April 2012

Community, Libraries and Mental Health
Libraries aren’t just a place to borrow books or get on a computer. They are places where we can feed the mind, affirm our membership in our community and maintain our sense of belonging. Adler would have seen them as an essential support for a community’s mental health.

School employee busted for topless photos
A Fresno Unified employee is out of a job after she snaps scandalous photos of herself inside the school library.

The Homan Elementary School library tech is out of a job after those pictures they later surfaced.

Parents at Homan Elementary just found out about the situation after CBS47 started asking questions.

Death at Salt Lake City Main library a suicide, police say
Police said a man committed suicide Thursday by jumping off a balcony at the Salt Lake City Public Library.

SLCPD Detective Carlie Wiechman said surveillance footage shows the man deliberately jumping, and no evidence has shown the fall could have been an accident or involved foul play.

Archive Team Targets Digital Dark Ages
Archive Team is a loose collective of rogue archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths dedicated to saving our digital heritage. Since 2009 this variant force of nature has caught wind of shutdowns, shutoffs, mergers, and plain old deletions – and done our best to save the history before it’s lost forever. Along the way, we’ve gotten attention, resistance, press and discussion, but most importantly, we’ve gotten the message out: IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY.

Publishers Starting to Reject e-Book DRM
It’s early, but the tea leaves seem to indicate that more and more e-book publishers are souring on DRM. It may take time for DRM to disappear, but it’s got very little to recommend it. Let me know if you think e-book DRM has a future.

Is Academic Publishing Finally At A Crossroads?
So, where does that leave us? Libraries are grumbling, funders are disquieted, and individual faculty members are happy to sign petitions of protest. But none of this addresses what I see as the key issue: faculty give these journals this much power because they rest entire careers on them. You get tenure based on your academic publications. You submit your publications list when you apply for grants and funding. Look at any academic C.V. and you’ll see that it’s structured so that the big name journals in which the person has published are listed promptly. It’s one of the first things that gets looked at when someone applies for an academic job.

How does Google search work?

Over at Technology Review, a look at whether a true digital public library can ever become a reality.

“Google’s ambitious book-scanning program is foundering in the courts. Now a Harvard-led group is launching its own sweeping effort to put our literary heritage online. Will the Ivy League succeed where Silicon Valley failed?”

New York Times: The literary world still has not recovered from its Pulitzer snub last week, when the absence of an award for fiction incensed publishers, authors and booksellers.

But they may find some consolation in a new set of prizes that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg will announce on Thursday: the N.Y.C. Literary Honors, given to living writers whose work and lives have been informed by New York City, as a way of highlighting its place as home to the publishing industry and an inspiration to authors.

The honorees, to be named at an evening ceremony at Gracie Mansion, are closely associated with New York in their work and in their lives. They include Paul Auster for fiction, Roz Chast for humor, Walter Dean Myers for children’s literature and Robert A. Caro for nonfiction. Mr. Caro’s first book, “The Power Broker,” a biography of Robert Moses, is one of the best-known works of nonfiction ever written about the city and its history.

Way to go Mr. Mayor! Any other communities doing likewise?

More interesting than the beta launch of a news aggregator called Wavii, is the recap of of such things in Science Fiction novels and stories of the past at Technovelgy.com
“This same idea was first explored in science fiction decades ago. In his 1978 novel The Fountains of Paradise. Arthur C. Clarke described the personal interest profile that could be used to gather all relevant items of information from news feeds.”