says Isabelle responsible Walet. “She welcomed children and adults every day.” The building of 280 m2 is completely destroyed. “With my team, we are bewildered and sad,” said Isabelle Walet, “we invest a lot in the relationship with the people and, in one night, this public service has entirely disappeared.”

See additional coverage at http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=Villiers+library+fire&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wn.

If you’re not already sick of all the Kindle chatter, Here’s One More. John Jantsch says he believes we may see a shift in the way books are actually created, particularly non-fiction books.

If I, as a marketing coach, wanted to add updates and lessons to a book about marketing, I could easily do this through an electronic device that’s always on. Authors could very easily enter into public conversations about their work and how to apply it much like we do now with our blogs and the readers of those blogs.