June 2011

Is your library littered with old Easter basket grass, shredded newspapers and animal bones? Good, neither is the NYU’s Bobst Library, but the twelfth floor window ledge outside the library where red tailed hawks Bobby & Violet have raised their baby, Pip, is kind of a mess.

From the New York Times Hawk Cam, where city dwellers have been anxiously awaiting this proud day.

At 11:55 a.m. on June 23, the 49th day of her life, Pip the red-tailed hawk, reality star of the Hawk Cam, flew the nest.

She took off from her 12th-floor ledge at Bobst Library at New York University, glided across the southeast corner of Washington Square Park and down to the roof of Joseph and Violet Pless Hall, a seven-story building at 82 Washington Square East, perhaps 200 feet away.

“She was graceful,” the Hawk Cam chatroom regular Pon Dove reported from the field. “She just jumped and she just glided, as if she were aiming for that building.”

More from NYTimes.

A Dixon Police Department two-month investigation finds a claim that District Librarian Gregg Atkins violated the California Government Code as unfounded.

Back in April, former librarian Nancy Schrott claimed that Atkins and his staff violated the Government Code when they distributed 3,500 library cardholders’ e-mail addresses to a private public relations firm – AIM Consulting – hired by the library to drum up support for the library’s expansion project

Full article

Libraries: Information And Knowledge Spaces
This is the opening article of a series of articles (3), which aim to look at libraries and the landscapes they are a part of and help build. Though archives are the mother concept of libraries and include many other typologies such as museums, this series will focus more specifically on libraries while creating occasionally necessary bridges — when relevant — to moments of conceptual overlap with those other spaces. It is understood that a totally different and relevant angle would easily be to have an entire discussion on the contemporary dissolution of these categories.

A Life in Libraries, Thanks to Gutenberg
Before he became the first name of a bank, J. P. Morgan was a Wall Street mogul who, a century ago, bequeathed his collection of 14,000 or so rare books to what his son would transform into the Morgan Library and Museum on Madison Avenue. Since then, the collection has grown to about 80,000 printed books, supervised since 1999 by John Bidwell, 63, the Astor Curator of Printed Books and Bindings. He majored in history at Columbia University, and received his master’s at Columbia’s School of Library Service and his doctorate in English from Oxford. Dr. Bidwell commutes from Princeton, N.J., where he lives with his wife, Andrea Immel, a curator at Princeton University Library.

This morning, Steve messaged me to tell me to look out the window, because “There’s some weird rolling book thing down there.” When I went down to investigate, I met Laura Moulton, who handed me a business card reading “Street Librarian,” and explained that she recently received a RACC grant to fund a project called Street Books, a mobile library that provides books for the homeless. (Or “people living outside,” to use the website’s wording.) The bike-powered library has a small trailer full of 40-odd books—an impressively diverse collection skewing slightly toward regional authors (Jim Lynch, Benjamin Parzybok, Kevin Sampsell, Tom Robbins). While we spoke, Moulton shuffled through a stack of neatly labeled index cards, cataloguing a book that had just been returned—yes, cue nostalgia, she uses a card catalogue system. She told me that although she started the project with “no expectation that books would be returned,” she’s had about 6 books returned of 25 or so lent out since the project began in early June.

Full piece

So really, there are two ways to play:

1) Guess the number of fashion-forward librarians I can photograph in three days at the ALA conference and comment here or on our Facebook page. We’ll select a winner July 1.

2) Nominate your library’s candidate for America’s Most Glamorous Librarian. Share your nominees by commenting with a link to your photo/post, e-mailing us @ [email protected], or simply posting your photo/post on our Facebook page. This competition ends July 30.

Well…there are more than a couple of tatted librarians. But here’s an interview with Skokie Library’s Valerie Kyriakopoulos from Op-Ed News. Before Valerie got her MLS at Dominican, she worked in theater and collected tattoos. Here’s a portion of the interview:

Q: So you began accumulating tattoos and worked in theatre. I imagine that was not so out there. But what about when you decided to apply to library school? Were you worried that you would be judged and found wanting because of the tattoos?

A. It wasn’t a problem at all in the theater especially since I was backstage running around in the dark as opposed to being onstage as an actor. No one saw me or my tattoos much! As for library school, I did initially wonder if there might be any problems or obstacles with my tattoos and the library world. I have to say though, that after I visited Dominican University and met some of the professors, staff and other potential library students, those concerns were pretty much gone. The tattoos (as well as my theater background) seemed to be more a source of interest and curiosity rather than any sort of hindrance. Even the dean of the GSLIS program always recognized me in the two years I spent at Dominican.

In 2004, we spoke with law professor Cass Sunstein about the echo chamber effect, the phenomenon by which the explosion of information streams allows us to cherry-pick our media diet so we encounter only news that reinforces our worldview (while evading facts and opinions that contradict it). And so, seven years later are we on a path to ever more intellectual isolation? Eli Pariser, Lee Rainie, Clay Shirky, Joseph Turow and Ethan Zuckerman weigh in.

If you do not want to listen to the piece you can read the transcript.

‘Red books’ draw public enthusiasm
Guo Yao picked up the Constitution of the Communist Party of China from a pile of books in the Beijing Books Building, one of the capital city’s largest bookstores, on Tuesday.

“I came today specially to buy books with respect to the history of the Party, as we will celebrate the Party’s birthday soon,” the 68-year-old Beijing woman said with a smile.