October 2012

“I didn’t really write the book so much as Google it. It’s amazing what a major, major literary figure can accomplish chained to his keyboard in a cloud of his own stench.”

“I have been able to make a difference in the lives of others, and in my own life because of the opportunities and programs I found at my local Iibrary. It was definitely one of the most rewarding jobs I could have ever done. It has made me stronger, more skilled and equipped for the working world and more confident in who I am as a person. I can truly say I’ve discovered a lot about myself because of the summers I’ve spent in programs at the library. Brooklyn Public Library has forever changed my life.”

“In other words, if you see something wrong, fix it yourself. Don’t just stand around saying somebody should do something. Be someone. Because on a wiki, there is no default value for somebody.”

“If you’re a wiki fanboi like me feel free to leave your suggestions for new wiki users in the comments.”

Pearson, the British media conglomerate that owns Penguin, said Thursday that it was discussing a potential deal with Random House’s owner, Bertelsmann of Germany. The merger, if completed, would create a combined entity that would control nearly 25 percent of the United States book market and feature an elite roster of authors like Dan Brown, Toni Morrison and John Grisham of Random House and Junot Diaz and Patricia Cornwell of Penguin.
“A combined Random House and Penguin would be a supplier so large it would be very difficult for any anyone to dictate terms to,” said Mike Shatzkin, the founder and chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, a consultant to publishers. He added: “You’re allowed to collude if you’re combined.”

[Update] Gary Price Says It’s official. A deal bringing Penguin and Random House together is a GO according to official announcements from Pearson (Penguin’s owner) and Bertelsmann (Random House owner).

This week’s episode brings discussion of preparing to respond appropriately to Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath as well as a news miscellany.

Related links:

• The Atlantic: Study — Writers Are Twice as Likely to Commit Suicide
• BBC: UN calls to expand internet surveillance
• CNET: U.N. calls for ‘anti-terror’ Internet surveillance
• Ars Technica: Amazon Web Services outage once again shows reality behind "the cloud"
• Library of Congress: Chronicling America Posts 5 Millionth Page — Popular Online Resource Provides Access to Nation’s Historic Newspapers
• CBC News: Online vigilantes — Is ‘doxing’ a neighbourhood watch or dangerous witch hunt?

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Angry Birds, a popular mobile app, is among the seemingly innocuous programs that are raising privacy concerns by collecting personal information that is used to focus advertising. When Jason Hong, an associate professor at the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, surveyed 40 users, all but two were unaware that the game was noting and storing their locations so that they could later be the targets of advertising.

So if librarians are going to learn to program and we don’t want to put our public-facing servers at risk, what kinds of software development tasks could librarians use to cut their teeth? Here are some ideas…
[Fixed that link!]

“I wonder if the 20th century will actually be seen as the high point of the accessibility of books, with near universal literacy in wealthy countries, public libraries, and cheap books. Literacy doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, but I can all too easily imagine a dystopian future history of book accessibility, written maybe only 50 years from now…”
A rather scary dystopian future history of (e)books.

Oops! An employee at the Valparaiso branch of the Porter County Public Library made a shocking discovery this week after cracking open a donated book.

The book, which carries the title “Outerbridge Reach,” was hollowed out and contained a historic-looking handgun, according to Valparaiso police.

It may seem impossible for an encyclopedia of everything to ever near completion, but at least for the major articles on topics like big wars, important historical figures, central scientific concepts, the English-language Wikipedia’s pretty well filled out. (There is, of course, room for improvement in articles that have received less attention, but that is a different, yet still very important, set of challenges.) There’s always going to be some tidying — better citations, small updates, new links, cleaner formatting — but the bulk of the work, the actual writing and structuring of the articles, has already been done. “There are more and more readers of Wikipedia, but they have less and less new to add,” writes historian and Wikipedia editor Richard Jensen in the latest issue of The Journal of Military History.