December 2010

Amazon announced earlier this year that there would be lending available for some Kindle ebooks. The announcement came out yesterday that the feature is now active.

Message from the Amazon Kindle Team:

Today, we’re pleased to launch Kindle Book Lending, a new feature that lets you loan Kindle books to anyone you choose. The borrower does not need to own a Kindle. Kindle books can be read on Kindle or using our free Kindle reading applications for PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android devices. Each eligible book can be lent once for a period of 14 days. Not all e-books are lendable – the publisher or rights holder determines which titles are enabled for lending. For more information on how to loan Kindle books, please visit www.amazon.com/kindle-lending.

What researchers have discovered, from the New York Public Library blog.

A digital twist on a dying craft has earned a couple of local librarians place in the national spotlight.

Cynthia Dobrez, librarian at West Ottawa Public Schools’ Harbor Lights and Macatawa Bay middle schools, and her colleague Lynn Rutan have run a blog, Bookends, about youth literature for just more than two years. It can be found on the website booklistonline.com.

Both are accomplished librarians. Rutan, also a former West Ottawa librarian, sits on the committee that hands out the envied Newbery Award to new children’s books, and Dobrez has chaired the American Library Association’s Printz Award committee.

Full article here

It appears that the Office of Intellectual Freedom and the Washington Office of the American Library Association have created a new “emerging issues” site to provide rapid response on breaking stories that erupt outside the regular cycle of ALA meetings. Their first topic covered by the site is Wikileaks.

From the Librarian in Black

Bless me, O Biblioblogosphere, for I have sinned.

I have betrayed the trust of my librarian people by *gasp* loving my Kindle like I am told I would love a child if I had any interest in being a parent, which I don’t. But I do have an interest in reading digital content on a sleek, affordable, and easy-to-use device. Thus the Kindle.

Later in the piece there is some counter language: Now that we’ve covered the pros, here’s why I detest the Kindle as a librarian

Full blog post at the Librarian in Black

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Story at Teleread.com

Yep, you are reading this right. It’s actually quite easy now to get Kindle books on Nook color and have both eBook stores available to you on a single device. This is possible because Nook Color is more of an entry level Android tablet than a dedicated eReader. As it comes out of the box it just happens to start the Nook application by default and not let users run anything else.

http://www.teleread.com/paul-biba/read-kindle-books-on-your-nookcolor/

GAINESVILLE, FL: The Alachua County Public Library branch operated at the county jail has been selected to receive a Great Stories Club grant from the American Library Association.

As a result of the grant, the county jail will receive free books that are geared toward the young adult inmate population. Major funding for the Great Stories Club has been provided by Oprah Winfrey’s Angel Network.

The jail library, an actual branch of the Alachua County Library District, has more than 5,000 books and is very popular among the inmate population.

Earlier this month, two juvenile inmates who had conducted their research at the jail library, were recognized by the Gainesville Chapter of the Links Incorporated, for essays they had submitted for a community-wide essay contest.

Oprah, show us some of that library love too! OPRAH, LIBRARIES NEED YOU!

A few days ago, we ran a story on how important the work of a prison librarian can be. Unfortunately, there’s also a down-side to being a prison librarian:

ROCKLAND, Maine (AP) — A 36-year-old Maine prison inmate is going to serve 40 additional years for kidnapping and assaulting a prison librarian and another inmate.

A judge told Michael Chasse Tuesday his actions were “unspeakably cruel” when he stabbed the librarian and the other inmate while he held them hostage for about seven hours on June 30, 2008 at the Maine State Prison in Warren. The hostages were not seriously hurt.

Chasse was convicted in August. Chasse was originally in prison for breaking into the home of the brother of former Defense Secretary Bill Cohen. Chasse argued he should be sentenced to about 15 years.

The Bangor Daily News says Chasse’s latest sentence will not begin until his current sentence has been completed. His release is scheduled for 2070.

SALINAS, CA : — The good will of library staff helped keep two Salinas libraries from closing their doors on Monday.

Salinas city leaders decided earlier this month to close the libraries the week between Christmas and New Year’s in an effort to save money. The news caused a public outcry, with many community members requesting some libraries stay open while children were out of school for the holidays.

The director of Salinas libraries, Elizabeth Martinez, managed to get enough staff members to work to keep both the John Steinbeck and Cesar Chavez libraries open for most of the week.

Angel Gomez and his dad, Edgar, said keeping the libraries from closing allowed them to look for jobs on Monday.

“It’s a good thing they opened. I found this side job I can do right now,” Edgar Gomez said.

From the New York Times: Morris L. Cohen, a book lover who shunned the practice of law because it was too contentious and became one of the nation’s most influential legal librarians, bringing both the Harvard and Yale law libraries into the digital age, died Dec. 18 at his home in New Haven. He was 83.

Morris L. Cohen, at the University of Pennsylvania’s law library in 1971, went on to be law library director at Harvard and Yale. The cause was leukemia, his wife, Gloria, said.

Mr. Cohen had worked at his Uncle Max’s law firm and on his own in Brooklyn in the 1950s before deciding that enough was enough. “He wasn’t cut out for practicing law,” Mrs. Cohen said. “He was not confrontational.”

Instead, he would become director of the law libraries at four universities: the former University of Buffalo, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and Yale. He brought to those positions a fascination with legal history — as evidenced in the six-volume Bibliography of Early American Law (1998), which he researched and compiled for 35 years — and with modernizing law libraries. He also brought that fascination to his classes in legal research.