October 2009

According to the Daily Herald, someone has been crossing out dirty words in books, and employees at the Maury County (TN) Library aren’t happy about it.

“It bothers me because nobody is holding a gun to their head making them read these books,” said Elizabeth Potts, director of the county library. “If they don’t like them, they should just return them.”
Library Director Elizabeth Potts shows one of several books which have had “dirty” words marked through. Others have editorial comments added.

Salt Lake Tribune reports: No formality was overlooked at Monday’s rededication of the University of Utah’s Marriott Library.

But in a break from tradition, U. President Michael Young bypassed a ribbon cutting in favor of a book exchange between dignitaries headlining the event and four school-age children. The exchange was meant to symbolize the library’s enduring role, “the transfer of knowledge from one generation to another,” said Young.

But for the Rytting siblings, James and Lizzie, it was a chance to get up-close and personal with former first lady Laura Bush, America’s most famous librarian.

“It was so cool,” said 9-year-old Lizzie. “I want to be a librarian when I grow up.”

Bush delivered the keynote address Monday at the invitation of Bill Marriott, son of library namesake J. Willard Marriott Sr., and a contributor to the Laura Bush Foundation for America’s Libraries.

Mike Shatzkin has a blog post called A coming new obsession: how to handle a smaller print-book business

Tim O’Reilly said this about it: This is the best post I’ve seen on the problems facing publishers, bar none. Mike hit almost every nail square on the head. (In the discussion of Shatzkin’s post you can see the comments by O’Reilly)

Librarians need to be aware of what is going on in the book publishing ecosystem.

Interview of Cory Doctorow at Internet Librarian International conference in London, on the future of libraries, access and technology.

Cory Doctorow at Internet Librarian International 2009 from Jaap van de Geer on Vimeo.

Meiji University in Tokyo has announced plans to open a library devoted to the art of manga, the Japanese graphic novel genre.

Full blurb at the NYT

Two Nicholasville librarians are fired for not allowing a kid check out a book. The women say the book contains pornographic material inappropriate for children.

The two women say they were fired last month when they wouldn’t let a young girl check out a book from The League of Extraordinary Gentleman series. Now, both women say they’re less concerned with their jobs and more concerned with keeping material like this out of children’s hands.
[Thanks Dan!]

NYT Magazine article about a piece of software that keeps you offline

…an app called Freedom, which blocks your Internet access for up to eight hours at a stretch. The only way to get back online is to reboot your computer, which — though not as foolproof as, say, removing the modem entirely and overnighting it to yourself (another strategy I’ve contemplated) — is cumbersome and humiliating enough to be an effective deterrent. The program was developed by Fred Stutzman, a graduate student in information and library science, whose own failsafe self-binding technique — writing at a cafe without Internet access — came undone when the place went wireless. “We’re moving toward this era where we’ll never be able to escape from the cloud,” he told me. “I realized the only way to fight back was at an individual, personal level.”

Full article

Kiva is a site that allows people to make micro-loans to entrepreneurs around the world. You can donate as an individual but you can also join teams.

There is a Lending Librarians Team.

We loan because: Without food, who can afford books? Without knowledge, what good is income? Plus, librarians are natural lenders!

About us: Librarians, library students, and other information-profession-oriented folks dedicated to helping raise the standard of literacy and education in the developing world through giving people a boost out of poverty.

For those who like renting movies, Hollywood may soon have a message: Prepare to wait.

In an effort to push consumers toward buying more movies, some major film studios are considering a new policy that would block DVDs from being offered for rental until several weeks after going on sale.

Under the plan, new DVD releases would be available on a purchase-only basis for a few weeks, after which time companies such as Blockbuster Inc. and Netflix Inc. would be allowed to rent the DVDs to their customers. The move comes as the studios are grappling with sharply declining DVD revenue, which has long propped up the movie business.

Full story here.

The free software application is expected to be released in November. It will run on the Windows 7, Vista and XP operating systems from Microsoft.

Full story in the L.A. Times