June 2008

In the world of broadcast news, it’s normally a given courtesy that, when a well known news personality dies, the station they worked for will be the first to break the news after the family has been notified. It’s one of the unwritten rules of journalism.

In the case of beloved NBC newsman Tim Russert, Twitter scooped the massive network on the big story.

Turns out that a minor lackey at the station heard the news and, assuming it was public knowledge, edited Russert’s Wikipedia page to reflect the death. Someone at the station caught it, which makes me wonder who they pay to watch Wikipedia, and changed it back some eleven minutes later.

Too late.

By the time they made the changes, the story was already out on Twitter.

Kindle sales to hit 4 trillion by 2013.

Total speculation on my part. While we are talking speculation the Washington Post has this article, “Amazon E-Book Sales To Hit $2.5 Billion In 2012”

The Rapid City (SD) Public Library has made it easier for Rapid Valley residents and others on the east side of town to return their library books.

A new drop box was already filling up as library staff cooked and served free hot dogs Saturday outside Don’s Valley Market to celebrate the box’s installation. “I went over there and gave it a wiggle, and it’s already half full,” said Jason Walker, circulations supervisor for the library.

At least one commentator asked why the library couldn’t build more branches for this type and other types of service, but others were pleased with the addition of the new drop box.

Internet users should soon be able to use new domain names such as .love, .paris or .bank if one of the world wide web’s biggest shakeups is approved this week as expected by the web regulator ICANN.
“Apart from the .com, .net or .org, the 1.3 billion web users will be able from early 2009 to acquire generic addresses by lodging common words such as .love, .hate or .city or proper names,” ICANN president Paul Twomey told French newspaper Les Echos.

E-mail and other electronic communications have dramatically changed the contemporary legal landscape. By some estimates, more than 90 percent of the cost of a lawsuit today can come from sorting through e-mails and other electronic documents to determine which ones are relevant to the case.
Story @ NPR.

You’re working on one right now. Maybe you’d like to know more about the forerunner of today’s PC, The Small Scale Experimental Machine, better known as “Baby”, which ran its first program at 11 am, 21 June 1948, at Manchester University in the UK, sixty years ago.

Baby was the first “stored program computer”, meaning it ran programs by loading them into a temporary memory store, or random-access memory (RAM), just as computers do today.

“That approach, and the fact the Baby was fully electronic, made it much easier to reprogram than previous computers,” says Geoff Tootill, who helped design, build and test Baby. Check out this article from New Scientist Tech which also features a slideshow of Baby and her creators.

SLA has applauded the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s recent report on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s library closures. The report was requested by the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee last year following an outcry by the public and the library community over the destruction of sensitive documents and restriction of access to public health information contained in the EPA libraries. “SLA was the first library association to denounce the closures in February 2006, and we have continued to work diligently to ensure that the concerns of our members and the public’s best interest are considered and appropriately addressed in the EPA’s strategy and operations plans going forward,” said SLA CEO Janice R. Lachance.

Second-hand books have never been more popular. But to me the thought of a dog-eared, mucus-smeared paperback is too much to bear.

The Wikinomics blog has a post about potential privacy concerns that result from using Facebook applications:

“…many people do not realize that by adding these applications, they’re giving the applications (and therefore the application’s developer(s)) access to their personal information — irrespective of any privacy settings that a user may choose.”

Perhaps no one portrayed a stereotypical librarian better than actress Shirley Jones in the 1962 movie, “The Music Man.” Her character, Marian Paroo, was the town’s conservative, unmarried, bespectacled and socially awkward librarian, who only learns to loosen up when a fast-talking salesman stops into her Iowa town.

This stereotype of librarians as studious and socially awkward has persisted in American culture over the years – something that’s evident not only in film and television characters, but in the McFee Company’s (www.mcphee.com) Librarian Action Figure, released a few years ago. The action figure is modeled as a gray-haired woman in glasses, wearing frumpy clothing. Press a button on her back and she lifts her arm in a “shushing” motion.

These are exactly the stereotypes today’s librarians would like to get rid of, especially one new class of librarians – “guybrarians,” or male librarians who are daring to take their careers where previous generations of men rarely did.

Full article here.