January 2012

Trolley helps lighten load for librarians
Moving up and down, depending on weight, meant the book needed was always on top, at an easy-to-reach level, he said.

He said the prototype trolley would put an end to bending and stretching into deep book bins, a daily problem for librarians.

Mataura librarian Julie de Villiers approached the engineering company about the problem.

“She had heard about hydraulic-based bins in the UK libraries but could not find anything like them in New Zealand, so she came to us,” Mr Clarkson said.

Library break-in suspect in South Dakota a real turkey
Authorities investigating an apparent break-in at a public library were surprised to discover the culprit: a 20-plus-pound turkey.

Library director Jeanette Chaney-Moodie tells the Black Hills Pioneer newspaper that she headed into work Sunday morning after authorities called her about the incident.

Oscars’ big winners will be books
Six of the nine nominations announced this week for Best Picture are based on books, reflecting a recent pattern in which the Oscar lists have consistently and gratifyingly affirmed cinema’s dependence on literature. Apart from a modest lurch towards originality in 2010, the previous five years saw line-ups in which half or more of the shortlistees were adaptations, including the winners No Country for Old Men (2008), Slumdog Millionaire (2009) and The King’s Speech (2011).

Larry Kirshbaum was the ultimate book industry insider—until Amazon called… Amazon’s Hit Man

And now this. Amazon could be an unstoppable competitor to big publishing houses. If history is any guide, Bezos, who declined to comment for this story, doesn’t care whether he loses money on books for the larger cause of stocking the Kindle with exclusive content unavailable in Barnes & Noble’s Nook or Apple’s iBookstores. He’s also got almost infinitely deep pockets for spending on advances to top authors. Even more awkwardly for publishers, Amazon is their largest retailer, so they are now in the position of having to compete against an important business partner. On the West Coast people cheerfully call this kind of arrangement coopetition. On the East Coast it’s usually referred to as getting stabbed in the back.

Library union’s pressure tactics continue
Ditto for Nunziata, who was not at all surprised with the threatening tone of the e-mails. “Instead of the union trying to intimidate councillors, why don’t they work with the city … and bring forth suggestions on how we can make operating cuts,” she said. “All they’re interested in is keeping their jobs … they just care about themselves.”

With This Library System, Government Isn’t All Bad
Ms. Dempsey is the Chicago Library commissioner, who is stepping down after an inspiring 18-year run. She is leaving after a remarkable transformation and amid uncharacteristic stumbles by Mayor Rahm Emanuel over library hours as the Missile and the crucial public employees’ union duel like Somali warlords.

“In the age of Google, our minds are adapting so that we are experts at knowing where to find information even though we don’t recall what it is.
The researchers found that when we want to know something we use the Internet as an ‘external memory’ just as computers use an external hard drive.
Nowadays we are so reliant on our smart phones and laptops that we go into ‘withdrawal when we can’t find out something immediately’.”

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2091127/Google-boggling-brains-Study-says-humans-use-internet-main-memory.html#ixzz1kfLn3UXX

How does Google’s new privacy policy compare?
The fact of the matter is, Google doesn’t appear to be doing anything worse than what companies likeApple, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Facebook have doing for years. It’s just that Google has taken arguably unprecedented pains to alert the public of imminent changes to its privacy policies and has made the new policy approachable enough for the average person to read it. (Or skim it. Or skim what someone else wrote about it after skimming it.)

The Great Disk Drive in the Sky: How Web giants store big—and we mean big—data
The impact of these distributed file systems extends far beyond the walls of the hyper-scale data centers they were built for— they have a direct impact on how those who use public cloud services such as Amazon’s EC2, Google’s AppEngine, and Microsoft’s Azure develop and deploy applications. And companies, universities, and government agencies looking for a way to rapidly store and provide access to huge volumes of data are increasingly turning to a whole new class of data storage systems inspired by the systems built by cloud giants. So it’s worth understanding the history of their development, and the engineering compromises that were made in the process.

From Mike Cane’s blog:

This, for example, is what he means by “unglue,” the concept that lies at the heart of Gluejar: “unglue (v.t.) For an author or publisher to accept a fixed amount of money from the public for its unlimited use of an e-book.”

Hellman wants us to consider, in other words, a world in which those who hold the rights to books agree to license them through a Creative Commons arrangement that protects author/publisher copyrights, enables the rights holders to maintain or pursue additional licensing agreements, and at the same time creates an environment in which public funding helps “unglue” the books for digital distribution.

Crowdfunding — something already in play within organizations as diverse as the Nature Conservancy, NPR, and Kickstarter — provides the fiscal fuel, making sure that both the creators of the book and Gluejar get compensated for their efforts.

Read it all here.