July 2009

A New Jersey librarian’s (LISNews’ VERY OWN ANDY W!!!) lighthearted Facebook petition for a Ben & Jerry’s library-themed ice cream flavor might just come to fruition — or should that be chocolate-swirl-ition? Launched in early June, the petition has picked up momentum as summer temperatures have risen — there are currently more than 4,800 members in the group, and folks from as far away as Canada and England have volunteered flavor ideas. If you haven’t joined the facebook group yet…DO IT NOW!

Suggestions included Gooey Decimal System (dark chocolate alphabet letters with caramel swirls in hazelnut ice cream), Rocky Read (vanilla with chocolate-covered nuts, chocolate chunks and raisins) and Sh-sh-sh-Sherbet! (either lime or chocolate/vanilla).

But, like an autodidact left free to roam the stacks, later ideas have strayed from the original to embrace anything bookish, related to authors or reading or titles.

More from the LA Times Blog.

[Kudos to Andy! He’s most likely a dynamite librarian, but he’s also got the right stuff for marketing. Libraries need that, now more than ever.]

Publishers Weekly reports on the recently purchased Crocodile Pie and other Chicago area bookstores closing.

Had enough of independent bookstores and other indie businesses closing? Want to save the remaining few? Tired of Amazon.com calling all the shots?

Check out these websites and do your part.

IndieBound
350 Project
New Rules Project

and if you’re on facebook…become a fan:

IndieBound
350 Project
New Rules Project
Keep Independent Bookstores Around the World Thriving

The model of requiring online readers to pay for some or all of a newspaper’s online content – which the Democrat-Gazette adopted seven years ago – is referred to as a “pay wall.”

Hussman said during the webinar, titled “From Free to Fee,” that the Democrat-Gazette’s pay wall helps it remain the primary source of information for the state (Arkansas).

Full story here.

So much for the stereotype. Texas librarians are baring their skin and revealing their tattoos – all to raise disaster relief money to help damaged libraries.

Full story here.

New York City residents are particularly fond of hawks (not too many chicken farmers here). A luxury apartment house near Central Park is home to the famous Pale Male and Lola. So when a hawk was found injured near the Duane Library this morning, New Yorkers took note.

Fordham U. reports on the the incident:

A member of the University’s custodial staff discovered the bird on a lawn adjacent to the library at roughly 7:50 a.m. The employee contacted Fordham Security, which summoned officers from the New York City Police Department’s 48th precinct and emergency medical workers.

The hawk is believed to be one of a pair of red-tailed hawks—nicknamed Hawkeye and Rose—which have nested and raised offspring on the pediment of Collins Hall since 2005. They have become popular campus fixtures for staffers and students alike.

We are still awaiting news on the injured hawk’s condition.

We’re getting closer and closer to the start of another academic year and a new intake of LIS students. A question that arises is how to follow LISNews. Recognizing that people have different interests and also different habits in consuming Internet content, it is necessary to perhaps list some of those tools.

You can subscribe to LISNews via e-mail. A page with an example of an e-mail and the sign-up form can be seen at https://lisnews.org/node/28182. E-mails normally come out once per weekday.

LISNews has a multitude of RSS feeds. The main stories RSS feed is https://lisnews.org/rss.xml and you can get wind of new comments by following https://lisnews.org/crss in your RSS reader. RSS feeds off the blogs do not necessarily function at the moment. A partial list of feeds by topic tag is available at https://lisnews.org/syndication.

LISNews posts to Twitter when most new posts are put up. You can find such at http://twitter.com/LISNews.

While there is a tweeter on Twitter for LISNews, there is an automatic posting account on Identica. You can find that at http://identi.ca/lisnews. Identica provides a variety of data export formats so that you can consume posts in your feed reader.

The feed for the LISNews Netcast Network, presently helmed by Interim Coordinator Daniel Messer, is http://feeds.feedburner.com/LISNewsNetcasts. You can also subscribe to LISNews Netcast Network posts via e-mail. You can find the network’s early vodcast efforts at http://listen-from-lisnews.blip.tv/ although it should be noted that that effort may be revived, equipment permitting.

As for other specialty content within the LISHost constellation, you can read press releases related to the library realm at LISWire. LISWire can be found at http://www.liswire.com while the feed for your reader is http://www.liswire.com/aggregator/rss/1. If you have a press release to post, it should go to LISWire first before LISNews.

Also as part of the LISHost constellation for those wanting to get their feet wet with podcasts before investing themselves too much is LISFeeds. LISFeeds is a planet aggregator that brings in show posts into one web page. Click on an episode title to reach the program’s own site for playback. You can find that online at http://www.lisfeeds.com/. In case you are worried that the planet back-end might be stuck and not have updated, this account on Identica is updated when an update cycle concludes: http://identi.ca/lisfeeds.

LISHost can be found at http://www.lishost.org.

The Reno Gazette-Journal has laid off its longtime librarian. Jeanne Rasmussen was informed by the Gannett-owned paper that her position would be terminated July 9, according to the Reno News & Review. She had been the librarian at the Gazette-Journal for more than 40 years.

Reed Business Information is putting Publishers Weekly and its affiliated publications, Library Journal and School Library Journal, up for sale. The sale of the group is part of RBI’s strategy to divest most of its trade magazines in the U.S. Last year, Reed Elsevier, parent company of RBI, tried to sell all of RBI but dropped the sale when it couldn’t get the price it wanted in a depressed market for media properties.

In a related announcement, Tad Smith, CEO of RBI US, has resigned. John Poulin has been named acting CEO and he will head the sales process.

Who wants to buy some professional journals…Blake?

The Kindle and the Future of Reading by Nicholson Baker in the current issue of the New Yorker. It starts…

“I ordered a Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could I not? There were banner ads for it all over the Web. Whenever I went to the Amazon Web site, I was urged to buy one. “Say Hello to Kindle 2,” it said, in tall letters on the main page. If I looked up a particular writer on Amazon—Mary Higgins Clark, say—and then reached the page for her knuckle-gnawer of a novel “Moonlight Becomes You,” the top line on the page said, “ ‘Moonlight Becomes You’ and over 270,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle—Amazon’s new wireless reading device. Learn more.” Below the picture of Clark’s physical paperback ($7.99) was another teaser: “Start reading ‘Moonlight Becomes You’ on your Kindle in under a minute. Don’t have a Kindle? Get yours here.” If I went to the Kindle page for the digital download of “Moonlight Becomes You” ($6.39), it wouldn’t offer me a link back to the print version. I was being steered.”

From San Francisco’s Green Apple Books Blog (video piece), Pete writes:

“People keep asking me, as an owner of an old-fashioned brick-and-mortar independent bookstore, what I think of the Amazon Kindle, one of the many “e-readers” available. So I bought one.

I admit, I was curious. The buzz is nearly screeching; and there must be a reason we don’t sell as many John Grisham novels as we did when I started 16 years ago; and who can resist the appeal of a new gadget dedicated to one of life’s necessary pleasures: reading.

Sure, I had heard some bad stories: there’s the class-action lawsuit against Amazon concerning screens that crack. And the recent brouhaha about Amazon silently removing 1984, Animal Farm, and other titles from Kindles (albeit for a good reason—they had sold pirated copies). And having seen Amazon founder Jeff Bezos laughing on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show is enough to make anyone scared.

And while there are some thoughtful, balanced articles out there, like Nicholson Baker’s piece in the current New Yorker, I wanted to see for myself.

So Green Apple’s crack video crew came at it with an open mind, pitting “The Book” against the Kindle in a smack-down of the most literary sort. We had plenty of help from some, um, “talented” folks, as you’ll see.”