If you’re like me (and you know you want to be) you never get sick of the overdue book stories!
Overdue Charles Darwin book returned to library 122 years late
A stamp inside the first edition copy showed that the book had been borrowed more than a century ago, on January 30, 1889.
Investigations have found that the book had been in a private collection for 50 years before being handed to a local university, whose employees passed it back to the library.
Anonymous cover letters from hired librarians & archivists
Open Cover Letters
Are you currently applying for jobs in libraries or archives? This website hopes to open up the mysterious world of hiring by making real cover letters open to the public, with personal information redacted.
A big special Thank You to all the early cover letter contributors! You are responsible for helping to get this website off the ground.
If you currently have a job and would like to submit a cover letter that got an interview to this website, please email [email protected]. I and many other people will be very thankful.
Don’t forget to follow @opencoverletter on Twitter for updates.
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Unbound is a new way of connecting with writers. Most of the writers on our site will be well known, others will appear here for the first time.
What’s different is that instead of waiting for them to publish their work, Unbound allows you to listen to their ideas for what they’d like to write before they even start. If you like their idea, you can pledge to support it. If we hit the target number of supporters, the author can go ahead and start writing (if the target isn’t met you can either get your pledge refunded in full or switch your pledge to another Unbound project).
Independent bookstores, squeezed by competition from Internet retailers like Amazon, have long done something their online brethren cannot emulate: author events. And now many bookstores say they have no choice but to capitalize on this grand tradition.
They are charging admission.
Bookstores, including some of the most prominent around the country, have begun selling tickets or requiring a book purchase of customers who attend author readings and signings, a practice once considered unthinkable.
Researchers suspect that bright outdoor light helps children’s developing eyes maintain the correct distance between the lens and the retina — which keeps vision in focus. Dim indoor lighting doesn’t seem to provide the same kind of feedback. As a result, when children spend too many hours inside, their eyes fail to grow correctly and the distance between the lens and retina becomes too long, causing far-away objects to look blurry.
This leads us to a recommendation that may satisfy tiger and soccer moms alike: if your child is going to stick his nose in a book this summer, get him to do it outdoors.
What Big Media Can Learn From the New York Public Library
With all this change — not to mention a possible $40 million budget cut looming — it would be no surprise if the library was floundering like the music industry, newspapers, or travel agents. (Hey, man, we all get disintermediated sooner or later.) But that’s the wild thing. The library isn’t floundering. Rather, it’s flourishing, putting out some of the most innovative online projects in the country. On the stuff you can measure — library visitors, website visitors, digital gallery images viewed — the numbers are up across the board compared with five years ago. On the stuff you can’t, like conceptual leadership, the NYPL is killing it.
Librarians in the U.S. from 1880-2009
Brian Herzog: “That’s interesting – I had chalked up fewer librarians to wave after wave of budget cuts and hiring freezes. I know people sometimes ask, “we have the internet now, why do we need librarians?” but aside from factual reference questions, my library is still as busy as ever. Our Town Hall has never said, “your stats are down, so you don’t need as many employees” – instead, they’ve said, “every town department is being cut 5%, and probably more next year.” Maybe that is why I hadn’t drawn a direct correlation between the loss of jobs and the rise of the internet – nor that the decrease in jobs would stabilize once we find our information age niche. “
The number of people who are homeless is on the rise, as is library service for them. Still, many librarians and library administrators believe they cannot meet the needs of this group since homelessness is such a complex issue. It often reflects the problems of individuals themselves—hence the idea that the homeless themselves are the “problem”—but it is also attributable to a lack of affordable housing and changes in work and the economy. Nevertheless, there are innovative librarians and libraries working to serve homeless and low-income users. Their efforts fulfill the spirit of the American Library Association Policy 61, inspired by lifelong activist Sanford Berman (see “The Problem Is Poverty,” Blatant Berry). The policy spurs librarians to recognize the “urgent need to respond to the increasing number of poor children, adults, and families in America.”
More at Library Journal
Attendees are just about to depart for the ALA conference in New Orleans this week, and there’s a major announcement waiting for them. 3M plans to unveil the 3M Cloud Library at the ALA Annual Conference, which starts on June 23.
3m will be demoing the new system in its booth, and it plans to offer sneak peaks of the new hardware like the Discovery terminals and the 3M eReaders. 3M is also pleased to announce that it has added HarperCollins and Sourcebooks to its growing list of partners. This now makes 4 publishers announced so far, including IPG and Random House. More partners could be announced later this week.
3M website:E-book Lending Service
The state librarian of Kansas, with the backing of state attorney general’s office, is planning to terminate the Kansas Digital Library Consortium’s contract with ebook vendor OverDrive and is asserting the bold argument that the consortium has purchased, not licensed, its ebook content from OverDrive and, therefore, has the right to transfer the content to a new service provider.
Jo Budler, the state librarian, said she is in negotiations with other platform providers, and that the state consortium will become a beta tester of 3M’s new Cloud Library eBook lending service, which will debut this week at the American Library Association’s annual conference in New Orleans. (3M announced today several other beta testers as well.).
Budler is asserting ownership of all the consortium’s content on OverDrive’s platform, which represents a $568,000 investment from December 2005 to June 2010, with one exception: the MaxAccess subscription it has with OverDrive for audiobooks. Budler refused to sign a renewal contract with OverDrive not only because it would have raised fees nearly 700 percent by 2014 but also would have rewritten the clause upon which Budler is basing her right to transfer content.
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