July 2010

Cleveland-based digital media vendor Overdrive is taking a “digital bookmobile” on a tour to show off the services Overdrive provides patrons via libraries. The LISTen production team visited the tractor-trailer rig to get some pictures of the traveling show. Clicking on pictures below will take you to larger versions on Flickr. All pictures are by Stephen Michael Kellat, Head Writer of Erie Looking Productions.

A view of the scene taken from Ashtabula City’s North Park

The front façade of Ashtabula County District Library

The parking lot at Ashtabula County District Library was too small for the tractor-trailer rig so parking next door at First Baptist Church of Ashtabula was required.

LISTen producer Gloria Kellat entering the exhibit.

Upon entering you are greeted with a video talking about downloading digital media and the benefits you can gain from that.

The walls were covered with facts and details about libraries and books.

Examples of reading devices to consume Overdrive materials with were on display too.

A video lounge as well as computer terminals to explore content holdings were also found in the trailer. The trailer was making a single day appearance at Ashtabula County District Library.

Photo Montage: Digital Bookmobile by Stephen Michael Kellat is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The perfect gift for bookworms with authority
The Little Librarian kit lets my kids turn their stack of favorite books into their own mini-library, complete with library cards, book pockets and even overdue slips for those forgetful borrowers. All the material is made of paper or cardstock, so don’t expect the items to last years, but my school-age kids didn’t seem to mind one bit.

The Glen Rock (NJ) Public Library has been hit with a string of thefts from its video collection. More than 25 videos have been removed from their cases and stolen. Librarians say the videos targeted for theft are action-adventure titles.

Since mid-June, the library has lost 29 DVDs to theft, according to Lori Quinn, director of Circulation and Technical Services. The empty DVD cases are being left throughout the library.

“The average price is $22, and it’s really adding up,” Quinn said. The missing videos are mostly action-adventure titles, such as “Blade,” “The Matrix” and “Scarface.” This week the library discovered three more titles missing: “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra,” “Tropic Thunder,” and “The Hangover.”

“The genre we’re finding is mostly action or male-dominated, testosterone-driven movies,” Quinn said. Librarians speculated the thefts were likely being perpetrated by a single individual.

“It saddens me that there’s a person who is doing this for whatever reason. It could be extreme boredom, mental illness, or adolescent arrogance – and it’s adolescent whether or not it’s a young person,” Pelcyger said. “To steal from a community, from a family, hurts the people this person sees every day.”

This week, Lifehacker wants to hear about your favorite book recommendation service. Where do you go to get fresh titles to fill your reading list? What makes your go-to recommendation service better than all the rest? They want to know why it won you over and how it keeps you coming back. I see a few votes for librarians so far.

Boing Boing noted An Amusing Old article where they talked about Martin Duncan, librarian to the Zoological Society, who, they say, quite accidently discovered her could hypnotise lobsters. Librarians: What Can’t We DO?

At a time when the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library is suffering from deep county-wide budget cuts, local booksellers are banding together to offer financial support this August.

Three libraries closed indefinitely June 19, and to keep the remaining libraries open, the book-buying budget was reduced by 58 percent since last fiscal year.

That means the average wait time for a new book is six months – sometimes longer.

“We were able to keep the libraries open with the deals made with the municipalities, city and county, but we still had to make cuts elsewhere,” said Angela Haigler, communications and marketing director for Charlotte Mecklenburg Library.

To help out, 18 bookstores in the greater Charlotte area have agreed to hold their own three-day book sales and give a portion of profits to the library’s book-buying fund.

“Customers will be asked if they’re interested in supporting local libraries, and if they’re interested, 10 percent of their purchases for that day will go to the libraries,” said Edward Lee, general manager of the Books-A-Million at Concord Mills Mall.

A listing of participating stores and additional information at the Charlotte Observer.

Online competition forces price cuts on used books
The rise of the digital book has prompted one of Detroit’s last independent bookstore operators, John K. King, to promote cutthroat pricing in an attempt to keep alive his two satellite used bookstores.

“What I can’t stand is the free pass the e-books are getting,” King said. “Like they are the greatest things and they have no negative aspect. Besides the closing of bookstores like mine, what about the toxic nature of those devices? Books are biodegradable.”

Conservative vs. Liberal Women’s Book Covers
Conclusions: The formula for a Republican lady book cover is pretty simple and consistent. Put the nice-looking author (preferably a blonde, long hair and lots of makeup a must) on there, in a medium or full-body shot. Display chest prominently when possible.

And now…the other side of the coin. How enforced reading can help rehabilitate former and would-be offenders as reported by the Guardian UK. The program, Changing Lives Through Literature, is described here.

When Mitchell Rouse was convicted of two drug offences in Houston, the former x-ray technician who faced a 60-year prison sentence – reduced to 30 years if he pleaded guilty – was instead put on probation and sentenced to read.

“I was doing it because it was a condition of my probation and it would reduce my community hours,” Rouse recalls. The 42-year-old had turned to meth as a way of coping with the stress of his job at a hospital where he frequently worked an 80-hour week. Fearing for his life, Mitchell’s wife turned him into the authorities. “If she hadn’t, I would be dead or destitute by now,” he says.

And now…the other side of the coin. How enforced reading can help rehabilitate former and would-be offenders as reported by the Guardian UK. The program, Changing Lives Through Literature, is described here.

When Mitchell Rouse was convicted of two drug offences in Houston, the former x-ray technician who faced a 60-year prison sentence – reduced to 30 years if he pleaded guilty – was instead put on probation and sentenced to read.

“I was doing it because it was a condition of my probation and it would reduce my community hours,” Rouse recalls. The 42-year-old had turned to meth as a way of coping with the stress of his job at a hospital where he frequently worked an 80-hour week. Fearing for his life, Mitchell’s wife turned him into the authorities. “If she hadn’t, I would be dead or destitute by now,” he says.

Five years on, he is free from drugs, holding down a job as a building contractor, and reunited with his family. He describes being sentenced to a reading group as “a miracle” and says the six-week reading course “changed the way I look at life”. Repeat offenders of serious crimes such as armed robbery, assault or drug dealing are made to attend a reading group where they discuss literary classics such as To Kill a Mockingbird, The Bell Jar and Of Mice and Men.” It made me believe in my own potential. In the group you’re not wrong, you’re not necessarily right either, but your opinion is just as valid as anyone else’s,” he says.

NY Times, Dateline: NEW HAVEN — As the trial approaches for one of the men charged in the triple-homicide home invasion in Cheshire, CT in 2007, all the motions, requests for evidence, and demands that one would expect in a complex capital case have flown back and forth between the defense and prosecutors.

But one stood out, tantalizingly. The defense said it would request that the names of books that one of the accused men, Steven Hayes, checked out of a prison library before the killings not be admitted as evidence. The books, the defense indicated in one motion, included plots that were “criminally malevolent in the extreme.”

Mr. Hayes’s lawyers suggested that prison librarians might have given him what amounted to a literary blueprint for the crime, one that already has what some see as a literary predecessor of sorts: it has been compared with the 1959 Kansas killings described in Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.”

The defense lawyers’ suggestion that prison library books could have shaped the crime — or that knowing Mr. Hayes read them could turn jurors against him — has created a strange kind of guessing game about the literary interests of Mr. Hayes, 46, a career thief and drug abuser whose education topped out at a high school equivalency degree.