December 2007

An apology may be in order. How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, the slim French bestseller which has become a sleeper hit in English translation this fall, may have a fantastic but faulty title. That’s because unlike, say, the news summary magazine The Week, or the chic advice guide In the Know: The Classic Guide to Being Cultured and Cool, How to Talk… is not intended to help you cheat at life by appearing more sophisticated or educated than you really are. Indeed, the author Pierre Bayard has a sheepish admission to make. theglobeandmail.com Has The Review/Interview.

The current state of Cape Girardeau’s [MO] library expansion may seem shocking.
All but two small sections of the library’s exterior walls have been removed. What remains are concrete columns holding the library’s roof. The two remaining rooms are scheduled for demolition as well. The construction will double the size of the library. In addition to new walls and rooms, the building is getting new plumbing, and a new heating and cooling system.

Public.Resource.Org, the Internet Archive, and the Boston Public Library announced the commencement of phase 1 of a project that aims to create a comprehensive digital archive of 60 million pages of government documents over the next two years.

Phase 1 of the project will produce a minimum of 2.5 million pages of digital text using a scanning and optical character recognition (OCR) technology suite developed by the Internet Archive. The Boston Public Library is the first Contributing Library in the program, and has agreed to lend a 50-year run of Congressional Hearings from 1936–1986, as well as a complete copy of the Catalog of Copyright Entries. Scanning will take place at the Boston Library Consortium’s Northeast Regional Scanning Center.

Lifehack.org: The field of web-based productivity is growing by leaps and bounds, and seems to be on the brink of becoming mainstream and ubiquitous. That’s good news for mobile workers like me, who can never be completely sure where, or on what kind of computer, we may need to access our files. 2007 has been a good year, with great strides in core productivity apps like word processors and presentation software, and some interesting developments in specialized areas like collaborative brainstorming and todo list management.

Interview with “Washington Spies” author Alexander Rose at iBookWatch.com

There’s little doubt that Google Inc. is indeed king of online media. In August 2007 alone, Google captured 57% of worldwide market share among search engines, with more than 37 billion search inquiries, according to analyst firm comScore Inc. in Reston, Va. Add to that a mind-boggling stock price of $711 per share on Nov. 5. Not surprisingly, this dominance has led to endless rumors about where Google is headed next.

This One From Last Week caught my eye. Why must we “lure teens” into the library? Doesn’t it make us sound creepy? A quick search of some newspaper archives shows me we’ve been doing it for years! Do reporters do this on purpose? Some other goofy headlines:

USC library’s lure: Modernized facility attracts By: Hammond, James T.. State
Warren library branch lures teen readers with style and clothing show By: Dunn, Andrew. Herald-Sun
Books aren’t the hook when libraries lure kids to video-game events By: Newman, Heather. Detroit Free Press
Books aren’t the hook: Video game events lure young people — especially boys — to local libraries By: Newman, Heather. Detroit Free Press
Library is ‘more of a cool place’ now: Video games, once shunned, are being used to lure teens By: James, Douane D.. Sun-Sentinel
Library lures girls to books with looks: Beauty tips focus of event for teens By: Cuniff, Meghann M.. Spokesman-Review

8 Kick-Ass Movies You Didn’t Know Were Based on Books: Nobody reads books these days. After all, what’s the point? There’s no way some novel could ever kick as much ass as, say, watching Sylvester Stallone punch a guy’s head off his shoulders. Or, could it? Believe it or not, a lot of the most kick-ass movies were adapted from kick-ass books. No, we’re not just talking Lord of the Rings here. We’re talking about …

Read all about the Largo (FL) Public Library Bookstore in which has been operating successfully for the last 17 years .

The Friends group was formed in 1975 to help support the library. The original group was made up of members of the Largo Woman’s Club, who started the library in 1914. Proceeds from book sales help pay for materials and support library programs. Since its inception, the group has raised more than $500,000 for the library.

About 35 dedicated volunteers clean, sort and price incoming donations, ring up sales and are always ready to offer advice on the next great read. It helps that several volunteers are retired librarians and educators. “If one of us doesn’t know the answer, the other one does,” said volunteer coordinator Mary Ann Whitehurst.

Sewell Chan’s NY Times Blog reports on a program at the Queens Borough Library that for the past eleven years has utilized a collection agency and also sometimes refers extreme cases to a credit bureau.

In a related story, one overdue borrower sued the collection agency and won (on something of a technicality).

Readers are invited to reveal their own overdue book stories here.

Should an overdue library book affect your credit rating?