October 2012

“I bet you don’t know that librarians have, right from the start, been at the forefront of the digital information age. Librarians recognized the potential for providing even more information-based services with the advent of Internet based hypermedia. Libraries and librarians have also been stalwart in protecting the intellectual property of content creators and at the same advocating for ‘fair use’ of information all kinds. I’m pretty sure that a very important court decision slipped under your radar this week. So you’re hearing it first on Carpe Librum.”

Self-published books make up 43 percent of the print titles released in 2011 and helped to drive the first growth in print production since 2007, according to a new study from Bowker.

What happens to all these self-published books, one may wonder? Do they mostly end up in boxes in the authors’ garages? Not necessarily.

Though it said the idea of people openly carrying weapons into libraries is “alarming,” libraries can’t ban weapons, the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled today.
In a 2-1 decision, the court said it’s up to the state, not local government units, to regulate matters related to firearms.
“Certainly, at a time where this country has witnessed tragic and horrific mass shootings in places of public gathering, the presence of weapons in a library where people of all ages — particularly our youth — gather is alarming and an issue of great concern,” Judges Jame Beckering and Henry William Saad said in the majority opinion.
However, guns are a matter for the state to regulate while complying with the federal constitution, the judges said.

Seems Like A Bad Idea…

Principal of Madison Park Primary David Lawton said books would become a “thing of the past”.

“The day has arrived – iPads are here … look out books,” Mr Lawton told the News Review Messenger.

“School library budgets are being lowered and our budgets for technology are higher, so it’s only a matter of time before technology takes over from the traditional way of teaching.

“I was concerned that there wasn’t going to be any library service,” said Kysar, who lives in Yacolt. “I called to see what the plan was, and there wasn’t any plan.”

At the same time Kysar was talking to representatives from the library district, other community members began talking to Jeff Carothers, then a mayoral candidate and now mayor, about opening a library branch in the rural community just north of Battle Ground, which reported a population of 1,556 in the 2010 census.

[That’s Washington, NOT Oregon…oops]

“We’re not going down without a fight,” Swafford says. “A gentle fight. Just to say, we’re hearing we’re serving our patrons. We’re doing our best to keep up with technology, which isn’t cheap. We offer so many services that so many services do not and cannot. We’re open two evenings a week when other agencies are closed.”

Good News!

Librarians at McGill are proud to announce their support of the open access movement. McGill librarians are granting the McGill University Library a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to their scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the works are properly attributed to the authors and not sold for a profit.

Specifically, each librarian grants a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported license for each of his or her scholarly articles. The license will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is affiliated with the Library except for any articles accepted for publication before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the librarian entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy.

All such work by McGill librarians will be deposited in the institutional repository, making it freely available online.

The library also supports open access by making available all theses & dissertations through its institutional repository, eScholarship@McGill by digitizing rare and unique titles and making them available to the world through its digital collections, and by supporting the publication of open access journals including CuiZine, and the McGill Journal of Education.

80 terabytes of archived web crawl data available for research
Internet Archive crawls and saves web pages and makes them available for viewing through the Wayback Machine because we believe in the importance of archiving digital artifacts for future generations to learn from. In the process, of course, we accumulate a lot of data.

We are interested in exploring how others might be able to interact with or learn from this content if we make it available in bulk. To that end, we would like to experiment with offering access to one of our crawls from 2011 with about 80 terabytes of WARC files containing captures of about 2.7 billion URIs. The files contain text content and any media that we were able to capture, including images, flash, videos, etc.

I love Posts Like This ReadWriteWeb picked up on The University of Washington’s Living Voters Guide, a site dedicated educating voters on issues and referendums in Washington state.

“However, it might not be entirely accurate to call the librarians on the site “fact-checkers.” They are more like on-call information finders. The system set in place at the Living Voters Guide is guided by the people that use it. They ask for topics brought up by others to be fact-checked and the librarians respond with direct research from a reliable source. Fact-checkers do this, too, but can sometimes be guided by entities that have a vested interest in their fact-finding results. “

The author, most recently, of “The Racketeer” wishes President Obama would read “Fifty Shades of Grey”: “Maybe it would loosen him up a bit.”