November 2007

The website FreeRice (http://www.freerice.com) has two purposes. First, they want to help people improve their English vocabulary. The site gives you a word and four possible synonyms. Get it right, and you advance to a higher level with tougher words.

At the same time, advertisers who appear at the bottom of the screen donate 10 grains of rice per correct word to the World Food Programme, which in turn sends it to countries in need around the world.

As of now, FreeRice has paid for just under 4 billion grains of rice, hovering at around 200 million grains per day. Not bad considering it launched on October 7 with 830 grains!

The Worcester Telegram & Gazette has a report on Bronson Potter, a quiet man who kept to himself when he visited the Fitchburg Public Library to check out books, but in the end he left his imprint there. Mr. Potter, an inventor and children’s book author, bequeathed more than $206,000 to the library when he died three years ago, said Chief Librarian Ann Wirtanen.

Since his death, Mr. Potter’s two children — who weren’t included in his will — have contested the will in court, but the New Hampshire Supreme Court confirmed a ruling by the state probate court that the document was properly executed, according to a Feb. 17 article in the Nashua Telegraph

Stuff To Do @ Your LISNews, Part 1: Reading

This will be the first in an occasional series highlighting things you can do @ LISNews. I’ll be covering “reading,” “writing,” “playing,” “networking” and whatever else I can come up with in this series. I thought I’d start with “reading” to point out what you can read, how you can find it, and how it can be read.

There are essentially 3 good homepages for LISNews. The first is the page you see when you visit https://lisnews.org/ (though this is radically different if you’re logged in) the second, can be found at https://lisnews.org/blog and the third you’ll find at https://lisnews.org/tracker The blog page shows all the recent posts made by LISNews users. Anyone with an account can write in his or her own blog. The tracker page puts everything in a nice easy to reader list format. I actually use the tracker as my home page so I can keep track of everything happening @LISNews.

There are several ways to browse your way around current LISNews Content. You can start with one of the homepages as I mentioned, or you can check out the Topics page: https://lisnews.org/topics. That will list all our many topics. I’m a big fan of lists, the Hall of Fame page at https://lisnews.org/hof/ offers a nice way to see what’s popular. If you’re more interested in older content, going way back to the beginning of LISNews, start over on the Old Stories page at https://lisnews.org/articles. You can find almost every story posted to all 4 versions of LISNews since 1999 when I first started the site.

Stuff To Do @ Your LISNews, Part 1: Reading

This will be the first in an occasional series highlighting things you can do @ LISNews. I’ll be covering “reading,” “writing,” “playing,” “networking” and whatever else I can come up with in this series. I thought I’d start with “reading” to point out what you can read, how you can find it, and how it can be read.

There are essentially 3 good homepages for LISNews. The first is the page you see when you visit https://lisnews.org/ (though this is radically different if you’re logged in) the second, can be found at https://lisnews.org/blog and the third you’ll find at https://lisnews.org/tracker The blog page shows all the recent posts made by LISNews users. Anyone with an account can write in his or her own blog. The tracker page puts everything in a nice easy to reader list format. I actually use the tracker as my home page so I can keep track of everything happening @LISNews.

There are several ways to browse your way around current LISNews Content. You can start with one of the homepages as I mentioned, or you can check out the Topics page: https://lisnews.org/topics. That will list all our many topics. I’m a big fan of lists, the Hall of Fame page at https://lisnews.org/hof/ offers a nice way to see what’s popular. If you’re more interested in older content, going way back to the beginning of LISNews, start over on the Old Stories page at https://lisnews.org/articles. You can find almost every story posted to all 4 versions of LISNews since 1999 when I first started the site.

If you’re not into browsing, and you’re looking for something in particular, there’s a Google Search box down at the bottom of each page, or there’s also quite nice Drupal advanced search page here: https://lisnews.org/search/node Drupal offers a couple more interesting ways to search and display stories that I’ll be adding sooner or later.

If you’re more of a “feed reader” type of person, you’re in luck. LISNews has more feeds than you can shake a stick at. Most of them are listed on the Syndication page located here https://lisnews.org/syndication Each one of our topics has it’s own feed, as does every user blog. There’s also main feed (https://lisnews.org/rss.xml). There’s also quite a few legacy feeds floating around. LISNews way one of the first blogs to have a feed, so I’ve done my best keep the feed readers full.

If you’re cool and trendy (like me) you can even follow LISNews via Twitter!
Tweets by LISNews

There’s one final way to keep up with what’s being posted to LISNews; email. Each day, Monday through Friday I send out a short email with what’s new on the site, you can see an example and subscribe at http://www.lisnews.org/node/28182

Next time I’ll highlight “Writing” and show you ways you can contribute to LISNews, after all, it’s yours!

Though I’m sure this isn’t something new for many of you, The Librarian Paradox is new to me:

A librarian is wandering round her library one day and comes across a shelf of catalogues. There are catalogues of novels, poems, essays and so on, and some of these catalogues, she discovers, list themselves, while others do not.

In order to simplify the system, the hard-working (and rigorously logical) librarian makes two more catalogues. One lists all those catalogues that list themselves; the other lists all those that don’t. Once she has completed this task, she has a problem: should the catalogue which lists all the other catalogues which do not list themselves, be listed in itself? If it is listed, then by definition it should not be listed. However, if it is not listed, then by definition it should be.

Arstechnica is one of many places pointing to The University of Michigan’s head librarian, Paul Courant’s blog where he talks about large-scale digitization projects.

Sounds noncontroversial, right? It was, for all of one post, and then Courant defended his library’s relationship with Google, saying that “the University of Michigan (and the other partner libraries) and Google are changing the world for the better.” Not everyone agrees.

Fred Armstrong, who was fired without explanation last month as WV state director of Archives and History, has decided to fight his dismissal. Charleston attorney Jim Lees said Monday he notified Culture and History Commissioner Randall Reid-Smith and the state Public Employees Grievance Board that he would represent Armstrong in a legal challenge of his Nov. 1 termination. The Charleston Gazette Has The Scoop

The Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum will release approximately 122,800 pages of historical materials from the Nixon presidency at the National Archives in College Park, MD.

Highlights include national security documents on U.S. policy towards Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the Soviet Union, and on the Kurds. Also included are documents on the Vietnam War, on dealing with the terrorist Black September Organization, on producing the CIA’s Presidential Daily Brief, and on U.S. covert action in Chile. A selection of 15 documents from the release will be posted on the Nixon Presidential Library web site at www.nixonlibrary.gov.

Ghent University Library has teamed up with the internet search engine Google in a deal that in time will make 300,000 books from the library’s catalogue available to all via the World Wide Web.

Ghent will be the first Belgian university library to make its collection available on-line.

Courtesy of the LibrarianInBlack.com, she brings us online meditation rooms. Very relaxing, pictures and music as the end of the year comes, we can take a moment to sit back and relax.

Courtesy of beyondthejob.org, a new mentoring program by the Southeastern Library Association.