February 2009

Keep libraries free! So Say The Censors, So Say The Kids
Yesterday Indexed took a funny little look a library censorship.

A measure now before the Indiana Senate would allow library districts to opt out of proposed reorganization efforts with a little help from voters.

Senate Bill 348 would establish a service planning committee in each county to craft a plan for a consolidated county library system or draw up — and defend — a proposal to maintain multiple library districts.

The effort is a product of the Kernan-Shepard local government reform commission, which found that 6.5 percent of the state’s population — in pockets of 38 counties — does not have access to library services.

A weekly live interactive roundtable discussion of all things library, Greg:

In short, it’s time to devote more of my headspace to being daddy. Toward that end, and with a heavy heart, I’m putting the show on hiatus. I’m hesitant to declare it a permanent vacation, as situations change and I’ve been known to change my mind, but that’s a distinct possibility.

Speaking at Princeton on Thursday, Richard Sarnoff, chairman of the Association of American Publishers, discussed the landmark settlement in the Google Book Search case. Sarnoff speculated that the agreement could effectively give Google and Amazon a “duopoly” in the online book market.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Ad Hoc Task Force to Review the Proposed OCLC Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records has issued its final report, which calls on OCLC to develop a new policy to replace the one released in November 2008. The report is freely available on the ARL Web site http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/oclc-report-jan09.pdf.

I (Elizabeth Davies) have a confession to make: There’s an overdue library book under my bed.

If you are my librarian, that confession doesn’t come as any surprise. In fact, I’m fairly certain the library is thinking of naming its next addition, “The Elizabeth Davies Overdue Fine Center.”

It’s not that I intend to be delinquent, of course. But I seem to have trouble getting through an entire book in just two weeks. I always think I can do it, but since having children, I consistently find myself re-reading the same paragraph over and over again. It seems to take days to turn the page.

It’s just a darned good thing that I don’t live in Independence, Iowa. That’s where a 39-year-old woman was arrested on a charge of failing to return a library book over the course of nine months. Ironically, the $14 book was “The Freedom Writers Diary” — and it cost the library patron $250 to free herself from jail.

Hopefully, the threat of being jailed for that book under the bed won’t keep people out of libraries. It’s only in recent years that I found out what awesome places libraries are. Growing up, we lived outside the city limits so we didn’t qualify for a free library card. Thus, I only really thought of the library as a place to do research for homework. More from TH Online.

Before you click the link to see the book take a guess at the cost. See how close you are.

Very expensive Kindle ebook title: Practical Variable Speed Drives and Power Electronics (Practical Professional Books)

The sales rank for the book is 32,000. I wonder if Amazon really sold a copy or if certain Amazon employees have free downloads and they got the book just to say they had a title this expensive or just to see what a book that cost this much looks like.

Report from the NYTimes: Two years ago, an effort to fix No Child Left Behind, the main federal law on public schools provoked a grueling slugfest in Congress, leading Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, to say the law had become “the most negative brand in America.”

Education Secretary Arne Duncan agrees. “Let’s rebrand it,” he said in an interview. “Give it a new name.” And before Mr. Duncan has had time to float a single name, scores of educators, policy wonks and assorted rabble-rousers have rushed in with an outpouring of proposals.

A blog contest to rename the No Child Left Behind law has received entries like the Rearranging the Deck Chairs Act and the Teach to the Test Act. Here’s the website sponsoring the contest. So far, 216 suggestions have been made.

The college textbook is on track to becoming a relic of the paper-and-ink era. On campuses around the country, professors and students are selecting digital versions of books that can be read off of a computer screen.

Most college students are used to going online for music, videos and news — so why not textbooks?

One college in rural Missouri is the first trying to go entirely book-free.

Full story at NPR

One day last summer, Google’s search engine trundled quietly past a milestone. It added the one trillionth address to the list of Web pages it knows about. But as impossibly big as that number may seem, it represents only a fraction of the entire Web.

Beyond those trillion pages lies an even vaster Web of hidden data: financial information, shopping catalogs, flight schedules, medical research and all kinds of other material stored in databases that remain largely invisible to search engines.

The challenges that the major search engines face in penetrating this so-called Deep Web go a long way toward explaining why they still can’t provide satisfying answers to questions like “What’s the best fare from New York to London next Thursday?” or “When will the Yankees play the Red Sox this year?” The answers are readily available — if only the search engines knew how to find them.

Full article in the NYT