January 2010

FORT WORTH, Texas — What do the authors of the children’s book “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?” and a 2008 book called “Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation” have in common?

Both are named Bill Martin and, for now, neither is being added to Texas schoolbooks.

In their haste to sort out the state’s social studies curriculum standards, the State Board of Education recently tossed children’s author Martin, who died in 2004, from a proposal for the third-grade section. Board member Pat Hardy, who made the motion, cited books he had written for adults that contain “very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system.”

Interesting discussion in The Scotsman about how today’s children are no longer reading classic novels such as Wind in the Willows, Moby Dick and Oliver Twist. The bestseller lists are dominated by Harry Potter, The Twilight Series and other recent titles.

“Sometimes it can be a little daunting to be given a 600-page classic and told it is a classic if you are a young kid, so maybe it’s about how you present books and talk about them.”

To get hung up on whether children are reading “the classics”, though, is to miss the point, says Ali Bowden, director of Edinburgh’s Unesco City of Literature Trust .

“I think the most important thing is that kids read, rather than being overly prescriptive on what they read. “I think the classic novels are still being taught in schools and I suspect most kids are being given contemporary books rather than classics at home. A lot of kids are reading a whole range of books, including classics.

“Nurturing a passion for reading is really important, rather than giving kids a really strict book list.”

On January 16, Barnes & Noble, which owns B. Dalton, closed the store inside Laredo’s Mall del Norte.

That leaves Laredo, Texas, population of 250,000, one of the largest cities in the United States without a bookstore

Key Author Estates, Formerly Resistant, Now Support Google Books

Members of the Authors Guild who vociferously opposed Google Books now support the initiative. The estates of author John Steinbeck and songwriter Woody Guthrie, which led a successful movement to postpone the opt-out deadline to January 28, said they are now happy with the revised Google Books plan in an e-mail the Authors Guild sent to its members on Thursday.

One from Times of India: Inaugurating the two-day seminar organized by the Department of Library and Information Centre, St Agnes College, on Empowering Library Professionals in Managing Digital Resources and Providing Extension Activities here recently, she said the adoption of library software could help over come the problem of staff shortage.

I bet you’d love to read this article in Science Magazine: Improving Access to Research
The authors write “Last week, the U.S. House Science and Technology Committee’s Roundtable on Scholarly Publishing (on which we served along with 10 others) released a report* arguing that journal articles derived from federal research funding should be made publicly available as quickly as practicable—generally in a year or less after publication—and in ways that will improve scholarship by maximizing the scope for interoperability across articles, among disciplines, and internationally. ”
Unfortunatly…. “The content you requested requires free registration or a subscription to this site. If you already have a user name and password, please sign in below.”
Well at least you can read the report.

SRU’s Bailey Library is home to a variety of unique and rare items, which happens to include a once-missing crumbling book of Spanish erotic poetry from South America.

What makes this book important isn’t its subject, or the fact that it’d been missing for years until this past Winter Break, but its binding.

Human skin.

One reason book was lost:

…….was the fact that the author’s name is different from what’s in the library’s system, Voyager-it lacks the hyphenated last name of Medina-Navascues that had been added to Voyager years ago

Full article

Forget media specialist or teacher-librarian. As far as the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) is concerned, the official title for the profession is now school librarian.

Full story at School Library Journal

Sharing what we see on the Web has reduced the chance that we are also missing something important. Call it “controlled serendipity.”

NYT Bits Blog