Library related fortune cookie.
March 2013
The NYPL’s Twitter-Poem Contest Sure Is Getting Some Odd Entries
From the New York Times blog:
New York Public Library is running a pre-National-Poetry-Month Twitter poetry contest through Sunday, in which you submit three very short poems and compete for a chance to win a set of books by America’s leading poets. Here’s where you can enter the contest .
One poem has to be about libraries, books, reading or New York City, but the other two can be about whatever you like. It is the “whatever” ones that, naturally, drew our attention as we made our way through some of the hundreds of entries submitted just in the past two days. Some rated impressively high on the what-the-heck scale.
Here are a few of our favorites, a few about books but most not. It is possible that some of them were not meant as poems but were just tweets with @NYPL in them.
@NYPL i ripped the wings off the wind and fed them to the birds / they aren’t as holy as they thought they were. — Drew Knapp (@drew_knapp) 6 Mar 13
Paper @NYPL / pulped rags shucked from corpses / the fibers embracing type / like teeth meat / we’ll taste every word. — Matthew Wills (@backyardbeyond) 6 Mar 13
@NYPL To become dead even for a moment is not prudent says Yevtushenko, so resist the gentle pull of the steering wheel always to the right — Peggy Delmas (@PeggyDelmas) 7 Mar 13
Susan Orlean’s Next; THE LIBRARY BOOK
Susan Orlean’s next book is going to be about libraries. More details here.
Book Calendar
The 2013 Book Calendar — see all the books that have been selected this year. You can click on a flipcard to see more information about the book.
To see the current book selection click here.
The ‘Big Data’ Revolution: How Number Crunchers Can Predict Our Lives
Companies and governments have access to an unprecedented amount of digital information, much of it personal: what we buy, what we search for, what we read online. Kenneth Cukier, co-author of the book Big Data, describes how data-crunching is becoming the new norm.
Link to book: Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think
A Fired Library Director’s Letter to the Board
Kingman Daily Miner tells the story:
Former Mohave County (AZ) Library Director Danielle Krol said she wanted to expand services for the public and bring better pay and more opportunities for library employees, but was fired by the Board of Supervisors before she had a chance to get the ball rolling.
The Art of Browsing: New Shows Focus on Books
But with every trend, however modest, you have to wonder, why now? Is it possible that book browsing is already strange and unusual enough to be considered material for art? Everyone agrees that the future of publishing is electronic, with words beamed to us instantaneously. But in that case, what will happen to all of the books beside the book—and the places that store them? When they’re gone, where will we randomly stumble on the knowledge we didn’t even know we wanted to know?
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/03/the-art-of-browsing.html
Innovative Interfaces Drops Case Against OCLC
Innovative Interfaces said yesterday that it has decided to pull the case that it and sister company Skyriver Technology Solutions filed in 2010 in Ohio. Instead, the company said it would integrate Skyriver’s operations into Innovate and would focus on competing with OCLC and working with OCLC as a potential collaboration partner.
Finding A “Grand Challenge” For Libraries
This grand challenge would require librarians, information scientists, telecommunication experts and specialists on space flight. The lessons learned could be applied to earth-bound libraries and could re-envision how libraries are connected to each other and to the resources that they use. It could also impact other industries and how they communicate or share information. The work could place libraries and librarians front and center in a number of communities because we would need to be involved in creating the solution.
From Wikipedia to our libraries
“Looked at the right way, Wikipedia can be a big help in making online readers aware of their library’s offerings. One of the things we spend a lot of time on in libraries is organizing information into distinct, conceptual categories. That’s what Wikipedia does too: so far, their English edition has over 4 million concepts identified, described, and often populated with reference links. And Wikipedia has encouraged people to add links to relevant digital library collections on various topics, through programs like Wikipedia Loves Libraries and Wikipedian in Residence programs. But while these programs help bring some library resources online, and direct people to those selected resources, there’s still a lot of other relevant library material that users can’t get to via Wikipedia, but can via the libraries that are near them.”
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