June 2012

This Wall Street Journal blog makes note of what New York City librarians are wearing these days. Turns out it’s a little bit of everything. The report includes an interactive slide show.

Shauntee Burns, a teaching and learning specialist, said: “I definitely like to look like a librarian, but I twist it with a pop of color, so it’s 21st-century librarian.” Jessica Pigza, assistant curator of rare books, added a homespun touch to her librarian look: She sewed her dress and wore it with a vintage shirt and black-frame glasses.

Employees involved in fundraising or special events—such as the “Live from the NYPL” speaker series, which features celebrity speakers like Jay-Z, Umberto Eco and Oliver Stone—tend to dress more formally.

Patrick Hoffman, director of the theatre on film and tape at the library for the performing arts, wears a suit and tie every day. “I’m a firm believer that good clothes open all doors,” he said.

Grazing in the Stacks of Academe
Inside there is the deep quiet of protection and near-abandonment. You hear the hum of the lights, turned on as needed; that’s it. There’s a phone to make outgoing calls on the fifth floor. To me the stacks are the most sacred space in the library, yet here nobody’s telling you not to talk. You’re on your own. It’s a situation for adults.

Roger L. Simon, writing at PJ Media, speaks about his memories of Nora Ephron. Reuters reports that Ephron died of leukemia aged 71.

Story in the NYT has this tease line: Nicholas Longo, the director of Geekdom, says usage-based billing would worsen an economic barrier between some Americans and the Internet. “It’s like locking the doors to the library.”

Full article: Sweeping Effects as Broadband Moves to Meters

It’s the place to look for the plumber’s phone number, the date of the next doctor’s appointment, that photo from your summer vacation and the spelling test your kid aced last week.

Yet even for all these telling glimpses into the minutiae of daily life, your refrigerator door reveals much more about your middle-class family.

The sheer volume of objects clinging to it may indicate how much clutter can be found throughout your home. Furthermore, that clutter provides a strong clue to how much stress Mom feels when she walks through the door at the end of a day at work.

This is one of the juicy tidbits from “Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century: 32 Families Open Their Doors,” the first book by researchers affiliated with UCLA’s Center on Everyday Lives of Families

Full article

The new issue of code4lib as a interesting article “Tools for Reducing and Managing Link Rot in LibGuides”.

From abstract

“This article describes tools for managing links in SpringShare’s LibGuides, a popular web platform for libraries. LibGuides includes a built-in link checker for only some links. Instructions are provided on how to run an automated link checker on all links within a single guide. Persistent Uniform Resource Locators (PURLs), hyperlinks which are maintained centrally and rarely break, are recommended for library electronic resources. Special consideration is given to the fact that many libraries using the LibGuides platform may not have easy access to in-house information technology (IT) personnel. A method is presented for implementing PURLs entirely within the LibGuides platform.”

The automated link checker suggested is Xenu Xenu Link Sleuth which is fairly well known though clear instructions are given.

The second part of the article using LibGuides “Redirect URL” feature coupled with “Friendly URL” feature is pretty clever though, allowing you to create a PURL using just Libguides.

Full article here

Aaron Tay

I’d Rather Go To Hawaii.
“I want to raise the alarm because I think a presidential museum will inevitably become our university’s highest-profile institution on a national basis,” Political Science Professor Charles Lipson said. “It will not be a disinterested, scholarly institution. It will be advancing a political agenda, funded by President Obama’s political allies, including foreign donors who cannot give money to his presidential campaigns.”

The University of Hawaii has waged a more public campaign to land Obama’s library. The state’s legislature passed a resolution encouraging Obama to put the library in the tropical paradise he called home for most of his first 18 years. Even the Chamber of Commerce is on board, said University of Hawaii Professor Robert Perkinson: “Obama is quite a beloved figure in Hawaii.”

Librarian.net has a story about a Iowa library that is licensing music from local artist.

Full blog post

This week’s episode presents a news miscellany. As to the fate of LISTen #203…we’ll address that another day. Please bear in mind that there has been a de-Google incident which has resulted in there no longer being FeedBurner feeds, delivery of the podcast via FeedBurner e-mail, or the Google Voice line previously mentioned. The podcast masthead has been updated to reflect the changes that occured on Friday.

Direct Download Link: Ogg Vorbis Audio

Related links:
WEWS: NewsChannel5 meteorologist Mark Johnson shows frustration for Miami Heat’s win during forecast
Kim Andrew Elliott: “Taking Canada’s voice off the world stage.”
Slate: We Don’t Need More Scientists—We Need Better Ones
PC World: Chinese Operators Hope to Standardize a Segmented Internet
IETF Network Working Group Draft: DNS Extension for Autonomous Internet(AIP)
Inside HigherEd: When University Presses Fail
PC World: Twitter Downplays Downtime
CBC News: Twitter user who taunted blogger must be ID’d: court
PCMag Digital Network: E-Book Borrowers Scarce at U.S. Libraries
Pew Internet and the American Life Project: Libraries, patrons, and e-books
INFODOCKET: Pew Internet Releases New Report: “Libraries, Patrons, and E-books”
O’REILLY radar: Publishing News: Penguin goes back to the library
The Register: FATTIES are DESTROYING THE WORLD, scream mad professors — Reiterate call for everyone to become Hobbits
AP News: Ohio candy thief targets mostly peanut butter cups

LISTen: An LISNews.org Program — Episode #204 by The Air Staff of Erie Looking Productions is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

I haven’t seen this written elsewhere, but the latest Pew ebook study seems to me to confirm that the publishers are doing the right thing for sales by constricting the availability of many of the most attractive books from library shelves.

Full blog entry