September 2012

Gary Price at Infodocket presents documents for both sides in the disagreement over e-lending.

Swedish News (in English): Following a storm of media criticism, officials at the Kulturhuset library in Stockholm have reversed their decision to remove Tintin comic books from its shelves, saying the move happened “too fast”.

“The decision happened too fast,” Kulturhuset head Eric Sjöström and the organization’s artistic director, Behrang Miri, said in a statement released late Tuesday morning.

The reversal comes after a report in Tuesday’s Dagens Nyheter (DN) newspaper in which Miri said the library planned to remove Tintin comics from its shelves.

“The image the Tintin books give of Africans is Afro-phobic, for example. Africans are a bit dumb, while Arabs sit on flying carpets and Turks smoke water pipes,” he told the paper.

But after criticism of the move erupted in Swedish media on Monday morning, Miri changed his stance.

“I wanted to highlight an opinion piece about issues of discrimination, but realize now that it’s wrong to ban books,” Miri said in a statement.

However, Kulturhuset head Sjöström applauded Miri for prompting a discussion about discrimination.

“The issues of discrimination, equality and norms continue to be debated and discussed,” Sjöström said in a statement.

From the Rockford Register Star: Quite a generous donation has been made to the Rockford IL Public Library, a large downtown performance space, the Sullivan Center, and the majority of library board members voted to accept the gift.

The mission statements of the Sullivan Center and Rockford Public Library may not mirror one another, but the core values are so close that the Library Board voted 5-2 Monday to take over operations of the downtown theater.

“Their mission statement is written in such a way that I think it’s very similar: promoting performance arts and education,” Trustee Dan Ross said. Marjorie Veitch and Bradley Long voted against the library’s latest acquisition.

The agreement to accept the theater as a gift from the building’s owner, Richard Nordlof, also means accepting Nordlof’s stipulations that the theater not be sold or converted into other uses, such as office space.

The agreement perhaps ends months of debate about whether the board is needlessly venturing into operations beyond its expertise.

“This is not a stretch in what libraries do,” board President Paul Logli said before the vote, and the library has a chance to lead the way in a downtown arts resurgence.

Ex-librarian gets little jail time for theft
The support of the library district she stole from and ill effects of medication led to a milder sentence for a former St. Elmo library director Friday. She received a 30-day jail sentence despite recommendations from both state and defense attorneys and medical professionals she not be incarcerated.

Books on board – Learning in progress! That’s the mantra of one Prince William County school bus driver who turned the bus into a “library on wheels.” Ric Clark was voted the “Education Support Professional of the Year by the Virginia Education Association for his efforts in creating a learning and interactive experience for kids.

Yikes!…Trustees of Conway Public Library, on Saturday, rescinded their controversial decision to reorganize the library’s staff, a move which could have cost four popular librarians their jobs. Still, two dozen picketers demonstrated outside the library calling for the ouster of the director and trustee chair.

The October 1 issue of the New Yorker has a 9000 word article on JK Rowling and her new book – The Casual Vacancy

The article is titled Mugglemarch

The entire field of particle physics is set to switch to open-access publishing, a milestone in the push to make research results freely available to readers.

Particle physics is already a paragon of openness, with most papers posted on the preprint server arXiv. But peer-reviewed versions are still published in subscription journals, and publishers and research consortia at facilities such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have previously had to strike piecemeal deals to free up a few hundred articles.

Reporters Without Borders takes a look at new frontiers in carrying out censorship being undertaken in response to an infamous YouTube video.

NYT has a “Room for Debate” piece discussing – Information’s Environmental Cost