November 2008

Mint Canyon (Santa Clarita, CA) Elementary School Principal Betsy Letzo has come up with some pretty wild ideas. But none have been as hair-raising as her latest reading-enhancement scheme, according to The Signal.

These were the conditions: If students could read and pass comprehension tests on more books that their teachers, the teachers had to sport a Mohawk for a day. Participating faculty lost the heated competition and walked around campus Monday with their hair sprayed into long, stiff, colorful Mohawks. Check out the photo!!

Is Michelle Obama wearing Dirty Librarian Chains?

Michelle Obama

Dirty Librarian Chains?

When cleaning out the attic of the Guilford H. Hathaway (MA) Library, Michael McCue and others found more than just some musty items and cobwebs.

Instead, they found historical treasures from the 19th century to the mid-20th century that they now plan to preserve at the Historical Society Museum on Slab Bridge Road.

Among the artifacts were pencil sketches of two town officials, Guilford Hathaway and George W. Hall; a handwritten list of World War II airplane spotters who were town residents; items from the town’s various Temperance Society groups; collars and other pieces of clothing from town marching band uniforms; and an 1897 original layout of the Assonet Burying Ground.

Things are a-changing in San Angelo.

Workers last week toppled the brick walls on the first floor of the Hemphill Wells Building, opening the interior to the elements and giving a glimpse into what the new library will look like when completed more than a year from now.

“It’s quite different to look at,” said Library Director Larry Justiss. “That came down fast. There was just a skin left after the asbestos people got through. A good wind could have blown it over.” The library’s designs call for a ground floor enclosed entirely in glass, though it will be a few more months before those working inside get any relief from the winter weather.

Construction work, delayed by the discovery of asbestos in the abandoned department store, began in earnest last month and is expected to continue until spring 2010.

Possibly later today, one of three finalists, profiled and pictured in this Seattle PI article will be named Director of the Seattle Public Library.

A selection committee will recommend one of three finalists to the post as early as today. They are Susan Hildreth, the California state librarian; Jane Light, who heads the San Jose Public Library; and Rivkah Sass, director of the Omaha Public Library. The previous Seattle city librarian, Deborah Jacobs, left in July to take a job at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

If you hear/see the announcement, please let us know the results…THANKS Heidi, it’s Susan Hildreth.

The Library of Congress may hold the nation’s collection of books, but those aren’t the only words in the building worth a visit.

The white marble building is a cathedral to the written word. Lofty inscriptions peer out from among the stone columns, murals of classical figures and twining vines that decorate the Great Hall.

“Words are also actions, and actions a kind of words,” one reads.

“In books lies the soul of the whole past time,” another says.

All the inscriptions go together, says historian John Cole, author of “On These Walls: Inscriptions and Quotations in the Library of Congress.” Cole has spent more than four decades in the building, and says it took him years to realize the message behind the quotations.

Listen to entire story on NPR

If you follow the link there is a slideshow that tours the hallways of the Library of Congress. I would direct link the slideshow but it is a java link so I cannot do that.

AP reports: The Milwaukee Public Library has been chosen to host a national traveling exhibit on baseball’s Negro Leagues.

“Pride and Passion: The African-American Baseball Experience” will tour libraries from July 22 through Sept. 4.

The Milwaukee Public Library is one of 25 libraries nationwide chosen to host the exhibit, which treats baseball as a reflection of U.S. race relations. Details on the grant that funded the exhibit from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Verizon Wireless has fired an undisclosed number of employees who couldn’t resist the chance to peek into Barack Obama’s cellphone records, CNN reports.

It was an old, flip-top phone, not his famous BlackBerry, and the account had been inactive for months. No text messages or voicemail contents could have been accessed. The employees were satisfying “idle curiosity,” a source told CNN, and the employees were not authorized to access customer records.

Based on my experience, it is one of Blakes’ favorite words: meh.

But there is nothing meh about the journey of the latest entry in the Collins English Dictionary. Rather, it illustrates how e-mail and the internet are creating language.

“Meh” started out in the US and Canada as an interjection signifying mediocrity or indifference and has evolved, via the internet and an episode of The Simpsons, into a common adjective meaning boring, apathetic or unimpressive in British English.

Times Online says “Collins has been aware for some time of the growing use of meh in written and spoken language. The word is widely used on the internet and is appearing in British spoken English as well as in print media.

Cormac McKeown, head of content at Collins Dictionaries, said: “This is a new interjection from the US that seems to have inveigled its way into common speech over here.” Love it, us colonists teaching the inhabitants of the motherland new words.

OPPORTUNITIES for social networking abound on the Internet, but not when it comes to one standard job: using a browser and search engine to comb the Web for information. That task is still typically done solo, because browser displays and search procedures have traditionally been designed for a single user.

Now tools are being developed by Microsoft and other companies that let people at different computers search as a team, dividing responsibilities and pooling results and recommendations in a shared Web space on the browser display as they plan a family vacation, for instance, or research a medical problem.

Full story here.

Also in article: SearchTogether, by contrast, actively supports a group search, said Michael Twidale, an associate professor at the graduate school of library and information science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who studies people’s strategies for conducting research jointly.

“SearchTogether addresses a real need,” he said. “People searching for information often want to interact with other people. But most of our information retrieval systems fail to recognize this.”