December 2011

David Weinberger on the future of libraries
Weinberger acknowledged that this new way of looking at knowledge has its drawbacks. “We’ve organized ourselves as cultures, to a large degree, around what we agree we know. And when you have multiple ways of knowing, multiple ways of organizing, the society loses one of its deepest organizational principles,” he pointed out. It also gets more difficult to dismiss some points of view, even if they’re wrong – “it gets harder to rule them out when every bad idea can be made globally public through the web. ”

[Thanks LIbraryStuff!]

How Much More Do Books Cost Today?
In recognition of the steadfastness of the New York Times Best Seller lists, let’s see what books were topping it, going backwards in time, and use the opportunity to compare what these bestsellers cost relative to each other (as we are wont to do). It’s going to be a straightforward exercise: go back in increments of ten years and see which hardcover book is on the top of each of the Fiction and Nonfiction lists. We’ll use the first week of December for each—close enough to today’s actual date to get a sense of continuity but hopefully far enough away from Christmas so as to avoid any Yuletide influence at the top of the lists. And as usual, all retail prices will be converted into 2011 dollars thanks be to this ingenious little tool from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

No deal with OCLC
The National Library (of Sweden) has ended negotiations with OCLC, as the parties could not successfully come to terms on a contract. The decision was made by the National Librarian after discussion in the National Reference Group and the Expert Group for the Libris national system
[Via DJF of the LSW]

Oshkosh Public Library gets $1.1 million gift
life-long Oshkosh woman described as an avid reader and movie watcher made a $1.1 million bequest to the Oshkosh Public Library.

The library board decided Thursday to use the money from the estate of Marjorie M. Drexler to establish a memorial trust fund.
Drexler died Aug. 16, 2010, at the age of 87.

[Thanks Mark!]

Yorkshire library volunteers prepare New Year takeover
Hundreds of volunteers are preparing to take over libraries across Yorkshire in the New Year as councils continue to make tens of millions of pounds of cuts. Some libraries have already closed, while dozens of others will only survive if local residents come forwad to run them. Unpaid volunteers and charity groups in places like Denby Dale and Rawdon in West Yorkshire and Bawtry in South Yorkshire are now being trained to take charge.
[Thanks Kendra!]

Writers and Their Books: Inside Famous Authors’ Personal Libraries
Alongside the formidable collections—featuring Alison Bechdel, Stephen Carter, Junot Díaz, Rebecca Goldstein and Steven Pinker, Lev Grossman and Sophie Gee, Jonathan Lethem, Claire Messud and James Wood, Philip Pullman, Gary Shteyngart, and Edmund Whit—are short interviews with the authors about the books most important to them (including their top 10), their style of organization, and their thoughts on what the future of books might hold. (Cue in writers on the future of books.) The interviews are prefaced by Leah Price’s fascinating brief history of bookshelves, from the rise of the vertical book on a horizontal shelf to how social bookmarking services are changing our relationship with tagging and indexing information.

For the first time ever, a government advisory board is asking scientific journals not to publish details of certain biomedical experiments, for fear that the information could be used by terrorists to create deadly viruses and touch off epidemics.

Full article

Book industry consultant Mike Shatzkin has a series of questions for the book industry for the next year. The questions are for these groups:
The biggest publishers
Publishers bigger than small, but not Big Six
Smaller publishers
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Independent bookstores
Authors
Agents
Illustrated book publishers
The industry

A Tumultuous Year in Books
This has been a tumultuous year for the book business, a time of profound change in the way books are distributed and read. It is no exaggeration to say that the widespread acceptance of digital devices and a simultaneous contraction of shelf-space in stores qualify as a historic shift.

2 former librarians face legal issues in Louisiana
The former directors in East Baton Rouge, LA seem to be in legal trouble. One was placed on administrative leave in June, after exchanging text message with and agreeing to meet a federal agent he thought was a 13-year-old boy. In the meantime, the library board in East Baton Rouge was evaluating the other’s performance when they discovered that he had been arrested and charged with sexual assault and impersonating a police officer 15 years ago in Cullman. He also lacked the state certification required for the position.