April 2010

“Catcher in the Rye” is passed out in class on South Park. You can watch the full episode here. This is South Park. If you click on the link expect to hear profanity.

On April 21, Overdrive announced a free audiobook app for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, available now in the Apple App Store.

From the announcement: “With OverDrive® Media ConsoleTM for iPhone, users can now wirelessly download MP3 audiobooks from OverDrive-powered library and retail websites to their Apple® device. Audiobooks for over-the-air download are available from more than 10,000 libraries worldwide.”

Has anyone out there tried this? I don’t have the requisite device so I can’t give it a test-run. This strikes me as huge news. If anyone reading this tries the app out, please post results in the comments.

Expanding Our Touchpoints To Self-Service

As libraries move more of their services into the online and mobile worlds, we will no doubt expand the opportunities for self-service – which is a good thing. But as we do so we will also need to pay attention to expanding our touchpoints in those environments.

The Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment to the Minnesota Constitution, approved by voters in 2008, was a financial windfall for supporters of the state’s wildlife and wetlands, drinking water, arts, history and cultural heritage. And for Neil Gaiman.

The 2009 Newbery Award-winning author earned $45,000 — all of it coming directly from so-called legacy-amendment funds — for an appearance a week ago at Stillwater Junior High School in the kickoff event of Club Book, a project of the Metropolitan Library Services Agency. The project brings well-known national and regional authors to Twin Cities-area libraries by tapping into the arts and cultural heritage fund portion of legacy-amendment funds.

Chris Olson, director of the Metropolitan Library Services Agency (MLSA) and one of those who helps oversee the $4.25 million in legacy amendment funds that were allocated to the state’s regional public library systems, admitted last week that he was somewhat taken aback when he learned the amount of Gaiman’s fee for the Stillwater event.

“Frankly, yes, I was surprised,” Olson said. “That was my immediate reaction.” Politics in Minnesota.

Durst passed this on to me to post.

In a move toward greater transparency, Google on Tuesday introduced a new tool that shows the number of requests for data and for data removal that Google has received from governments around the world.

Google’s Government Requests tool does not provide detail about the nature of the requests and it is updated only every six months. Nonetheless, it represents an unprecedented degree of disclosure.

Full article

By now it must be clear to all but a handful of diehards that the business model based on returnability of books for credit, a practice instituted by the trade book industry some 75 years ago, is no longer viable. In fact it has proven to be a bargain with the Devil.

Some pundits ascribe the woes of our business to printed books themselves, saying that the medium is no longer appropriate for our times. In truth nothing is wrong with printed books. Everything is wrong with the way they are distributed.

Full blog entry at e-reads.com

At first blush, Costco Wholesale Corp v. Omega, S.A., which the U.S. Supreme Court last week agreed to hear, doesn’t involve the kind of cutting-edge issues that copyright lawyers usually grapple with in the digital age. So why is the Court willing to consider a dispute between a company that makes fancy watches and a company that imports and resells them? It sounds like the kind of lawsuit that should have been resolved 200 years ago.

What’s at stake in these disputes is the ability of resellers large (Costco) and small (Liu) to offer legitimate, non-pirated versions of copyrighted goods to U.S. consumers at prices that undercut those charged by the copyright holders—something that’s possible thanks to the robust secondary markets provided by major Internet retailers such as eBay and Amazon.

Full story

TRIBUTES have been paid to a Cambridge University librarian who died after being hit by a train. Richard Savage, of Greville Road, off Mill Road, Cambridge, died at Royston station on Friday morning.

Colleagues at the university’s Department of Plant Sciences in Downing Street have spoken fondly about the 59-year-old who worked there for 20 years.

Howard Griffiths, professor of plant ecology at the department, told of how his friend had “hidden depths” and a keen sense of humour.

He said: “Richard seemed to embody the layman’s view of a librarian. He was well-read, had a keen sense of humour, and hinted at an interesting past by using off-beat literary references when sending reminders and messages ‘from the librarian’s cage’.

WALNUT CREEK — Librarians from Walnut Creek, Concord, Castro Valley and San Jose joined members of the California PTA today at Foothill Middle School to denounce education cuts that are shutting school libraries.

Because of cuts in the Mt. Diablo district, most middle schools libraries are open two days a week and closed three days. But Foothill parents raised about $17,000 to keep their librarian on-site for a third day and to pay for a library aide who staffs the facility from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. the other two days.

California ranks 51st in the nation in its ratio of librarians to students, with one school librarian per 5,124 students compared to the national average of one to 916 students, according to a 2006-07 report from the National Center for Education Statistics.

Read more at education writer Theresa Harrington’s On Assignment blog at www.ibabuzz.com/onassignment.

Story from the NYTimes about a $2.3 million dollar sorting machine that does the work that nobody wanted to do previously…sorting books to send from one branch to another.

Salvatore Magaddino, who oversees the library system’s distribution of materials did not know that such a machine existed until a colleague pointed out one that was featured in a YouTube video.

Article features photos and a video of the machine at work.