July 2011

The case for raunchy teen lit

A study warns parents about sex in YA novels, but these books can educate — and spark a passion for reading

Article at Salon.com:
http://www.salon.com/life/teenagers/index.html?story=/mwt/feature/2011/07/28/ya

Will Kindle Kill Libraries?

Via Justin Hoenke (@JustinLibrarian)
From a local Portland ME paper: “Will Kindles kill libraries?”
Portland ME Phoenix:

Public libraries have a fraught relationship with the digital book market — so fraught, in fact, that conferences like Book Expo America and the American Library Association Annual are dominated by talk of it. The debate rages on industry blogs, and librarians have launched Internet campaigns against at least one major publisher due to their approach to digital sales.
The latest marauder at the gates is Amazon. In April, the company announced that by the end of the year, Kindle users will be able to borrow books from over 11,000 local libraries through digital-content distributor OverDrive.
This week, OverDrive itself will host its own conference to help libraries deal with a massive onslaught of patrons clamoring to check out books on their Kindles. Can embattled public institutions handle such a drastic change? Does Kindle come to kill the American library, or to save it?

KILL: GOOD BOOKS WILL BE HARDER TO FIND
In the world of print, the library is king. Library sales comprise a full 10 percent of total US book sales, and publishers are happy to offer their biggest clients deep discounts to get their titles on the shelves.
Not so for e-books. Libraries get no discount on e-books at all. In fact, individual consumers pay less for e-books than libraries do. What’s more, libraries often end up paying more for e-books than they do for their physical counterparts.

Memories of a Library Assistant in Edinburgh

MANY years ago I used to work in a library. Now that you’ve stopped laughing I’ll continue. It wasn’t just any library, it was THE library, the numero uno of book depositories, the largest in the nation . . . the National Library of Scotland on George IV Bridge. Let’s face it, if you’re going to hand out books for a living you might as well aim for the top.

And that was basically what my job consisted of – handing out books. Apart from the exciting times I got to wheel them on a trolley into the rarefied world of the Advocates Library next door. To be clear, I was in no way ever a “librarian”, just a lowly deliverer of weighty tomes to the intellectually-gifted few who were allowed up the hallowed stairs to the Reading Room.

I was just out of school, and to even be considered for such an unskilled job I had to be interviewed by a panel of three people. Yes, a triumvirate of academics to quiz a 17-year-old to discover if she’s got the necessary qualifications to deliver a book. Apparently, my limbs were deemed acceptable.

Then, the National Library was a daunting place. The Reading Room was run by a matriarchal character called Ms Deas, straight from the pages of a Muriel Spark novel. She had all her staff living in quiet fear – and God help any general member of the public who tried to get into the place without the necessary paperwork. If you weren’t an academic or a PhD student you had no chance.

More from Gina Davidson at the Edinburgh News.

A Google A Day

Librarian Bill Drew just reported on receiving an email from Google about a new feature they wanted him to try out called A Google a Day. Here’s the gist of it:

What is a Google a Day?
A Google a Day is a daily trivia question where searching isn’t just allowed, it’s encouraged. Through daily questions on a diverse array of topics, we delight the curious with exciting new facts. Questions are featured daily on www.agoogleaday.com and above the New York Times crossword puzzle.

Why is it cool?
A Google a Day is a great new way to discover fascinating information about the world around all while learning how to use the wealth of the web to satisfy one’s curiosity. Moreover, it’s a great way for students and library patrons to build search skills that allow them to better put the power of Google’s search engine to work for them in researching for assignments and discovering untapped avenues for further exploration.

Even more exciting, the Google a Day widget can be embedded right on a library’s home page. With minimal effort and no programming experience required, each day the widget will automatically update so users have instant access to exciting and educational content on the landing page.

Why is it useful for libraries?

Librarian Bill Drew just reported on receiving an email from Google about a new feature they wanted him to try out called A Google a Day. Here’s the gist of it:

What is a Google a Day?
A Google a Day is a daily trivia question where searching isn’t just allowed, it’s encouraged. Through daily questions on a diverse array of topics, we delight the curious with exciting new facts. Questions are featured daily on www.agoogleaday.com and above the New York Times crossword puzzle.

Why is it cool?
A Google a Day is a great new way to discover fascinating information about the world around all while learning how to use the wealth of the web to satisfy one’s curiosity. Moreover, it’s a great way for students and library patrons to build search skills that allow them to better put the power of Google’s search engine to work for them in researching for assignments and discovering untapped avenues for further exploration.

Even more exciting, the Google a Day widget can be embedded right on a library’s home page. With minimal effort and no programming experience required, each day the widget will automatically update so users have instant access to exciting and educational content on the landing page.

Why is it useful for libraries?
With budgets being cut, A Google a Day is a free method to build search literacy in a fun and accessible way. Every day we highlight awesome and useful search tricks to help find information quicker and easier. These skills can be built into an instruction session or curriculum on search engine utilization and internet research. We hope A Google a Day will not only spark interest in the wealth of knowledge hosted in libraries, on the web, and around the world, but give users the search skills to best unlock this information.

How do I get started?
To install the A Google a Day widget into your site copy/paste the follow information (including the “<” and “>”) to your desired location. You can include this iframe element:

Collapse this post
A Google a Day
Welcome to the new daily puzzle from Google. There is no right way to solve it, but there’s only one right answer. Find the answer with your creativity and clever search skills.

On Mistakenly Shredding a Prized Collection

Carla Tracy, director of the Thomas Tredway Library at Augustana College in Illinois writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Shortly after I began my career as a librarian, the Web made its appearance to the general public. Even with the broad scope afforded me through my educational background, I didn’t believe the Web would amount to much. I could not imagine that this unimpressive resource would shake the very concept of the library as it had been known for hundreds of years.

The shaking hasn’t stopped yet. College librarians are faced with the challenge of expanding digital media and study space while reducing print media. That reduction includes withdrawing books from the shelves, which, in effect, means selling, recycling, giving away, storing off-site (for those who can afford it), discarding, or shredding texts. Suddenly college librarians, among the world’s greatest lovers of books, are viewed in certain corners as book destroyers.

If a library is a growing organism, then I’ve felt the growing pains keenly on our campus these last few months. In leading our library staff through an effort to remove certain books used only once in the past 25 years, if at all, I stand at the head of a series of events that inadvertently sent part of a reprint collection, written in classical Chinese, to the recycling center.

More from Chronicle.com.

Having old information can kill

The GPS: A Fatally Misleading Travel Companion

In remote places like California’s Death Valley, over-reliance on GPS navigation systems can be a matter of life and death.

Each summer in Death Valley, a quarter-million tourists pry themselves from air-conditioned cars and venture into 120-degree heat to snap pictures of glittering salt flats. They come from all over the world, but many have the same traveling companion suction-cupped to their dashboard: a GPS.

Full story: http://n.pr/p4HT66

Codebook Shows an Encryption Form Dates Back to Telegraphs

If not for a computer scientist’s hobby of collecting old telegraph codebooks, a crucial chapter in modern cryptography might have been lost to history.

The collector is Steven M. Bellovin, a professor of computer science at the Columbia University School of Engineering and a former computer security researcher at AT&T Bell Laboratories. On a recent trip to Washington he found himself with a free afternoon and decided to spend it at the Library of Congress, looking for codebooks that weren’t in his collection.

Full article:

Woman saves a life at Russell Library

A man stopped suddenly and fell to the floor, hitting his head on a table on the way down. The previously calm and quiet Main Reading Room at Russell Library (Middletown CT) became “action central” as another patron ran to the Information Desk and a librarian called 911 for help.

Annie Abbate, who was studying for her upcoming Medical College Admission Test, sprang into action as soon as she saw the man collapse. Taking one look at the fallen patron, she immediately dialed 911 on her cell phone.

Since Annie had emergency medical training, a librarian who had rushed to the scene, took her phone to talk to 911 as Annie assisted the man. She gave rescue breaths when his breathing became labored. When Annie could not feel a pulse, she began CPR. Another nearby patron left his seat and offered words of encouragement to the stricken man. Within minutes, first responders arrived and began their work. They praised Annie highly for what she had done and took the man to Middlesex Hospital.

Full story:
http://middletownpress.com/articles/2011/07/25/news/doc4e2e1bc7beed2053906414.txt

‘Free Culture’ Advocate May Pay High Price

Aaron Swartz, an agitator for free access to information on the Internet, has been charged with illegally downloading more than four million articles from a subscription-only digital storehouse.

Full article in the NYT:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/25/business/media/aaron-swartzs-web-activism-may-cost-him-dearly.html?ref=technology