December 2009

As e-readers such as the Amazon Kindle continue to rise, so follows the publishing industry’s worst nightmare: e-book piracy. For years e-book piracy was the exclusive province of the determined few willing to ferret out mostly nerdy textbook titles from the Internet’s dark alleys and read them on their PC. But publishers say that the problem is ballooning as e-readers grow in popularity and the appetite for mainstream e-books grows.

A review of e-books currently available for illicit download confirms that e-book piracy is no longer dominated by technical how-to e-books but includes best-selling authors Janet Evanovich, John Grisham, and James Patterson. PCWorld found that one-third of Publishers Weekly’s 2009 top 15 best-selling fiction books were available for illicit download through a growing variety of book-swapping sites, file-sharing services, and peer-to-peer networks.

More from PC World.

You can borrow books from a library. You can borrow movies. But, did you know in the Arapahoe (CO) Library District, you can borrow librarians? (One commenter requested a cute blond.)

“We’re their personal search engines,” said Pamela Bagby, librarian.
The Arapahoe Library District recently launched the “Book a Librarian” program. Patrons can schedule one-on-one time with a librarian who can aide in researching virtually any topic from travel to health to homework.

“You kind of have to be almost a counselor or pastor in some ways,” said Bagby, one of the 22 librarians across Arapahoe County trained for the program.

Bagby says librarians can act as information detectives guiding patrons through the miles and miles of books as well as the Internet.

“I think it’s wonderful because very often the library is difficult to navigate,” said Ellen Witkin, library patron. “There’s so much information out now.” Video and story.

If you are one of the proud few librarians hanging out on Identica, something new has been created. Beyond the main feed having its story titles posted to a feed there, a group for discussion has been created. Unlike Twitter which has to have this bolted on from third party providers like Twibes, Identica provides group functionality in house.

A group for story discussion and the like was created earlier. You can learn about the nascent group here: http://identi.ca/group/lisnewsterz. To post so that the whole group sees it, you need merely add any of the following to your post: !lisnewsterz, !bibliomicroblog, !lischat. Such means you can see relevant discussion without having to subscribe to three million people of diverging interests simultaneously. To sign up to see posts, go to the group page and hit join.

This is a tech powertoy for folks to play with over vacation time. This Identica functionality does not have a two-way bridge with Twitter at this time. Identica natively accepts posts via e-mail, XMPP, curl, web, and more than a few mainstream desktop clients.

If you are not a user of Identica already, visit their sign-up page.

A few weeks ago hundreds of ODU students rushed into the library to party as part of a quickly organized flash mob. An ODU spokeswoman told NewsChannel 3 no arrests were made and no students were pepper sprayed, but video on the flash mob’s Facebook fan page clearly shows officers pepper spraying students in the library.

Mexico opens library for detained aliens
Mexico’s National Immigration Institute says it has installed a library with 1,000 pieces of reading material at its holding station in eastern Mexico City. It’s named “Looking South,” even if many of the migrants caught were looking north, hoping to cross Mexico to reach the United States.

Library ban for ‘pungent body odour’ man
Library officials in Leicestershire have banned a regular reader from their building following complaints about his “pungent” body odour.

The council said they were forced to act as visitors left Wigston Library

Many More Government Records Compromised in 2009 than Year Ago, Report Claims
If you’re bummed about the data in your department that just got breached, you have some cold comfort. Although the combined number of reported data breaches in the government and the military has dropped in 2009 compared to last year, many more records were compromised in those breaches, according to recent figures compiled by a California nonprofit.

I had three people ask questions on how the “Blogs To Read” list gets put together each year, so I thought it wise to share. First and foremost, it’s not a popularity contest. Every year there have been a couple that received an avalanche of votes, and they usually make it on to the list. But more important that popularity is quality. Blogs make it on the looooong list by being suggested. I go through every blog I can find and look back at what they wrote this year. I get email, IMs, and comments on LISNews full of blogs from all over. I ask past winners, friends, and anyone else I can find. I start with as many as possible. The first list this year was about 180 blogs, which I quickly cut in half, and then with a bit more work in half again. I’m currently working my way through the final list of 30(ish) blogs now.

There are 5 that I have short listed (2 crowd favorites and 3 obvious choices) which leaves just 5 more. I’m going to try to reduce that short list of 30 to about 10 and get feedback from the other LISNews authors. And that should do it. The final list is going to be difficult this year, the short list looks like a great bunch of blogs. I don’t have strict rules to eliminate blogs, but I did come up with this list that explains how the list is reduced. I go through the list, read and reread every blog and try to objectively decide if it will fit on the list this year.

Below are the things that I use to create the final list:

Things that get blogs excluded:
Infrequent posting: This year I also excluded any blog that hasn’t updated in a month.
Short posts: Anyone can post a single link every day.
Too many posts consisting of just a big long quote: Wow, you can copy and paste!
Too many posts of life stream stuff: We’re all impressed you found Twitter.
Too much personal or off topic stuff: Yes, your cats are super cute.
Too many memes: How many Facebook quizzes did you take?
Didn’t stand out in its niche: Sometimes the blog is good, but just not better than others.

Things that make a blog “readable”:
Frequent essay length posts.
Quality, in depth and insightful posts that add to the conversation.
In depth reviews of books, blogs, articles, conferences and life in our profession.
Frequent updates.

How to make a pop-up book by Robert Sabuda, leading children’s pop-up book artist and paper engineer, who works with Matthew Reinhart on this Encyclopedia Prehistorica Dinosaurs: The Definitive Pop-Up (not available on Kindle?)

Want to try your hand at it? It doesn’t look easy.

Incident compromises more than sensitive information of more than 51,000 patrons at 25 campus libraries.

Full story