July 2008

The infrastructure of the FDR Library is in shambles. The roof leaks, the basement floods, asbestos is flaking from old steam pipes, an ancient electrical system could send the whole place up in smoke. This sorry situation is an insult to the person the library and museum honor: the founder of the New Deal, the greatest investment in our nation’s modern development.

Op-ed calling for congressional support of our existing Presidential Libraries by author Nick Taylor in today’s New York Times. Some interesting commentary on the subject of Presidential Libraries too.

Time for a library cat article. Did you know that library cats date back to the time of medieval monks, who needed cats around to protect the manuscripts they were creating from mice?

Long Island’s Newsday brings us up to date on Bob from the Ellington (CT) Library and a few other favorite library felines.

Since community schools have had to be very frugal due to budget cuts, tutoring, homework help and summer school are usually the first things to go.

But Nancy Schram, library division manager for the Thousand Oaks (CA) Library wrote a grant that allowed the library to purchase the Brainfuse program and students who enjoyed it through the school year are now utilizing it through the summer too.

Does it substitute for summer school? Perhaps it’s more fun…more from the Ventura County Star.

The Malaysian National News Agency reported from Kuala Lumpur that Ian Wison has been elected President of the International Council on Archives. Wilson, who reportedly has spent thirty years connected with Canadian library and archive communities, will serve a two year term.

As was mentioned in LISTen #30, there is no podcast episode being released on July 28th. LISTen will return on August 4th with its thirty-first episode. The audio project from Blake is still underway and responses are still being collected, though. You can hear examples of what an audio reply showing up on the podcast would sound like by listening to LISTen #30.

Residents living in the unincorporated areas around Eugene, OR grew weary of the US$80 per household fee they paid to the Eugene Public Library. So they decided to start their own library.

For a mere $10 per year, the residents can use a library now holding over 14,000 items in its collection. To drive the point home to the Eugene residents about affordable library service, they only charge them $15.

“We love to come here,” said patron Jana Hazelton, who was there recently with 8-year-old son, Brady, and his friend Landon Nicholsen, also 8.

The Fort Mills Times seems surprised librarians have blogs. Books may date back to the papyrus of ancient Egypt, but the Idaho Commission for Libraries is joining the 21st century with Web site revamp that aims to give librarians space to blog about their changing world.

With a federal $25,000 grant, the agency is currently testing the new site, which it plans to roll out this October.

AFTER scanning his textbooks and making them available to anyone to download free, a contributor at the file-sharing site PirateBay.org composed a colorful message for “all publishers” of college textbooks, warning them that “myself and all other students are tired of getting” ripped off. (The contributor’s message included many ripe expletives, but hey, this is a family newspaper.)

All forms of print publishing must contend with the digital transition, but college textbook publishing has a particularly nasty problem on its hands. College students may be the angriest group of captive customers to be found anywhere.

Full story in the New York Times

Books are not Nadia Konyk’s thing. Her mother, hoping to entice her, brings them home from the library, but Nadia rarely shows an interest.

Instead, like so many other teenagers, Nadia, 15, is addicted to the Internet. She regularly spends at least six hours a day in front of the computer here in this suburb southwest of Cleveland.

A slender, chatty blonde who wears black-framed plastic glasses, Nadia checks her e-mail and peruses myyearbook.com, a social networking site, reading messages or posting updates on her mood. She searches for music videos on YouTube and logs onto Gaia Online, a role-playing site where members fashion alternate identities as cutesy cartoon characters. But she spends most of her time on quizilla.com or fanfiction.net, reading and commenting on stories written by other users and based on books, television shows or movies.

Full story in the New York Times

On the third floor of the Museum of Modern Art in Midtown Manhattan rests a tribute to Esquire’s glory years — a collection of 92 covers from the 1960s and early 1970s that have become, in the museum’s words, “essential to the iconography of American culture.”

That illustrious history hangs over the magazine’s effort to celebrate its 75th year. Its attempt to add to the annals of museum-worthy covers includes a nod to the digital age: an electronic cover, using admittedly rudimentary technology, that will flash “the 21st Century Begins Now,” when it appears on newsstands in September.

Read full story of how e-ink will be used on the cover of Esquire at the New York Times.