Later this year, a local PCC natural food store will start testing eco-friendly shelf tags, Tech Flash reports. The “epaper” technology, called epops, involves using small LCD displays in the place of paper labels.
ZBD Solutions in Britain developed the technology, which lets retailers update pricing or product data without printing and attaching new labels. If successful in its Fremont, Wash., location, PCC will incorporate electronic shelf tags in all of its nine Seattle-area stores.
Borrowing can quickly turn to stealing when patrons pick up music at their local libraries.
Copying compact discs is illegal, but library employees say they generally can’t prove it’s occurring except in the most egregious cases.
“Copyright is an important issue, but it’s difficult to oversee,” said Ann Moore, Upper Arlington Library spokeswoman. “Once they take materials home, we can’t control what they do with them.”
Copying music or a book from a library CD is a form of piracy just like illegal downloads on the Internet.
KAMPALA, Uganda — The caller was frustrated. A new pest was eating away at his just-planted coffee crop, and he wanted to know what to do. Tyssa Muhima jotted down notes as the caller spoke, and promised to call back in 10 minutes with an answer.
Each day, Ms. Muhima and two other young women at this small call center on the outskirts of Uganda’s capital city answer about 40 such calls. They are operators for Question Box, a free, nonprofit telephone hot line that is meant to get information to people in remote areas who lack access to computers.
William Safire, a speechwriter for President Richard M. Nixon and a Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist for The New York Times who also wrote novels, books on politics and a Malaprop’s treasury of articles on language, died at a hospice in Rockville, Md. on Sunday. He was 79.
AncestryMagazine: Your research work at the library will go better if you follow the practical guidelines recommended here.
Yesteryear’s stereotype of the little gray-haired librarian, with her hair in a bun and her eyeglasses perched on the tip of her nose, pacing the library shushing people, no longer exists. The modern librarian is an information broker whose job is to provide us with a wealth of different resources.
In the genealogical research arena, the information and materials we request are often unique from those in other areas of the library. And the questions we ask librarians can often be challenging. But before you run to the librarian for help, consider the following research strategies to becoming an effective library patron.
Cool website: Ask for It By Name, explaining the origins of popular product names. On the home page today is the origin of the domain name ‘eBay’.
After Harvard University lost $11 billion of endowment value last fiscal year, President Drew Faust is pulling the pursestrings rather tightly.
Harvard’s 70 libraries, for example, must work together to increase savings, she said in a speech today on campus in Cambridge. Schools and divisions across Harvard have to work together to cut the impact of the fund’s losses resulting from the global financial crisis, she said.
Harvard’s library system, which has more than 16 million volumes, is the oldest in the U.S. and the largest academic library system in the world, according to the school’s Web site. While the system is one of the school’s “proudest treasures,” it’s in need of better coordination, Faust said.
“Curious practices have grown up as the system has grown – – obstacles to sharing and coordination,” she said. Economic arrangements at the libraries discourage them from working together, she said. [Sound familiar?]
“Change in our library system is not a choice, but a necessity,” she said. “We need to ensure that we make that change in the wisest way possible.”
Schools can also see savings in their purchases of computers and other forms of information technology, she said.
“We must dedicate ourselves — individually and collectively — to harnessing the power of a more unified Harvard,” she said. Report from Bloomberg News.
WSJ:’To you zealots and bigots and false patriots who live in fear of discourse. You screamers and banners and burners. . . .” These are the opening lines of the official Manifesto of Banned Books Week, which starts tomorrow. This annual “national celebration of the freedom to read” is led by the American Library Association (ALA) and co-sponsored by a number of professional associations and advocacy groups. Events and displays at “hundreds” of libraries and bookstores will “draw attention to the problem of censorship” in the U.S.
As the tone of the Manifesto suggests, the sponsors are more interested in confrontation than celebration. The Banned Books Week Readout in Chicago will feature “wildly successful” and “incredibly popular” authors who will “share their experiences as targets of censors.” The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression has produced posters, based on a graphic-novel adaptation of “Fahrenheit 451,” to help “publicize the hundreds of attacks on books that occur every year in the United States.” The ALA has launched an online U.S. “censorship map” to show how pervasive the threat is.
WSJ:’To you zealots and bigots and false patriots who live in fear of discourse. You screamers and banners and burners. . . .” These are the opening lines of the official Manifesto of Banned Books Week, which starts tomorrow. This annual “national celebration of the freedom to read” is led by the American Library Association (ALA) and co-sponsored by a number of professional associations and advocacy groups. Events and displays at “hundreds” of libraries and bookstores will “draw attention to the problem of censorship” in the U.S.
As the tone of the Manifesto suggests, the sponsors are more interested in confrontation than celebration. The Banned Books Week Readout in Chicago will feature “wildly successful” and “incredibly popular” authors who will “share their experiences as targets of censors.” The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression has produced posters, based on a graphic-novel adaptation of “Fahrenheit 451,” to help “publicize the hundreds of attacks on books that occur every year in the United States.” The ALA has launched an online U.S. “censorship map” to show how pervasive the threat is.
In the common-law tradition, censorship refers specifically to the government’s prior restraint on publication. None of the sponsors claim this has happened; the acts they have in mind are perpetrated by private citizens. Yet the cases on the map almost all involve ordinary people lodging complaints with school and library authorities. Before Banned Books Week began in 1982, such behavior was known as petitioning the government for a redress of grievances.
Rare Book Lover Banned From Library
DENVER — Who knew bed bugs could be book worms?
The Denver Public Library had to quarantine and fumigate four areas at the main branch in just the past three weeks because of bed bugs, KMGH-TV in Denver reported.
The tiny insect is being spread by a customer trying to preserve rare books, but ironically it’s because of his actions that the books now have to be destroyed.
“Some of the bed bugs fell out of those materials that had been returned,” said Denver Public Library spokeswoman Celeste Jackson.
The infected books came from 69-year-old Denver resident Roger Goffeney. He checks out historic books, some 200 years old, and helps archive them online in an effort called the Gutenberg Project.
In his new tell-all book, Speechless: Tales of a White House Survivor, former Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer talks about how the former President determined who would receive a a Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civil award. According to Latimer, Bush completely politicized the revered award during his administration.
Latimer writes that administration officials objected to giving author J.K. Rowling the Presidential Medal of Freedom because her writing “encouraged witchcraft” (p. 201):
This was the same sort of narrow thinking that led people in the White House to actually object to giving the author J.K. Rowling a presidential medal because the Harry Potter books encouraged witchcraft.
The article in Think Progress goes on to tell how Bush stayed away from awarding the medal to such liberal politicians as Teddy Kennedy.
The book is published by Random House.
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