Sutton Coldfield librarian works as a naked butler
HE’S a dedicated librarian by day and a NAKED butler by night.
Russell Davies enjoys helping bookworms to get the most out of the services offered at Hartshill Library, in Nuneaton, Warwickshire.
And when he finishes his shift, the 28-year-old from Sutton Coldfield, has fun stripping off for hen parties.
The adventures of Conan The Librarian
What is a public library for? Costa coffee and “bums on seats”? or the promise of a better world? The managerialised nightmare of a London council’s cost-cutting misunderstandings is glimpsed at through the deep stacks by a not-yet-defeated librarian and idealist
Elsevier’s Publishing Model Might be About to Go Up in Smoke
No, there isn’t a monopoly on scientific journal publishing: but there is on the last 50 to 60 years’ worth of papers that have been published and are now copyright of said publisher. This is leveraged into the power to make college libraries pay eyewatering amounts for subscriptions.
There’s not much new about this analysis and investors in Reed Elsevier, the owners of Elsevier, either do or should know all of this.
However, there’s something hapening that might change this, for Reed Elsevier shareholders, quite delightful position. That is, a revolt of the academics who provide both the papers and the readership.
There’s nothing like a book
Once upon a time, not too long ago, there existed a great and mighty weapon against the scourge of boredom. Its name was known far and wide across the land, and its reputation grew to heights unknown by any such weapon before.
It was known simply as a book.
The Future of the Book Is the Stream
Cloud storage is paving the way for books that are sold not by title, but by time.
What Netflix’s Watch Instantly has done for movies, and what Spotify has done for music, Audiobooks could do for books. The service has the potential to reframe book-buying as a transactional thing, making it less about purchasing an object, and more about purchasing an experience. In fact — convergence!
The Bookstore’s Last Stand
Barnes & Noble, the giant that put so many independent booksellers out of business, now finds itself locked in the fight of its life, with Amazon.com lurking in the background.
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This week’s somewhat truncated episode brings a spoken message from the siteowner, Blake Carver. A brief news miscellany is also presented.
Direct episode download link: MP3
Related links:
EFF on major changes at Twitter
Evan Prodromou on making one’s own microblog platform
Dave Winer: Get The Tech Back In Tech
WSJ on fears of hacker vigilantism
LISTen: An LISNews.org Program — Episode #184 by The Air Staff of Erie Looking Productions is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
LISNEWS linked to this article earlier this month: Locked in the Ivory Tower: Why JSTOR Imprisons Academic Research
A librarian responds with this blog post: Academic publishing is full of problems; lets get them right.
BoingBoing was where I saw that one article was responding to the other.
More and more, I read in pieces. So do you. Digital media, in all its forms, is fragmentary. Even the longest stretches of text online are broken up with hyperlinks or other interactive elements (or even ads). This is neither a good nor bad thing, necessarily — it is simply a part of modern reading. And because of that, works that deal with fragmentation, that eschew not only a traditional narrative structure but the very idea of a work comprising a single, linear whole — take on a special kind of relevance. Fragmentary writing is (or at least feels) like the one avant-garde literary approach that best fits our particular moment. It’s not that it’s the only form of writing that matters of course, just that it captures the tension between “digital” and “analog” reading better than anything else out there. And that tension, in many ways, is the defining feature of the contemporary reading experience.
Full essay here.
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